Super Moon Over Manly

Nearly forgot about this; so fired up the trusty Canon 7D @ ISO160 F11 with my 70-300mm IS onboard. It was pretty cloudy, but managed to grab a couple of shots.

The Clouds Begin To Roll In…

Sydney Skyline From North Head

As I mentioned I might, last Tuesday morning, with my tripod strapped to my bike, and my camera, lenses, and MacBook Air stuffed into a backpack, I headed up to North Head, Manly to shoot the passing of Cunard’s Queen Mary 2 and Queen Elizabeth as the passed into Sydney Harbour. Some things worked well, but I must admit that overall I came away disappointed with the fruits of my labours.

Into The Harbour 2

What Worked?

The MacBook Air is a great little machine for in the field tethered shooting. it’s 11.6″ screen was much more useful than my camera LCD for evaluating my images. And the very fact that they were going straight into Lightroom meant that I could sort, select, and edit on the run. If my 3G connection had been a little better, I would have been able to upload them here reasonably quickly as well. Much better than my normal delay between shoot, sort, and publish!

Live View on the Canon 7D is a great help for landscape photography, especially in the early morning light. I have always found it difficult to accurately focus due to the darkness, glasses, etc. but with Live View, I could zoom in 10x and set focus manually.

And I won’t bring a hot shoe mounted bubble level again; the electronic level in the 7D makes this redundant.

Mirror Lock Up is recommended for sharpest images, but when tethering, I found that I couldn’t correctly trigger the double shot from Lightroom. Perhaps I was doing something wrong? Either way, a simple solution was to set a 2 second delay timer, and then it worked fine while tethered.

A Crowded Sydney Harbour

Image Quality from the 7D at a range of ISO’s was pretty good, especially the extremely low light levels.

What Didn’t?

Taking photo’s of large cruise ships entering a harbour before dawn! I know that this was the entire purpose of the exercise, but I completely underestimated the speed at which these 100,000 ton mammoths move at, even in the confined waters between Sydney Heads. They were not the extremely slow, cautious giants I had assumed them to be. As a result, most of my shots of the ships are streaks of light, or hastily composed, refocused, recalculated, slightly less streaky streaks of light.

Queen Elizabeth Streaks In, Queen Mary 2 Waits…

The morning did brighten up eventually, but by that stage the ships were well into the inner harbour. So unless Canon releases a Speedlite with a power rating of 200, I think I will be staying in bed the next time these cruise ships call around…

Cunard Royal Rendezvous

Cunard Royal Rendezvous

I haven’t been up early for a dawn photo shoot in a while, but I am going to give it a go tomorrow morning.

Occasion?

How about two massive cruise ships, the Queen Elizabeth and Queen Mary 2, meeting off Sydney Harbour Heads and cruising in tandem into port? I will take a shot of that!

Location

A number of viewing locations are mentioned on the Cunard webpage, and even Sydney Ferries are putting on a charter ferry to follow them in. As I live in Manly, I am going to trot up to North Head. I have been meaning to shoot a dawn panorama from here, so what better than a panorama with two cruise ships passing through the heads.

Not going to be fun getting up at 4:30 am though!

Gear

I tried using Flickr and Panoramio photo sharing sites to get an idea of the appropriate framing, and hence the lenses that I would need for this particular jaunt, but didn’t find anything comparable (although there are some fantastic shots up there!). So, accompaning me will be:

• Canon 7D
• Sigma 12-24mm HSM wide angle lens
• Canon EF 28-135mm IS
• Canon 50mm F1.4 lens
• Canon 70-300mm IS lens
• Manfrotto Tripod
• Three way head
• Some filters
• Cable Realease
• Perhaps my Macbook Air for some tethered shooting

All lenses have been cleaned, batteries charged, camera settings base-lined. Hopefully have some nice shots to share tomorrow morning.

I get asked for product recommendations frequently. And my recommendations are ignored frequently .

Oh well.

I am a bit of a “gear head”, and love researching new camera gear. If only I had some way to pay for this obsession?

What about an Amazon Store you say? A good idea indeed. Behold my new Recommended Page!

In the spirit of full disclosure, as a signed up Amazon Associate, I get a tiny percentage of any products bought through the links in this Amazon store. I won’t be buying a private jet anytime soon, but it should help towards the cost of running this site. And just in time for a Christmas bailout!

Each of the hand-picked items listed I have either owned in the past, own currently, or would love to own in the future. There is no filler here, it’s all good stuff, and I would happily recommend to my family or friends.

Enjoy.

Looking the wrong way? I don’t think so…

Sometimes nowadays we can get too caught up in the details, the minutiae of controls and settings. Did we set ISO correctly? What about white balance? Am I in the right position? What about over there? Is the foreground cluttered? Rule of Thirds?

Sometimes our favorite images are captured, not through technical excellence and precise adjustments of the camera controls, but by standing back and looking around.

Sometimes our best images are captured, not by focusing on what everyone else is looking at, but by looking the wrong way…

The image above is one of my favourite in my entire collection, even if for many it won’t have the same resonance. There are no people, no consideration of leading lines, rule of thirds, foreground interest… That doesn’t matter to me, for (to paraphrase Bill Clinton) “it’s the colours, stupid!”

The setting for this shot is at a famous landmark, a site steeped in cultural significance, instantly recognizable around the world, but you can’t see that here.

Why not?

Because I am looking the wrong way…

Me In Action @ Uluru

As you can see, it is of the sunrise at Uluru (also known as Ayers Rock), in Australia’s Northern Territory, taken during a backpacking adventure back in 2002. As a group we had risen well before dawn to wonder in the changing colours of Uluru as the sun rose, but I must admit I was a little underwhelmed.

Behind me though, was this amazing sunrise. I spun around and grabbed a couple of shots, completely forgetting to tinker with the settings in any way, and too this day I have no idea what they were, save for the fact that I used Kodak 100 speed slide film on a Canon EOS 30. After scanning, there is little post processing other than dust removal and some levels.

Would look great on a large canvas…

The Original Image

A quick grab shot of my son in his buggy, looking a little less than pleased . This was taken with a Canon 7D @ ISO320, 50mm F2.5. Not a bad shot, but a little dull.

After Basic Adjustments

After importing into Adobe Lightroom 3, my initial goal is to arrive at the “best quality” photo. In this case I did the following:

1. Lens Profile — enabled lens profiles. As I used my favorite Canon EF 50mm F1.4, this did not make a major difference in this case.
2. Noise levels — Lightroom 3 has excellent noise removal tools, and this table for the Canon 7D from David Gold is a brilliant starting point.
3. Sharpening — I used David Gold’s suggested values again here.
4. White Balance — I can’t remember where I heard this tip, but taking a white balance from the white of an eye gives a pretty good result.
5. Exposure, Fill, Blacks — Pretty much the auto setting.

Crop, Adjustment Brush, and Lightroom Preset

Feeling creative, I said I would try for a wallpaper for my dual monitor setup at work, either in black & white or sepia:

1. Crop — The ratio required would be 3.2:1, and using the Rule of Thirds, I cropped so that the intersection was on Adam’s eye.
2. Adjustment Brush — Never tried this before, but setting up an adjustment brush of –4ev, –100% brightness is fantastic for “painting” out unwanted detail.
3. Lightroom Preset — Finally I simply applied the Color Creative — Color CP 3 preset. Love it.

The Final Result

The emergence of Canon DSLR video has been a triumph and a struggle for wannabe Steven Spielberg’s, me included. The triumph is the undoubted quality of the image, and the creative avenues opened up by the wide variety of lenses available.

The struggle includes the introduction of so much new terminology, so many new ways to be creative and to fail miserably, and the inevitable havoc caused to well established workflows with the introduction of video. This post outlines my efforts to arrive at something resembling a usable workflow for video, using  MPEG Streamclip, Adobe Premiere Pro, and YouTube.

Camera Settings

• Movie Mode: Depending on whether you have your Canon 7D set to PAL or NTSC, you are normally presented with 3 real options:
  • 1080P @23.97 Frames/Second or “24P”: This is the Movie Pro’s choice for the supposed cinematic look.
  • 1080P @25 Frames/Second for PAL or 30 Frames/Second for NTSC
  • 720P @50 Frames/Second for PAL or 60 Frames/Second for NTSC. This is the setting I use. Why? Mainly because it is the best balance between good quality and acceptable file size. Also, converting, editing, playing back HD clips takes a lot of processing power, which not everyone has.
• Shutter Speed: For best results Canon recommends a shutter speed between 1/<video frame rate> to 1/125 of a second. Click here for more.
• Aperture: One of the great benefits of Canon DSLR video is the ability to use fast lenses, so this is very much a creative decision.
• ISO: For lowest noise, this excellent article from Marvels Films  suggest using one of 160, 320, 640, 1250, 3200.
• Highlight Tone Priority: The interwebs suggest leaving HTP off to reduce banding in the movie files, as mentioned in this forum.
• Noise Reduction: With moving images, noise isn’t the same issue it is for photo’s. This can be turned off.
• White Balance: As with photography, try and set this before shooting. Saves pain later.
• Image Stabilization: Some seem to imply that using image stabilization helps reduce jitter / flicker in your movies… BUT if you are using the inbuilt mic, you can hear the lens motor all the time!
• Picture Style: After seeing this YouTube video, I was using the Canon Neutral style to preserve shadow and highlight detail, as in the movie at the top of this post. More seasoned Movie Pro’s employ custom Picture Styles, as excellently outlined in this video:

Shooting

Shooting video with a Canon 7D brings with it a number of ergonomic challenges, which many companies have sought to address with Finders, Follow Focus, Matte Boxes, Contact Rigs. These can all add up, but if you have the money to spend, get a load of this:

Canon EOS 1D Mk IV in a Zacuto Cross Fire Z-DCF3

If you are not in this category, and are improvising with their existing photographic supports and techniques, as I am, then I can share the following:

• Shoot more, shorter clips than fewer longer ones. Camera shake, noise, etc. will be less noticeable in your final edited movie as the viewer will have less time to notice erratic movement on-screen.
• If you plan on changing zoom, or focus, then you better be using a tripod or monopod, as it looks wobbly as hell if you try to do it hand-held.
• A lot of sites recommend manual focus, mostly for the creative cinematic effect of bring a scene into focus, but if you are shooting handheld, I would go for a larger F-stop with focus at infinity. This is especially important if you are shooting moving objects.
• Aperture Priority, Time Priority are completely ignored when shooting video. They become Program Mode, where you adjust exposure using Exposure Compensation. If you are dealing with erratic lighting or have a creative goal in mind, Full Manual is the way to go.
• The built-in Mic in the Canon 7D is fairly poor, and just “loves” the wind! I nearly always overlay my movie clips with music for this reason.

Transcoding

Ah yes, now to the heart of some of the difficulties. If you think the range of photographic file formats was complicated, wait till you get a load of movie file formats! You’ve got containers, codecs, compression settings, frame rates, dimensions, associated sound formats, sampling rates… it goes on and on. Let’s start with a couple of definitions from Wikipedia:

A video codec is a device or software that enables video compression and/or decompression for digital video.

And

A container or wrapper format is a meta-file format whose specification describes how data and metadata are stored.

My knowledge is very far from in-depth at this stage, but the reason why Canon 5D Mk II and 7D movie editing has preoccupied many people on the web is that the file format chosen by Canon (using the H.264 codec in a Quicktime MOV container) is a great balance between quality and size for playback but terrible for editing.

The reason for this is the video compression used, which utilizes Groups of Pictures, where only every 15th frame of the movie is a complete frame, and the intermediary frames are calculated based on differences from this complete frame. As you scrub forward and backwards in your editing software, searching for clips to extract, your CPU needs to work overtime to calculate and re-calculate movie frames as you make edits. Some editing programs do this better than others, with Sony Vegas, AVID Media Composer, and Pinnacle Studio coming in for mention. Try scrubbing through Canon 7D movie footage in Adobe Premiere Pro and you will think that your CPU’s are going to melt!

Adobe Premiere Pro CS5 is meant to be a vast improvement in this area, implementing native support for Canon DSLR movie footage. This improvement is enabled by a move to 64Bit, a new rendering engine called Mercury, and support for real-time rendering on a number of high-end nVidia CUDA enabled graphics cards.

While I have vastly simplified this explanation, you can now get some idea why movie files like this are so hard to edit, so the approach taken by most people is to transcode or convert the out-of-the-camera movie files to a format which is less CPU intensive to work with. The three main approaches that I have read about are:

1. Convert to ProRes which is a Codec supplied by Apple as part of Final Cut Studio. Which means you need to buy Final Cut Studio. And a Mac. $$$$
2. Convert to Neoscene which is a Codec supplied by Cineform. This Codec is compatible with Adobe Premiere Pro, but it does cost US$129.
3. Convert to DNxHD supplied by AVID which many in would consider to be the leader in HD Video Editing. The basic Codec can be downloaded for free here. You need to also get a copy of the free MPEG Streamclip from Squared 5 to accomplish the conversion.

The availability of a trial download of Adobe Premiere Pro CS5, which brings with it greater native support for DSLR video and much improved performance during playback and editing, allowed me to compare editing performance as can be seen in the following sequence of screenshots:

Processing RAW Canon EOS 7D video in Adobe Premiere Pro CS4. In the clip properties, you can see the different coloured frame types (i.e. the full frames and the differences). Simply playing the clip results in excessive CPU utilization.

Processing 10Bit AVID DNxHD video in Adobe Premiere Pro CS4. Even converting to this codec does not bring much of a saving in CPU utilization, although you can see that all frames are now full frames.

Processing 8Bit 50% Quality AVID DNxHD in Adobe Premiere Pro CS4. Dropping the quality level even further still doesn’t show great improvements, but it does help.

Processing RAW Canon EOS 7D video in Adobe Premiere Pro CS5. Now we see an improvement, which is especially good considering that it is using only the software version of the Mercury Engine, and the trial doesn’t include the native DSLR codecs due to licensing reasons.

I am unable to show Cineform Neoscene as my trial had expired and I don’t plan on purchasing it after seeing what Adobe Premiere Pro CS5 can do. Pending an upgrade, Adobe Premiere Pro CS4 is still my day-2-day video editor, and I chose the last, free option of AVID DNxHD and MPEG Streamclip. After installing these to components, here is how to go about performing the transcode:

1. File, Open 7D file.
2. File, Export to Quicktime.
3. Choose AVID DNxHD.
4. Click Options button beside the AVID DNxHD choice, which brings up a confusing looking dialog window. There is a bug in the layout.
5. Set Color levels RGB.
6. Click the tiny sliver of a box at the bottom of the window, and a drop down box will appear, allowing you to select the bit rate for DNxHD. As I demonstrated with the screenshots above, you may need to experiment to see what works best for your editing workflow, but ensure you pick the same resolution and frame rate as the source clip.
7. Hover over the Uncompressed selection and the OK button will appear. This is another bug. Click OK.
8. Set quality to 100% (again this is something to be experimented with).
9. Uncheck Interlaced Scaling.
10. Ensure that “1920x1080 unscaled” is selected (or the relevant unscaled resolution for your source clip).
11. Click “Make Movie”

Setting AVID DNxHD options in MPEG Streamclip. Note that the drop down list for resolution and frame rate settings hang awkwardly from the messed up dialog window.

Other MPEG Streamclip “Export to Quicktime” settings, in particular frame size is unscaled and interlace scaling and video are unchecked.

Editing

I tested the waters with a number of video editors, including:

• Microsoft Windows Live Video (I can’t believe that I am even admitting this, but it worked fine!)
• Pinnacle Studio HD (based on the advice from this Photoframd Blog post)
• Premiere Elements 7

As I stated at the beginning, and alluded too at a number of other points, I eventually settled on Adobe Premiere Pro CS4, which I am lucky enough to have as part of the Adobe Master Collection.  No point having all that professional software if I don’t use it! For me, the easiest way to learn this product is to watch a number of the excellent tutorial series on Youtube, such as this one from Sesestro:

I won’t go into great detail here about the editing process, as that in itself would make up a very very long post, but will make the observations:

1. When creating a new project in Premiere Pro you will need to create a new preset based on the nature of the video files you will be using, i.e. you shot 24p
2. I am still tiptoeing creatively when it comes to editing, using simple standard Cross Dissolves / Dips to Black
3. I am not using any external sound recording, and the Mic on the Canon 7D just loves background noise and wind, so I mostly overlay music on the clips
4. If you have imported a lot of media, some of which you have trimmed, others you haven’t used at all, creating a new “Trimmed” project at the end and deleting the original is a great way of conserving disk space.

Exporting

I am not really churning out sufficiently long (or sufficiently high quality for that matter) videos to want to create DVD’s or BluRays… currently. When it comes to exporting, I typically have the following two targets in mind:

1. Web Video: mainly YouTube, but for a more professional feel I am also looking at Vimeo.
2. iPhone / iPod Touch: My iPhone is my photo album, my slide collection, my primary method of physically sharing with those around me.

Once you are done in Premiere with your edits, you need to render or export your project for the appropriate destination. I am not familiar with your version of Premiere Pro but these are the general settings I use, much of which is based on the guidance from this YouTube and this Vimeo support page :

• Originals: the fewer re-encodings or transcodings between original file and YouTube the better
• Aspect Ratio: don’t change the aspect ratio if possible
• Resolution & Frame rate: again, don’t change the resolution or frame rate
• TV Standard: I am not sure whether this has a major bearing, but if you shot in PAL you should export in PAL (same for NTSC)
• Containers & Formats: While YouTube and Vimeo both support a wide variety of import formats, sticking with H264 in a MP4 container seems to be the best option

Finally

So that’s it, my longest, most involved blog post to date. Writing this has helped me collect together the various snippets of knowledge required to produce something approximating a quality video.

Hopefully it will be useful to all of you as well.

For further reading, please visit:

• Canon Digital Learning Center: Harnessing the Power of the EOS 7D’s Video System
• Philip Bloom: Articles about DSLR Video
• Cinema5D: Originally created for 5D, but relevant to 7D as well
• Planet5D: 5D and 7D News
• DVINFO: Canon 7D Video Forum
• Vimeo: Canon 7D Group

We Had Some Great Adventures!

Ah, my first DSLR, a Canon 20D, it is time to part company. I will miss it, but the truth is I have not used it since I got my 7D. So it is up on eBay now, to be recycled into something new and shiny! Check it out here.

UPDATE: Sold and dispatched.

This collection features images from the Vatican Museum, the Roman Forum, the Pantheon, St. Peters Basilica, and the Coliseum. If you are visiting Rome, here are some tips I would offer:

• Don’t fill everyday with museums and sightseeing. One of the best ways of getting under the skin of this city is sitting in cafes, or in a Piazza, and watching the world go by.
• Skip the restaurants on the Piazza’s, especially on the Piazza Novona and the Campo Di Fiori. While the food may be good, it will be overpriced. Search down the side streets for the small local trattorias where the locals go.
• Walk or use public transport. Rome is easy to get around by anything other than car!
• The Vatican museum is worth a full day on its own.
• A tripod will not be welcome in the Vatican, nor will you be able to take pictures in the Sistine Chapel (though many do).

While the gallery contains some of my favorite images, I have posted additional images in my Flickr Set.

All images taken with a Canon 20D, and post processed in Adobe Lightroom.