Cinematographer – Editor

Valley Dirt Riders 01-19-13 from Jeff Crowell on Vimeo.

Technical Details:

Shot on the FS700, metabones e-mount to EF-mount adaptor, Canon 24-105 L series.  240fps, 1/500th shutter.  ISO between 320 and 800 depending on the shot.   Thank God for the ND filters as I was using them on every shot.

Exposure wise,  especially with the white on the bikes and rider gear, I focused on not blowing out the highlights and still managed to get reasonable shadow detail on the berms.

CineGamma 2,

Black Gamma: High, +7

Knee: Manual, 105%, +5.  Black Levels: +5

Color Mode: Cinema, 5

Color Level:  -5

Detail: -7

Everything else was zeroed.

For post, this was my first foray in to Premiere and SpeedGrade CS6.  I’m definitely liking PremierePro for editing.  After getting used to the new hotkeys everything moved along quite quickly.  Once I was ready to send the edit to SpeedGrade for correction, things definitely didn’t go speedy.  Using the Send To SpeedGrade function and creating the DPX files was easy, especially when you walk away from the computer for a while.  Footage showed up fine and was going well until I got to the crossfades.  Crossfades are created as individual clips, so there’s no way to separate the two clips being mixed and grade individually.

I moved on to the the EDL route.  Contrary to what the forums and manual say, I could not get any EDL to import if there was a crossfade on the clip.  After a day of troubleshooting, I finally came up with a workflow that, well, worked.

Create edit in FCP.  Consolidate edit to as few tracks as possible.  Save as a new copy.  Remove all transitions.  Export EDL for each track.  Import EDLs to SpeedGrade, link to footage and begin grading.  Once the grade is complete, set the in and out points on each track and export 1 master clip for each track.  There will be portions of the exported clip that will be black, but that’s ok.    Go back to Premiere Pro, import the graded master clips and reassemble the timeline.  By setting the in point on each SpeedGrade track to time code 00:00:00, all you have to do is drop the clips on the time line, and trim the black sequences out.  Voila.  Original edit recreated.  Apply transitions, render and export.

At the end of the day, it was a P.I.T.A. but I like what I was able to get out of SpeedGrade, and compared to Color, I was able to get much more precise color adjustments.

As for actual color correcting workflow, I did the standard balancing of the blacks and whites on all tracks, adjusted gamma to taste, then went back for a second pass of color fiddling.  For the grade I went with the good old vintage photo look.  Shift the color wheel of the black offset over towards the blue to taste.  I shifted the mid tones over to red / yellow to bring out the golden hour look.  Then adjusted the M/S transition to get the color transition exactly where I wanted it.

For shadows, I wanted to bring out as much detail of the dirt and fiddled with the Shadow Offset, Shadow Gama, Contrast and Pivot.  For the highlights, more fiddling with the same settings to get bring out a nice gradient on the white plastics, and metal bits on the bike.