Act of Valor

[riogrande100]

Looking to get some post tools and was looking at the Adobe website and the Bandito Brothers movie! And they shot that movie using the 5D Mark II! I mean the shots looked amazing!

The 5D Mark II really is a great camera and for all its short coming in the right hands is awesome, and I believe that the Mark III basically improved on the whole package without focusing on any particular area! So whilst the MPX has not increased a lot, in every other aspects it has improved:

Body
AF
MPX
ISO
Headphones
Manual Audio Control
etc.

[Jedifarce]

Looking to get some post tools and was looking at the Adobe website and the Bandito Brothers movie! And they shot that movie using the 5D Mark II! I mean the shots looked amazing!

The 5D Mark II really is a great camera and for all its short coming in the right hands is awesome, and I believe that the Mark III basically improved on the whole package without focusing on any particular area! So whilst the MPX has not increased a lot, in every other aspects it has improved:

Body
AF
MPX
ISO
Headphones
Manual Audio Control
etc.

If you're looking to replicate what you saw on Act of Valor don't bother because it wasn't the camera alone. While Shane Hurlbut was using a $2000 camera he was also using $100,000 cinema lens glass and all the noise and compression was cleaned up in post production by Cinafilms using something called Dark Energy.

[broseph]

There are some pics of their setup here http://www.usa.canon.com/cusa/about_canon?pageKeyCode=pressreldetail&docId=0901e0248045fd9f

[RedEye]

Anyone know what glass he was using?  I saw that they used Nvidia technologies to post process which I happen to have a lot of so it would be cool to try to replicate the quality of film. 

[Jedifarce]

Anyone know what glass he was using?

http://hurlbutvisuals.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2009/09/primo-300x200.jpg

[marvinhello]

Anyone know what glass he was using?  I saw that they used Nvidia technologies to post process which I happen to have a lot of so it would be cool to try to replicate the quality of film.

Zeiss ZF and Primo glass.

For postprocessing, it's the software that plays a vital part, it's called Cinnafilm Dark Energy, a $15000 standalone software that removes noise/grain/compression artifacts in an unprecedented quality, with additional ability to process digital footage to make them look like as if they were shot on film. This software relies on Nvidia CUDA acceleration and requires a Tesla GPU card to be present in a PC.

[Christian_Stella]

I heard they were shooting through a giant bag filled with a 12-18 million dollar budget.

I have nothing against the movie and I definitely have nothing against the 5d, but I think that shooting a 12-18 million dollar movie on the 5d is wasteful. If the helmet cams are so important, they could surely hack together their own, higher resolution cameras for that job. There are two incredible and incredibly low budget movies that stand out to me in that respect; Monsters and Bellflower. These directors hacked together their own cameras with only a percentage of a sliver of Valor's budget. I know Bellflower was made for $17,000.

The 5d is an incredible tool for independant filmmaking but movies with budgets in the millions should spend less on trying to make the 5d look like film in post and just a little bit more to film on a Red or Alexa.

Act of Valor is cool, but then you realize that it had nearly the same budget as Pan's Labyrinth; which was beautifully shot on film and had a good deal of top-notch CGI.

As 5d filmmakers, we should keep our eyes on movies like Monsters, Bellflower, or Tiny Furniture... But we should also hope that if and when we'd have a budget well into the millions, we'd be shooting on Red, Alexa, a soon to exist Canon or Sony 4k, or film.

I have a friend shooting a movie on an iPhone and it looks pretty darn good actually. But if he had $3,000 or even a few hundred (to rent) lying around he'd be shooting on the 5d.

I shot a $6,000 movie on the 5d2 and plan on shooting a $20k on the 5d3, but even at $20k I'm still torn as to whether I'm going to make room in that budget to rent a C300 instead. The visible resolution bump may be worth it to me. Movies are too much work to shoot on anything less than the budget can accomadate.  These are my thoughts anyway.