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Summer Maypole

  • Origination formats: super-16mm and HDV
  • May 2005

DVD documenting the summer collection of fashion designer Josie Sundt.

BRIEF: Record a live dance event whilst keeping as low a profile as possible. Make sure the film shows the clothes in as much detail as possible.

WHAT WE DID: Shoot, edit and finish as HD. Produce a dual-mode DVD (“video partition” contains an SD video; the “data partition” contains a WM9-encoded HD version). Shoot on super-16mm so we can have smooth slow-motion and so we have the latitude to capture the glistening fabrics.

Camera setup:

  • 2 x Sony HDV cameras
  • 2 x Super 16mm Arri SR3s with 1.78:1 ground glass

Post workflow:

  • Scan the 1000 foot of Super-16mm at 2k on Midnight Transfer’s Spirit4k (25fps).
  • Transfer these DPX files from Midnight Transfer to our HD workstation on LaCie 250GB hard disks (450GB of files in total)
  • Copy the DPX files from the LaCie hard disks onto our HD workstation’s RAID0 array

Import the DPX files into After Effects

  1. crop the 1.66:1 frames down to 1.78:1
  2. apply some basic grading (crush the blacks, warm it up a little)
  3. apply grain reduction
  4. render as a Cineform HD AVI (the render took about 20hrs on my 2.4Ghz Athlon64 with 1GB of RAM)
  • Import all the HDV and s16mm footage into Premiere Pro 1.5.1 with Cineform Aspect HD installed
  • Edit in Premiere Pro 1.5.1
  • Grade in Premiere Pro
  • Import 5.1 surround sound into Premiere Pro
  • Encode twice: once as MPEG-2 SD and once as WM9 HD
  • Burn onto DVD using Encore 1.5

Challenges (you mean “problems, right?”):

  • Not all the files DPX copied correctly onto my LaCie disks from Midnight Transfer. They were very kind and let me go back to copy the files again. I wrote a little UNIX script to supervise the copying.
  • Our super-16mm footage looked very grainy next to the HDV footage (we shot on 500asa Fuji stock so grain was to be expected). Next time I think we’ll shoot on Vision2 500T

FILM CREDITS:

All films produced by: Tom Bell, Nick Clinch, Lucas Ochoa & Jack Kelly

“Maypole”

  • Camera: Ollie Downey, Nick Clinch, Tom Bell, Lucas Ochoa, Jack Kelly
  • Edited and Graded by Jack Kelly

“Lamentation”

  • Camera: Josie Sundt
  • Edited by Nick Clinch

“Unravel me”

  • Camera: Nick Clinch
  • Edited by: Nick Clinch

text on this page written by Jack Kelly

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