Post your post-processing voodoo magic!

[Christian_Stella]

I would love to know what workflow people are using to post-process their dslr footage. I am currently gearing up for an intense month of color grading on a feature (zombie drama) film shot on the 5d2 called The Battery. While I am color grading, the audio will be going to a professional studio for mixing. Lately I've been researching everyone's techniques for squeezing the absolute most out of 5d2 footage, so I was wondering... what do you guys do? Do you have some secret voodoo magic that you wouldn't post-process without?

The workflow I've settled on for now is the result of all my research, but I am always looking for better plugins and better results. You can see a 10 second clip at http://youtu.be/gn_aATlX-zs?hd=1 but the YouTube compression fullscreen pretty much ruins the look, so it is best viewed HD in a window.

This is what I have done / am doing...

1. Shot on 5d2 with neutral preset with contrast and sharpness all the way down. (Technicolor preset was just too hard to bring color back.) Shot 24p with a shutter speed of 50.

2. Shot with Zeiss ZE lenses, specifically 21mm and 35mm. Used a Singh-Ray variable ND filter to control depth of field in sunlight.

3. Converted all footage to the Cineform codec. Edited in Premiere Pro.

4. Stabilizing specifically shaky footage with After Effects Warp Stabilizer (only a few shots).

5. Color grading with Magic Bullet Looks and Colorista 2. Looks is what it is... I find it too over the top unless you really go easy on things.

6. Noise reducing high ISO or highly-graded shots with Neat Video... I do this after color grading as raising the shadows afterwards simply ruins the work Neat Video does.

7. Add fine 35mm film grain with Gorilla Grain video overlay.

After months of tests, this was the closest to the fabled filmic look that I could get 5d2 footage to look, but I am definitely interested to hear how you achieve your looks, cause I am not married to my methods and just want the best looking movie I can make.

 

[Axilrod]

It sounds like you know what you're doing, I wouldn't worry about other workflows if you're happy with the results.

I guess the whole Cineform conversion takes a while and I know Neat Video will make your render times much longer and takes a while to process. The whole doing noise reduction and then adding film grain seems kind of counterproductive. I don't know, I think the footage in that clip looks too close to normal to justify some of the steps. Those Zeiss lenses render color beautifully so I would say that "less is more" with these things. Some people feel like they have to do tons of stuff to footage, but you really don't always have to.

As for my workflow, I pull the .MOV's into FCPX, don't transcode anything, edit, color, export. At first I was still letting FCPX transcode to Prores, but I accidentally didn't do it a few times and the resulting file didn't look any different from the times I did transcode, so I stopped doing it. For more involved stuff I just use Colorista in After Effects or FCP7.

 

[Christian_Stella]

I am definitely happy with my current results, but my post workflow has changed multiple times as I experimented while waiting for the final cut. What I'm doing today is so radically different than what I started with several months ago that I am still very open to other ideas before I spend weeks grading.

With Cineform... I did side by side tests and found that the footage held up slightly better to grading than the native files using the exact same presets. I converted all the files in a batch over 1 night. It was painless, save for the hard drive space. I was also of the mindset that though Premiere was running full speed and stable with the native files, I didn't want to find things fall apart once the file got as complicated as it is today.

With Neat Video, it's just being used on very high ISO stuff and/or any shots that I push the shadows up a lot in grading. We filmed our entire movie in the woods without any electricity, so lighting was a challenge. No generator for sound reasons. Used battery powered LED lights, but even that was tricky as there is no electricity in the movie, do all night scenes had to look lit by lantern. In the end, I was forced to shoot at ISO 3200 a few times and it was definitely not something I wanted to do. I wish I had my 5d3 then. I'd say I'm only using noise reduction on about 1/20th of the movie.

As far as putting film grain back in... This is something I just started doing and have been running tests with for the past few days. Once the ugly high ISO and or compression artifacts of highly graded footage is noise reduced away, fine 35mm film grain helps dither out any color banding and also the shiny and smooth look the 5d2 naturally has with video. I am finding that using real filmed plates as an overlay (or at least the one I am using) is really smoothing out the awful highlight rolloff on the 5d2.) I've never been a fan of adding film grain, but it is definitely covering up some of my biggest issues with dslr footage. Like you said about less is more, I felt like my color grading was going over the top in an attempt to look somewhat grittier, filmic, and organic... But I've noticed that the grain plate has me doing much smaller color corrections now.

 

[marvinhello]

Try Pixelfarm PFClean, you get NR, sharpen, grain and chroma upscaling all in one single application, best so far for "restoration and optimisation" kind of work.

If you want somthing better than it and have $13000 to spare, try Cinnafilm Dark Energy.

 

[HurtinMinorKey]

Could you describe your method of coloring in more detail?

 

[Christian_Stella]

Marvin... I will definitely look into PFClean... sounds very, very interesting. There were three things that really got me on this mission to squeeze the best out of the 5d2 on the tiny budget we have... 1. The movie turned out much better than I even thought it would and I don't want to be the weak link in the chain. 2. All of the recent talk about the actual resolved detail of the 5d2 and 5d3 being as low as 800p and wanting to squeeze as much as I can out of that. I wish the sharpening I can add to 5d3 footage was a viable option for the 5d2 footage, but it just brings out the aliasing. 3. Dark Energy! I would kill to just run our movie through Dark Energy, but we're simply not in that league yet. Unless I can find a post-production house willing to take us in at a steep discount. So I've been on a quest to get a micro-budget version of those results. We'll never look like the 13 million dollar Act of Valor, but I want to eek out as much quality as humanly possible in our price-range... especially since I've had a few months of down-time as things were getting tweaked.

MinorKey... I've gotten very simple with color grading lately. I'm basically using Red Giant's Colorista's three way color corrector... for that shot to pull the shadows toward green and mids/highlights toward orange. The actor came very sunburnt that day, so I did additional correction using Colorista's HSL controls. Looking at it now, I'd probably pull the saturation in his skin tones down a little more now... or maybe the saturation in the whole shot. I almost always lower the contrast further and raise the shadows with RGB curves. as I don't want the blacks too black. I really want this movie to have a slightly vintage, woodsy feeling. I use Red Giant's Magic Bullet Looks for making quick exposure masks, exposure gradients, or adding diffusion from a window... some of the more intense stuff that Colorista can't do, but that's not on that shot above.

Here's a video I made to show the director a color grading test... this is before I started adding grain though so you can see serious color banding on the wall. There is also some nasty aliasing on the guy in the yellow shirt's shoulder that I will hopefully be able to go in and spot blur.

http://youtu.be/80Vt-iLpajg?hd=1