skiphunt

It's all good Matt. I get what you're saying. I started off getting my own back up prematurely and didn't exactly respond like I wanted to help the discourse go in a more positive direction. My intent was to just chat about the methods some here use to get their creative juices going, and ended up getting some really good responses as a result. It's likely I shouldn't have tacked on the Neatvideo tech question that wasn't inline with my main post, but I was trying to be efficient and not add a whole other thread. Anyway, there are some great ideas here that I hadn't considered before. Although I'm very much aware that it's best to have enough light or a fast enough lens instead of relying on Neatvideo, in my testing I've discovered that there will indeed be times that I'll screw up with improper exposure or expecting too much from my current gear and won't have the luxury to reshoot. For some, $99 is likely pocket change, but for me it's enough to at least read a couple reviews ask other's with more experience if it's worth it or not. :) One of my tests was to see if I could get acceptable images shooting in a car at night with no extra lighting. I shot some clips of my wife driving at ISO6400 with the D5300. That, I'm afraid was asking a bit too much and if I had to do that for real, I'd rent or borrow a faster lens and creatively use a couple portable LEDs instead. The footage I got was obviously quite noisy, but the contrast and color was decent. The quick test I did with the demo Neatvideo did an admirable job, but it looked too plasticy and was extremely slow. I saw enough improvement that it looked like it could be a viable solution when bad footage is all you have to work with. I've read others rave about Neatvideo, but I wanted to as least ask here before I bought it to see if it can actually live up to all the hype.

It depends on what you want to do with it and your budget. I have the D5300, am happy with it and would buy it again if I were purchasing again today. I was looking for a camera that 1. could use my existing Nikon lenses with (including my still photography strobes/accessories etc.) 2. Was well under $1000 3. Had very good low light performance 4. Could double nicely as a high-res backup still camera in a Nikon system 5. Was lightweight and could yield a decent image without having to rely on expensive/cumbersome rigs, time-consuming raw workflows, needing a faster computer and massive storage solutions. The D5300 ticks all of those boxes nicely for me and I happen to like the "look" of it's footage a bit better than the other options in the same budget category. However, If I didn't already have Nikon lenses, and didn't care about having a good back-up still camera, and the best low-light performance... I'd likely look more closely at either the 70D, but would likely favor the Panasonic G6 with Metabones adaptor that's so popular on this site.

Well, I'm actually glad I posted this now. Some very good suggestions and info on Neatvideo. I vaguely remember something about a thread related to non-technical stuff, but I don't regard that topic so "daft" or "silly" to be honest. It's far too easy to get so obsessed with the technical that it's all you think about. It's good to be reminded every now and then, beyond a catch-all sticky post, what the real goals beyond all the technical stuff are. Yes, that's stating the obvious, but for some it's necessary to be prodded out of the tech-geek obsession mode, and into the creative mode. I'm pointing that finger squarely at myself. :) Thanks for the great ideas and info folks!

Other than the question about whether Neatvideo is worth the money... I wish I could delete this thread I started. I only wanted to discuss different methods of getting ideas with other folks. Don't want to fight or argue with anyone. Push come to shove, I'll find my inspiration and have a go at it. Just trying to make conversation with others that I assume share my passion. So. Nevermind. I'll google some reviews of Neatvideo and be done with it.

I've already done that. Just haven't posted any of it. Was thinking today that I might just let a friend tell me a story, shoot that, and at least I'll have something potentially narratively interesting to play with.

I guess my post wasn't clear enough for you. That's exactly what I'm saying... I'm tired and finished with the "techno babble" as you say, and the testing... figured out mostly what I was trying to figure out and now looking for inspiration of something cool to shoot that's not the typical test footage. That's what I was really asking, ie. where do folks go and do for cinematic inspiration? But thank you very much for your flippant reply/"advice". Many get perpetually stuck in the tech stuff and never actually get out and make something. That's what I'd like to try and avoid, and getting out there and making something is what I'm gearing up to try and do. I'll likely get inspiration in Mexico and have some ideas, but am jonesin' to shoot something now that's not a waste of time and bandwidth. ;) I've also seen plenty of narrative stories that are technically perfect, they've really done their homework and have the whole thing graded perfectly with magnificent bokeh, lighting, etc. But, the story is completely boring and the actors are horrible. I wonder how those get made and why nobody noticed that the story, actors, and directing fell waaaaay short of the visual technical expertise. To be honest, I'd take a great story, well told, poorly lit and shot on an iPhone over the finest state of the art, perfectly-graded, pristine footage, in 6k of vapid banality any day of the week.

I think I've got pretty much everything all in-line for heading off to backpack in Mexico where I'll hopefully come up with something interesting to shoot. Have narrowed down what I'm taking, and got at least a clue how to shoot to increase my odds of getting something acceptable. Only problem at the moment is that I had all these ideas before I launched into camera-shopping-obsession-mode... and now that I have all the stuff I wanted... no freakin' ideas of something decent to shoot. I want to test some more, but don't want to shoot anymore shots at the park, or bowls of fruit, or xmas lights. No inspiration at all at the moment. What do you all do to get fresh ideas of stuff to shoot? Secondly, although the Nikon D5300 has impressive low light performance, I still get noise that I'd like to clean up at around ISO3200 and beyond. From what I can tell, to clean up noise the ONLY game in town is Neatvideo for $99. Is that true? And is it worth the money? I tried the free demo and was getting some plasticy looking results that were extremely slow to process. My machine at the moment is just a MBP 13in i7, that I'll sell off and get a faster 15in retina MBP max'd RAM, etc. sometime after I get back and likely in the Spring. But for now, is Neatvideo generally just very slow to process? And, with tweaking... does it ever yield better than the plasticy look?

I can get it right nearly every time, even by the LCD, if I'm using one of the profiles I've tweaked a little (Standard and Neutral). It's the flat picture profiles that are difficult to expose by the LCD. However, getting my exposure by the meter or by LCD while in Standard/Neutral, then switching back to a flat profile, works decent too. My evolution has been that I got pretty good images right out of the box without doing anything. Then, I started monkeying around with different profiles, grading, LUTs, etc. and learned there's A LOT of variation you can get if you want to experiment. Some of it looks very interesting... some of it, not so much. ;) Now, I'm back to tweaking the profiles that came on the camera to give me a little room for grading. Then getting a nice image that's sharp, with good color, and not too contrasty first, then playing with style on top. The new stuff Vision Color is working on, but hasn't release yet, looks very interesting: http://vision-color.com/2013/11/18/announcing-visionlog-ucs/

Yes, I discovered that yesterday and cranked up the sharpening to both the profile you provided and the Flaat 11. I've kept both of those installed for scenes where I want maximum DR, but also have sharpening cranked up so that I can more easily verify focus on the LCD. What I haven't quite figured out though... is the best way to know I've got perfect exposure when using either Flaat 11 or your picture profile. Yours retains a significant amount more in the highlights than the Flaat 11 one does. Haven't tried tweaking gamma on either though. Thanks for the link, looks very informative.

This is just a guess, but I think what's happening is that because what you're seeing on your viewfinder is so flat, it's difficult to judge if you've got proper exposure, so you tend to end up unintentionally underexposed more often. I noticed that when I'm using the Flaat 11 picture profile and my exposure looks good on the LCD (overall balanced with information throughout), then shoot the exact same shot with one of the default picture profiles like Standard for example, the shot will look waaay underexposed. So, when you go to adjust/CC/grade... you're working with an image that's a good 3 stops underexposed. That's obviously going to introduce all sorts of noise and artifact. I'm still learning the camera myself, and only just now trying to get up to speed with FCP X, Color correcting, LUTs, etc. So, I'm by no means any authority... but I can say that from my testing/experience so far... if I wanted the maximum dynamic range from my D5300, and didn't mind have to pay extra close attention to focus and exposure... I'd use either the Flaat 11 or the picture profile araucaria provided in this thread. The absolute most information I've captured in any of my testing, i.e. maximum shadow and highlight detail has been from araucaria's picture profile with the Flaat 11 a close second. The problem is that it's so freakin' flat that it's hard to tell what you've got. You need to expose so that it looks sort of milky and washed out on the LCD. And, take your best stab at hoping you're in focus because it's so soft that it's hard to tell. Then, you have to know what you're doing with grading or spend a lot of time tweaking. If I absolutely need the maximum DR, I'd use the flat profiles and likely at least crank up the in-camera sharpening so that I could see enough edge in the LCD to focus. And, I'd back out, set my exposure via the LCD using one of the default picture profiles, then go back to either the Flaat 11 or araucaria profile to shoot. Or, possibly use a handheld light meter (haven't tried that yet) For my taste, and for the least amount of fiddling and LUT/CC tweaking... I'm currently using either the Standard profile with the contrast at -3, everything else at 0, and sharpness about +5/6. The color is nice and punchy without being too much. If the scene has good contrast and rich color, I'm using the Neutral setting with the contract at -3, Saturation +1, and Sharpness +5/6. I sharpen up the last bit in FCP X. I'm sure many will balk at using the in-camera sharpening as opposed to letting FCP do it all, but I'm not seeing there's that much difference as long as you don't over-sharpen to the point of getting halo effect. And, letting the camera sharpen gives you a crisp image to focus by in the LCD. The ONLY time I've seen any artifact at all so far, was a couple days ago when I was playing with the Flaat 11 profile and a Rodenstock Circular polarizer. But, I think that had more to do with being underexposed without knowing it. Like I mentioned in my previous post, I've decided I want to know I've got close to what I want, on the spot without having to wait until I've tweaked it to death with LUTs and CC in FCP. I'm not an experienced colorist by any stretch of the imagination. If I was shooting a short film with the D5300, I'd likely shoot with either the Flaat 11 or acaucaria's picture profile, make sure I've got perfect exposure, and figure out what style I was going for beforehand. Kind of like you used to do when you'd choose the film stock you wanted to use. Then, instead of waiting on dailies, I'd do a quick grade on the set to verify it's all good before proceeding. Currently, I'm going to just shoot some stuff while traveling and want to know I've got something decent to work with on the spot and in a wide variety of situations without having to verify with color correction all the time.

I've sort of backtracked on this approach quite a bit. Although, shooting with your excellent color profile or the Flaat 11 one, I can get a great deal of grading flexibility for sure... especially for not being raw. The problem is, I can't tell for sure what I'm getting in the field. Then there's all the extra time spent trying to get the grade right. All these extra steps and not knowing what I'm getting, sort of defeats the whole reason I got the D5300 to begin with, ie. to be able to get a decent image right out of the camera without having to deal with all the extra grading hoops, extra storage, etc. So far, I'm finding that in practice I'm starting to get a much better image with either the Neutral or Standard picture profiles, contrast all the way down, some sharpness added in camera (can't tell much difference from camera sharpened vs FCP sharpened) and, I can nail focus much easier with a little in camera sharpness added. Can't tell if I'm in perfect focus with the sharpness all the way down and can't tell if I nailed exposure with a completely flat image. Now I'm going to just tweak a couple of the picture profiles to give me a little room for grade tweaking in a couple different shooting situations, then fine-tune in FCP CC. I've found just adding an adjustment layer (using Color Grading Central's layer effects tool) and creatively adding a LUT on top at a reduced percentage, is getting me much closer to where I want to be much faster, more accurate, and without as much guess work. I can certainly see the appeal of the raw workflow for those who want ultimate control of their image, but for me... getting it as close as I can in-camera is going to suffice for now I think. And, as long as I nail exposure and at least back off saturation and contrast, there's still some grading wiggle room to be had. :)

It appears there are ways to work with roundtrip audio from FCPX to Reaper using an app called Vordio. And Reaper also gives you a video preview so you can see what you're doing while working on the audio tracks. What I haven't figured out is.. when I simply import a video file into Reaper, then cut some audio out altogether, Reaper cuts the video segment out too. Can't find a way to split the audio cuts and preserve picture. Anyone know? I'm thinking, if I really need anything more than than FCPX offers for audio editing, I'll likely be better off just getting Logic Pro X since it import/exports FCPXML now. I wonder if the latest Garageband import/exports FCPXML?

Ah! So it was actually an anamorphic 50mm. That's why it looked like a wider 40mm masked to wide screen. I thought it looked a bit soft too, as it mentioned in the article. The compression likely didn't help that much either. Curious, excuse my ignorance, but why do you and others insist on referring to T-stops instead of F-stops? Even the article you reference cites f-stops instead of t-stops. I vaguely remember the difference from film school, but wonder why some use one or the other in film conversation. Ok, back to the Digital Bolex ;) One thing they told me at SXSW was that the battery isn't user changeable. That, when it's spent you'll have to send it back to them for a new one. I know you can power it from an external source as well, but I was hoping they'd change that in the development process. All in all though, I have to say that the sample footage I've seen so far definitely looks interesting. The camera itself seemed a bit heavy, but nice and solid. What I held wasn't a working prototype though. Certainly very interested in how it develops if they can get enough out there in the wild.

You're right. I haven't watched enough of it to make critical comment. But, I did watch about 20 minutes of it... jumping around. Are you sure that's a 50mm? Looks like a 40mm to me. I think I was also looking for focus pulling errors, since there's always a few on even the best productions and I saw none. That could be, as you say, that they did such a herculean job that it looked easy and made the technique completely invisible. Will have another look at the edited version, as the song got a little monotonous after about 20 minutes of it. ;)

I get what you're saying, and that's a cool video... but it's hardly a litmus test for follow focus. It's a wide angle lens with what looks like mostly fixed focus at about 12 feet. Camera stays about that distance way from the subject at all times, so not much focus following/pulling going on. Just the operator"following focus" by keeping the right distance away from the subject at all times. ;)

When I chatted with them at SXSW, they said they were working on some way to use the side crank as a follow focus mechanism.

Also.. with regard to the spots that don't look so smooth... just realized I had VR activated on the lens and also auto-stabilized in FCP X. That was all likely over-kill and I'm sure effected the smoothness of the slide and introduced some software stuttering as well. I think I just need more practice with the sliding/pushing. Seemed to get a little better with each try. ​I'm tempted to just delete these "tests" but I figured others might benefit and learn from my mistakes. :) Here's the vimeo upload:

Don't laugh... trying to get up to speed quickly with several totally unscientific tests at once. Testing, practicing, several things in this series of clips. The first of each 2, is using the Flaat 11 profile, then playing with grading and using various LUTs. Mostly the 3strip one. The second of each 2 is using a modified Standard picture profile with saturation +1 and contrast -3. Same playing with grading and LUTs. I just got a budget Kamerar slider and haven't got the hang of it yet, but you have to start somewhere with the practicing. ;) Anyone know if it's ok to put something slick like oil or graphite on a slider? Or, best to leave it dry and just practice your technique for smoother results? Used a Nikon 18-200VR lens at 60p. ISOs between 100-300 Any suggestions to improve results are welcome. Here's the YouTube version. Will add the Vimeo version when it's finished.

Looks good! & Spiritualized is a personal fav :)

I recently got the D5300 and love it so far... but for your needs of getting the shot on the move with quickly changing situations and foul weather, etc. I think I'd look seriously at the Sony RX10 you mentioned

Hey, I used your picture style on some quick tests, then played with grading. Compared yours to the Flaat 10, 11, and a tweaked Standard. Yours produced an image that gave me the absolute most room to play with the image. The Flaat 11 was better than the 10. Now I'm torn as to how to handle my shooting on the road. If I use either your profile or the Flaat 11, they'll require much more grading work, but the LUTs and effects, etc. are easier to start with. If I just continue to tweak my Standard profile to where I get very close to where I want to be straight out of the camera, it doesn't leave me much wiggle room at all in the grade. In FCP X... do you know what the difference is between using a preset "Look" or color table "preset" (i.e. "Alien Look") then adjusting to taste, and using LUTs? Seems like they both make good starting places to tweak from. Just wondered if one method is preferred over the other. Also, I've been starting with a LUT I like, then dialing back the opacity, then adjusting my various exposure, saturation, etc. balance levels. Is it better to do all the basic levels, color, exposure stuff first, then apply LUTs, presets, Looks, etc. afterward? I'd assume it is better to adjust the basics first before the style, but I'm not certain that it really matters as long as the final look is what you want. Not clear on what the difference is in applying a look to the actual clip, or adding it on an adjustment layer instead. Anyone know? Didn't want to get too far into the grading stuff yet, but I just want to make sure I shoot for the best image while traveling soon. Don't want to find out after the fact that I should've shot everything one way or another when it's too late to reshoot. ;) I know you said you're more into moving pictures and such, but I figured it couldn't hurt to ask in case someone else has good advice. Thanks for the picture profile. I'm definitely keeping it on the camera for shots that I want to have the most range to grade from. :)

Cool. Thanks! Will give it a shot. Will look for the Melara LUTs. Have you tried any of the commercial LUT bundles with your Nikon?

Hi, Experimenting with the D5300 before I take it on a little trip to Mexico. Trying to get something close to a decent look before I leave, and with minimal gear. Have decided that the 18-200mm VR lens, while not perfect, is close enough to my manual glass to sacrifice some shallow DOF for the benefits of the VR stabilization. The trade-offs are worth having a wide range, macro, AF for stills, VR for handheld, etc. So, now I'm trying to get the in camera settings where I want them to be for grading in FCP X. I've been playing with the LUT Utility with test footage I shot using the Flaat 10 profile, and a modified Standard profile. I didn't think I really needed the LUT Utility or any LUTs to start with... however, I just graded the same footage the best I could by eye and several different shots. Then used the Fuji 3513 to Rec709 at about 50% and miner tweaks to the exposure, etc. Added a little bit of grain and sharpened. Consistently, despite my best efforts, the footage using the LUTs comes out better and closer to natural film stock. I can get close starting with the Teal + Orange Look built-in to FCP X, but it's always better using the LUT. I'm sure a good colorist wouldn't need the LUTs but it's just so much quicker to get it right if you're a relative noob like me. ;) Anyway, what I've figured out is that I get better results with a tweaked Standard file than I do the Flaat 10 one. I don't think the LUTS that come with LUT Utility are the best for the Nikon, but they're not bad. I've seen really nice stuff from Brandon Li using Osiris, but it's mostly been from cameras like the Sony RX10, 5D3 & BMPCC which I think that LUT is particularly tuned to. Can anyone using Nikon here, recommend some LUTs that you find most appealing? Not going for Film Convert at the moment. Sticking with LUTS and tweaking my own profile.

Yes, I knew that from the D5200. That's also another reason I was hoping to make do with only the 18-200VR for travel. Great for stills, and so-so for video. I'm still in experimenting mode though. If the 18-140VR kit lens significantly outperforms the 18-200VR then that might be a good option for me during travel. While at home, I don't mind having a set of lenses for video, and another set for stills. So far, I'm thinking I'll take the 18-200VR and my manual 35-105 f3.5. That could give me a good walking around, stills lens with macro. And, a manual 35-105 f3.5 w/macro for more organic video stuff.

I've already got the 50mm f1.8D. Just did some tests with the 35mm 1.8G which is also very sharp and easy to focus.