I’ve had this site for several years, and the last year I’ve not updated much. But that is changing, as my work and processes have changed. I’m shifting my online presence from the ‘rNeilPhotog’ page to the rNeil VideoGrafx page. Which isn’t viewable … yet.
That title better sums up what I do now. And I’ll bring that page “public” pretty soon. But for today, I’ll add on here.
I’ll include here a short embedded vid I did this week. A young cousin’s hubby has a really hot 1970 Dodge Dart Swinger body. That’s all that is from a Dodge Dart however! And that body houses an amazing motor, frame, and safety construction. No Dart ever came outta the factory with an aluminum block! He runs it in the “Outlaw 10.5” category, and it is a very fast car. I wanted to see it in action. So they invited me to come for last weekend’s races at the Woodburn Dragstrip.
Unfortunately, he broke his very expensive and awesome motor on the run he made just as I got there. As in blew TWO holes in the aluminum block. But he wasn’t dismayed. I think he likes working on it better than driving it!
But I wanted some more footage, and so I shot around the various “pits” where people worked on their cars, And I shot quite a few ‘runs’ during the late afternoon and into the evening.
I’m including the ‘final’ of one of the runs here. And then of course, I’ll tell how I got there from the original media.
A BMPCC4K plus Moza Air 2 Gimbal
It was my first shot at using my BlackMagic Pocket Cinema Camera 4k (BMPCC4K) on my new Moza Air 2 gimbal. Which is a fair amount of weight fully kitted out for gimbal work without even an extra monitor or external mics. But I was able to be up very close to the track and the cars. And got a LOT of practice at fast panning.
The clip I finished off and show here is of Doug Lyons’ around ’69 Camaro. His was the space next to my cousin’s in the entrant’s working/living area. A very nice guy, awesome grandkids there … and holy schmolly his Camaro moves!
Color Correction
It took a LOT of work though to prep. Color of course including using Lumetri’s Basic, Creative, Curves, and Wheels tabs. Um, when don’t I use all of those?
This was shot in the BRAW “film” mode of my BMPCC4K, which is a Log format. I normally use the excellent Autokroma BRAW plugin for handling the transform to Rec.709. But decided this time to simply use the Lumetri panel for everything.
This is Log, right? So on first viewing it’s very “flat” … no dark shadows, nothing near a white, and very little color. All the data for those are “there”, but it’s not apparent until the image is either transformed with a LUT or other transform process. Or manually “sculpted” as I did here.
Basic Beginnings
Starting with the Basic tab, I upped the color temp a bit, and the tint, then upped Exposure a bit to lift the general upper ‘mids’. Working on my Tangent Elements panel was huge. I can move several controls at once. And work them against each other. So I was also working with the Shadows, Contrast, Highlights, and Whites controls all together. Working to get this pretty close to what looked good for tonal visuals and scopes.
It did take some further tweaking of black point using the Wheels ‘Shadows’ control. Which is a straight “Lift” control by function. But on that Elements panel, it was a short bit of work.
I added some Saturation and Vibrance with the Creative tab controls. But I could not get as much color in as I wanted without getting a lot of excursions past the boundaries of the Vectorscope. So off to the HSL Curves section of the Curves tab.
Throwing Some Curves
The first thing I did in the HSL Curves was to emphasize primaries … blues, reds, greens upped in the Hue v Sat curve. Then a slight correction to the blues. That was all-important here, as the car appeared slightly more cyan than it should be. So that involved the Hue v Hue control.
Then in the Luma v Sat curve, dropping of saturation in the upper third of the box (far right side). That included the light bulbs of the “Christmas tree”. And I needed to bring them back in-bounds when looking at the Vectorscope in YUV.
But it still needed more “colorfulness.” So I went to the Sat v Sat curve, and rolled off the top half steadily but heavily. This way I could go back to the Saturation and Vibrance controls and push the lower saturated colors. This gets more color everywhere without any out-of-bounds excursion or “blooming”.
And that was it. I did think of doing a secondary for the sky, to darken it some. But that would realistically take making a track matte effect “stack”. Duplicating the clip on V2 and V3, then applying the Track Matte Effect on the clip on V2 set to pull the Luma from V3. Then setting the Lumetri on V3 with a mask and Secondary selection to only show the sky values.
Then you would go to Lumetri ‘below’ the Track Matte effect on V3, and can use any control you want. It will magically appear in the selected area on the V1 clip, which is the one you actually “see”. But I decided the extra time and work really aren’t needed on this clip.
Audio
Remember I was working on a gimbal, right? And it was the first time out with the new gimbal. So I chose not to use any of my several mics and simply turned down the in-cam Left/Right mics so they weren’t clipping when the cars roared out.
Then there was a LOT of work to get this to sound “real” and relatively clean. Starting with the Audio Track Mixer for things that would affect the whole timeline, then doing specific clip work.
Track Mixer setup included the Parametric EQ effect in the top Effects slot for the track, Set to ‘lift’ the low frequencies substantially around 60-130 Hz, and another peak around 1800 Hz as that lifted the announcer’s sound and clarified it.
Then the Dynamics Processing effect. I like this effect’s controls as I can see how I’m sculpting the sound.
Anything on the straight line from lower left to upper right is left “as was”. Any place you add a control point and move is changed. You can see the effect. And it lists the actual hard numbers below.
First … I brought the upper-right end of the control line down to -8dB, Then added a control point and brought the sound “below” that well up, as you can see the nearly flattened line out to the second control point from the top. What had been at -30dB was now at -18dB.
I added another ‘lift’ control point to bring up a bit more of the lower sounds, then added a final point to bring the low-volume sounds back to the original values.
This is where hearing and seeing go hand in hand.
A last bit was balancing the L/R. The camera was set for the same settings on both channels. But the Left was a little less than the Right. So I fixed that between the Track Mixer’s Pan control and the track audio in the Effects Control Panel.
A Visual Tweak
You may note a bit of “zoom” during the run. I shot this in UHD and planned to use a 1080p timeline. So it was very easy and clean to ‘zoom’ in as the cars sped away. Yet maintain sharpness.
I did need to do a small amount of noise reduction/sharpening, with both set for low values. And I think, in all, it worked out pretty well.
With a good sized screen, and large good quality speakers, you can really get the feel of the track.
A Grafx Funnery!
Just for the fun of it, I made a little final credit for myself at the end. It uses Roland Kahlenberg’s typeGems2 mogrt plugin for the graphics image. And some sound from one of the drag races of the day. It took me around five minutes to come up with this using that spiffy set of options in typeGems2.
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