Moving from Final Cut – Progress or Perils? SXSW Panel

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I’ve briefly mentioned on Twitter and other social media channels that I’d be participating in a SXSW panel. Now is the time I actually get to share about that panel! Quite frankly the fact that it is a “panel” is why I was interested to participate. I don’t think it would be quite that interesting with me up there, alone. I’ll be participating on behalf of Dell and NVIDIA.

Dell is providing myself and several other filmmakers with new, top of the line workstations built with the Adobe Creative Suite in mind. Full disclosure – Dell is providing this workstation for free. Editors and creatives who are moving from a primarily Final Cut Pro 7 workflow to one based around Adobe Premiere is what they had in mind here. I was already planning on doing this, and was quite touched Dell thought I was important enough to have me on board. I’ll be testing and using the Dell Precision workstation over the next 12 weeks and sharing my thoughts on a variety of platforms. I’ll be going into more detail about this social media initiative Dell has embarked on, and my role in it. Another blog post will be out tomorrow going into more detail on how I got involved, and why.

Here are some more specific details about my SXSW panel:

Moving From Final Cut – Progress or Perils?
Monday, March 12
3:30PM – 4:30 PM CT
Austin Convention Center, Room 2

I hope to see you there! I’ve got a few friends in the Austin area and can’t wait to meet new people there. If you have any questions or comments – be they positive or negative, feel free to comment here or email: tom@theredowl.com.

Cheers!

For Your Consideration

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No, this isn’t my post letting you know about those oh so obscure films that should have been nominated, my displeasure with the Academy, or anything like that. However, now that I have your attention with a misleading title, I suppose I should mention this IS about films. Films deserving of your attention that I have seen in the past six months or so. My standards for this post don’t go beyond the fact that I enjoyed them very much, and they weren’t huge Hollywood blockbusters. Here is a list with a brief explanation for you below.

1. Hell And Back Again

So my previous Oscar-related statement goes out the window a bit here, but not entirely. A documentary by Danfung Dennis, this powerful film would be worth your money, Oscar nomination or not. This film first caught my eye because it was filmed on the Canon 5DMKII, a revolutionary full-frame camera that was initially just meant for web clips shot by photographers. People like Danfung, Shane Hurlbut, and many more have gotten much more out of the camera than Canon ever anticipated. On a whim I ordered the Blu-Ray, confident it would be a great film. This was of course after reading many reviews, so it wasn’t totally random. I watched it today and it was gripping in a way that no other documentary has ever been. I’ve seen plenty of fictional war films, and what you feel when you see real soldiers being injured and killed, that close and that real, is unlike anything that’s ever been shot before. This isn’t a political film – others have come and gone before already. Hell And Back Again, is as it is marketed – the true cost of war.

It focuses on Sergeant Nathan Harris of the U.S. Marine Corps, a young man who was injured in the line of duty. The story focuses on him during his time in Afghanistan, his wounds he sustained, and the process of recovery when he comes home. The 5DMKII was the perfect camera to capture this story but make no mistake – the story is first and foremost what will grip you throughout the 88 minute film. You won’t be wondering what lenses he used or marveling at the filmmaking of it – Hell And Back Again sucks you in quickly and never lets go.

Trailer

Buy: iTunes | Blu-Ray

2. The Art of Flight

Snowboarding films are not particularly the first thing I would put in my Blu-Ray player, but this one transcends many of them to reach audiences like myself who haven’t seen many, or any snowboarding films. Director Curt Morgan makes excellent use of the large budget of the film, which is truly an experience to behold. Travis Rice and many other talented snowboarders go around the world to the back country to bring you some of the most insane snowboarding you have ever seen. The entire team at Brain Farm Digital Cinema should be very proud of their work. The special features on the Blu-Ray warrant buying it in nothing less than that.

Trailer
Buy: iTunes | Blu-Ray

3. All.I.Can

All.I.Can by Sherpas Cinema first showed up on my radar after Tom Guilmette posted about it. The trailer was unique and intrigued me enough to buy it on iTunes. One mistake I made going into it was thinking this was skiing’s version of Art of Flight – it is most certainly NOT that. Everything about this film bears little similarity to The Art of Flight. The budget was most certainly lower, and the cinematography choices were very different. Hats off to the D.P. and everyone involved who poured their time and effort into this film. The visual language alone is worth the price of admission. One disappointment was the quality on iTunes HD – it was not that great. I’ll be getting the Blu-Ray too.

Trailer
Buy: iTunes | Blu-Ray

4. The Underground World of Sequoia National Park

Steven Bumgardner may be better known in Twitter circles as @YosemiteSteve, and he is the filmmaker behind this documentary. Most of what I enjoy watching on Netflix is National Geographic type content, if you are into nature and such then this film is definitely for you. The Los Angeles Times called this film “A 60 Minute Gem.” The underground caves of Sequioa National Park hold many mysteries, and hold your full attention for the hour long film. A gem made back in 2004, this one is definitely worth your time and money.

Buy: Amazon

Bonus: Watch all the “Yosemite Nature Notes.”

Critical Focus and the SmallHD DP4

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I just got this bad boy in time for MLG Raleigh, and decided to share my thoughts on this new addition to my kit. If you’re unfamiliar with Major League Gaming, MLG is the governing body for eSports in North America. Now that isn’t to say there isn’t competition from smaller leagues, but I would consider them to be the NFL of competitive video games. I’ve been doing contract work at their events for about 5 years. The games on the Pro Circuit are Halo: Reach, StarCraft 2, and Call of Duty: Black Ops. This event also saw a sneak peek at Gears of War 3, as well as the addition of League of Legends.

I wasn’t planning on buying the DP4 just yet, but I caught a great deal on eBay and I’m very glad I bought it. It’s changed my quality of work in several ways. I’ll be discussing those first, and then getting into the strong points of the DP4 and the ways it falls short. It’s a great piece of gear, but definitely not perfect. I leave it to you to make your own decision.

That being said, it was a dream to work with this past weekend in Raleigh, North Carolina. MLG events take up a huge convention hall, and things move pretty fast. There’s no opportunity to get the important shots more than once – getting critical focus, how you frame your shot are usually split second decisions when they really count. I shoot a variety of footage there, but it all revolves around StarCraft 2, one of the biggest games in the world for eSports. I shot on the Canon 7D, so thankfully there was no down-rezzing when I would hit record. The 5DMKII and T2i both downrez to 480p and it looks horrid. Even with the problem of down-rezzing with my T2i, I found doing some quick testing that right out of the box it was much easier for me to get critical focus. I know some people swear by the LCD and have never touched an external monitor. My vision is not 20/20 so this monitor has been a huge help to me.

I’m constantly analyzing things throughout an MLG event, how I’m doing, what I could be doing better, and what would enable me to get better shots in the future. The DP4 was absolutely invaluable when getting critical focus. We also rented different lenses this event – the Canon 24-70L and 70-200L IS II. MLG events are not brightly lit so having f/2.8 available helped me stay at lower ISO’s when in the past I’ve had to resort to as much as 3200 ISO(yuck). The lenses and the addition of the SmallHD DP4 enabled me to get my shots in a much more effective manner. At the end of the match, I’m tasked with getting reaction shots of the winner, and anything he might do after. For example, Korean pro player Nada won a very tough StarCraft match on the main stage during Raleigh. Nada’s reaction was great, and then he came out of his soundproof booth and celebrated a bit on the main stage. These type of moments are fast moving and I can’t afford to not get those shots – they happen only once. These moments tend to be extremely fast moving and I also make my best effort to stay out of our broadcast cameraman’s way. Without the DP4 I do not think I could have maintained focus as much as I did. It can look quite amateurish to have shots go in and out of focus.

One thing I was surprised at was how little I used the extra features of the DP4. The false colour, peaking, focus assist – I used none of them. The DP4 did what I needed it to do – help me maintain focus, or grab it very quickly. Another surprise for me was how heavy the DP4′s EVF loupe was – the thing was not light. Eventually it proved to be more an annoyance to me than a help. The optics were not bad, it just didn’t fit in with the environment I was tasked to shoot. The quality of the loupe was not an issue, however when I needed to do higher shots the loupe tended to fall down back onto the monitor and block my view of the shot. Honestly I don’t see myself using the EVF loupe much, if at all. Perhaps it’s because I’ve grown accustomed to the back of an LCD, but I just prefer seeing the DP4 without looking through an eyepiece.

The screen protector was great to have, and I did an unintentional drop test. The included hotshoe mount for the DP4 that I had was terrible. It felt like unless I tightened everything with all my might, the hotshoe mount would be loose. At one point, thankfully not at a critical moment, everything I had mounted on the hotshoe fell off and hit the ground. The DP4 was unaffected, as was the Rode Videomic Pro and LitePanels MicroPro I was using. I don’t recommend mounting that much stuff on a DSLR hotshoe. The build quality of the DP4 didn’t have me worried before, and after that little mishap I was even more confident in it. Battery life was good, I had 2 LP-E6 knockoff batteries from Opteka on it at all times. I got hours of use out of it, but never timed it precisely so I’m not sure exactly how much I got out of it.

Maybe if I had a shoulder rig or wanted it in a more ENG style configuration the EVF loupe would come in more handy for me – but it doesn’t. There are many different kinds of shooters, whose lenses all capture different types of stories. The types of stories I capture through my lens will not need the EVF loupe for the most part. As I said before, the build quality of it wasn’t flimsy, or bad – just not right for me. I will say the 2 second delay between shooting and reviewing shots on the DP4 is quite annoying. However, SmallHD has said that a fix is coming via firmware updates. I haven’t used Marshall or any competing monitors, so I can’t really tell you if this one is better. One thing I have heard about the DP4 is that it runs a bit hot, and I can confirm that is true. However, it was never a real issue for me. I would be more annoyed if it impeded the operation of the monitor, but it doesn’t, and therefore isn’t too much of a concern in my book.

What you see on your DP4′s screen matches what you will see on your computer pretty closely. I didn’t modify many settings on the DP4, just some slight tweaks to contrast and brightness. My need with this piece of gear was the ability to grab focus quickly and have a larger viewing screen. The SmallHD DP4 has more than met that need for me, so why not check out the SmallHD DP4 and see if it meets your needs?

Welcome!

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Greetings. Welcome. Bienvenidos.

Thanks for visiting. This is my new and improved website. I’m always looking to improve my online presences and I took a pretty hard look at my site, the purposes it serves, and how to make the user experience better. The conclusion I came to was that it needed a drastic overhaul. My old WordPress template, Manilla, was alright for my first webfolio but it had a lot of weaknesses.

The first and most glaring one was the slow load times. For a theme it was a bit “bulky” to say the least. In order to get it to serve my purposes I had to modify a lot of of php files, and I mean A LOT. I prefer to modify as little code as possible, personally – I can usually figure out what code I need to modify to get it to perform as I desire. Still, I am not a web designer and my knowledge of php is minimal. That and the addition of way too many plugins was slowing my site down. I wonder how many people didn’t view my work simply because they got tired of waiting?

The theme was not as simple and clean as I believe a webfolio should be which made me wonder why I chose it in the first place. Hindsight is always 20/20, I guess. I chose my new theme very carefully. I looked again to the marketplace of ThemeForest. ThemeForest is one of Envato’s great marketplaces for the selling of digital wares. I found a great theme, Anthology, by Pexeto. Something interesting I’ve noticed is how the selection of themes has improved over the past year.

To say that Anthology is flexible is an understatement. The custom interface tabs Pexeto added to Anthology made it very easy for me to tweak it to my liking. One of my favorite things about this theme is the portfolio aspect. It displays 4 portfolio items, but instead of loading a new page for the next “page” of portfolio items it loads it similar to a jQuery slider that you see on a lot of websites these days. Very handy and makes it easier on whomever may be trying to view my work. My philosophy with my web portfolio has always been to make it easy on the visitor. Hence, why my contact info, and social media sharing options are littered throughout the new site. Anthology has also allowed me to cut down from using 20 WP plugins to 5. The site loads a lot faster and is much cleaner. A cleaner site is going to be much easier for visitors to find their way around, I think.

That being said I hope all these changes improve your visits here. The internet has a short attention span as it is and I’d rather not waste people’s time because they can’t figure out how to get around the place. Thanks to all of you who visit my corner of the internet. Cheers!

My Favorite 10 Photos of 2010

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#1: Expose The Train

This photo is my favorite of 2010 for a few reasons. The main one being how incredible it is that there is no shake evident in the photo. At the time, I had a terrible tripod. When I say terrible I mean TERRIBLE, like got it for $20 terrible. At the time I was excited to try out my new intervalometer on some long exposure photography. This shot was a happy accident. I set the exposure time for 45 seconds and the train happened to end up like this.

#2: Tax Dollars

If there’s one thing I enjoy about a photo, it’s when symmetry plays a large role in what makes it visually pleasing. This photo was shot at Gail’s Harley Davidson. Every year they do a motorcycle ride in honor of those who died on 9/11. In order to keep things running smoothly, the police help direct traffic and lead the ride. I couldn’t resist snapping a picture of all their motorcycles lined up.

#3: Mullets

This one’s probably one of my favorite photos shot on my iPhone. The camera itself is not very high resolution, but apps like Cross Process allow you to play with the colors and processing in very interesting ways.

#4: Starry Night

This one was one of my first shots while on vacation in the Black Hills of South Dakota. I’ve been in the country plenty of times, far from the city life. However the view of the stars there was incomparable. The view made me painfully aware that I need faster glass. However I think this shot definitely gets the point across.

#5: Love & Hate

This one was another adventure in long exposure photography. The results of combining sparklers with long exposures has never let me down. Thankfully I had a few friends on hand who drew these shapes with a good guess!

#6: Antelope

One of my favorite trips this year was to South Dakota’s Black Hills. I was lucky enough to see an antelope near the road, which I’m told doesn’t happen very often. This one was not very jumpy – I didn’t have anything beyond a focal length of 55mm, combined with the crop factor of 1.6 on my T2i.

#7: Motorcycle Madness

This shot was also taken on the day of the 9/11 motorcycle ride at Gail’s Harley Davidson. There were so many great bikes there I could, and did, shoot photos all day. I picked this one mainly because of how I processed it in Photoshop, and the beauty of the bike. If there’s one area I’ve advanced much this year, it’s how to properly process photos taken in RAW.

#8: The best thing one can have…

I’m a bit biased here as I know the photo subject and she is wearing my favourite sunglasses…but I still think this is one of my better photos. Taken in Custer State Park. In particular, I liked the lighting of this shot.

#9: For Good Measure

This one was also taken at the 9/11 ride that started at Gail’s Harley Davidson. The military landed an Apache helicopter there, which was what attracted me to it in the first place as I was driving by. This gun is attached to one of the most amazing cameras I have ever seen. The camera is helmet-mounted and responds to the gunners head movement. This gun follows suit. While I am anti-war, one can’t help but admire the engineering effort that went into such a system.

#10: Dead Hills

This moment was one of the more surreal and reflective moments of my trip to South Dakota. This was taken from the top of Mount Moriah. On one side, there’s these hills. Lifeless and barren trees – which I found quite interesting as a new sight I had never seen. On the other side directly behind the direction I took this picture is the famous town of Deadwood. The view from the top of Mount Moriah is nothing short of majestic.

A Touch of Beauty #1

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The premise of this featurette is quite simple: I combed through some of my recent “Likes” on Vimeo to round up a few of the more inspiring videos I’ve seen lately. For me personally, the types of videos I’m embedding below are the ones I enjoy the most – the Earth’s beauty on display in various forms. Not all of this is expressed in timelapse, but I think you will get the idea. These are in no particular order.

Timelapse Montage by Mike Flores

November Mist from Paramotor by David Perry

Sacred Lands – Eastern California – Mindrelic Timelapse by Mindrelic

Yellowstone National Park by Sylvain Dardenne

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The Blue Ocean in RED by Howard Hall

TimeScapes: Rapture by Tom Lowe

Jonsi: Concert Timelapse at the Wiltern Theatre by Henry Jun Wah Lee

IRIDIUM by Murray Fredericks

Landscapes: Volume One by Dustin Farrell

Hope you enjoyed this! I wouldn’t expect this featurette on the blog to happen more than a few times a year. However, that depends on how many awesome videos come out, so who knows.

Cheers!

Love The Earth

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For those in the dark, “Love The Earth” is a film collaboration between musical artist Imogen Heap and filmmaker Thomas Ermacora. The video below explains the project in Imogen’s own words.

I first heard of Imogen Heap in Zach Braff’s first film, Garden State. At that time she was recording as Frou Frou. She’s continued to make incredible music and continues this with her latest record, “Ellipse.” As she stated in the video, she’ll be performing at the Royal Albert Hall tomorrow, November 5th. She’ll be conducting the orchestra live to accompany a nature film, “Love The Earth.” This project was “crowdsourced.” Thomas Ermacora and Imogen put out a call for footage. Submit footage of why you love the earth, and then the best footage will be edited into a half hour film. Imogen will provide the score for the film. The call for footage ran until September 26th.

The funny thing about this whole affair is my friend Joe Pollock and myself did not discover the project until the last day of submissions. Joe and I freelance together a lot so I told him about the project and suggested we submit footage. It was sort of on a lark. We’re still very “new” to the art of timelapse, but we still submitted our best timelapse clips we had on our hard drives. For me it was almost a joke, I had no time to prepare or shoot anything I thought worth submitting. Perhaps that is just the self-critic in me but that is how I felt.

As you may guess it was something of a shock to me when I got the e-mail from Patrick, the project coordinator, notifying me that my footage had been selected and the instructions on the next phase in the project. To my delight, Joe’s footage had been selected as well. Since we had been selected we were allowed to submit more footage. I had just got back from a trip to South Dakota’s Black Hills visiting a friend. While I was there I shot a lot, to say the least. So if you do see any footage resembling the Black Hills it’s probably mine. I am not sure what clips they chose, so I’ll probably update this blog when I watch the broadcast tomorrow.

For me it was an honor just to be selected. I thought, oh, I’ve been shortlisted but my footage will probably not make the final cut of the film. I got an email a few days ago letting me know my footage is in the final film and I’ll be credited. They are paying for my footage, too, so it’s not like they are using filmmakers. Many, including myself, tend to think of “crowdsourcing” as a dirty word. A fancy term for using the talented and not-so-talented. In this case, that is not true.

I’ve been a fan of Imogen and her music for a long time so making the final cut of the film is quite an honor. If you’d like to watch the live broadcast, it happens tomorrow, November 5th, at 7PM GMT. There is a 5 hour time difference so 7PM GMT is 2PM CST. I’ll be credited as “Thomas Baurain.” You can watch it on resounde.com. I highly recommend checking it out. Imogen will be conducting while the film plays behind her on a large projector. The other footage I’ve seen from the project is leaps and bounds better than mine. Many talented people have contributed to this film. I do hope you tune in for this global event.

Cheers!

UPDATE:
Just watched the final film, and to say it’s humbling to be included in “Love The Earth” is an understatement. It also gave me a sense of pride to see my buddy Joseph Pollock’s clips in there as well. We freelance together a lot, and have similar shooting styles. I loved so many clips in the film I can’t even list them all. Congratulations to the team that edited and made the film. There was definitely a story being told and a coherence throughout, not just a string of random nature clips in there. Watching it I actually recalled clips I should have submitted. Oh well, hindsight is 20/20 as usual.

Imogen’s score was as breathtaking and beautiful as I thought it would be. I would love to see her compose more classical music. Love The Earth 2, perhaps? It would definitely be a good idea. I can’t even put into words how much I enjoyed her score. She’s always been one of my favorite artists but this definitely lets me appreciate her in a new and amazing way. I truly hope there’s going to be an archived broadcast for people to watch it again. I’ll post it if such a rebroadcast or archive does come online.

UPDATE 2:

Imogen tweeted this out just a short time ago: “There is a DVD in the making of @loveearthfilm with footage from the night, backstage, interviews etc + official soundtrack + film. xx” I am definitely thrilled not just because my own work will be on the DVD, but I am always a hound for behind the scenes type stuff. I’d also love to learn more about the making of the film from interviews and such. Yay!

New Video: Denoise

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Denoise from Tom Baurain on Vimeo.

Music: “In Motion” by Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross Amazon MP3 | iTunes

If you’ve been following my blog or Twitter you’ve probably seen me tweet a few times about Magic Bullet Denoiser, a great new product from the folks at Red Giant Software. The post below this one gets into the basics of the program. This video is a better example of what Denoiser can do.

It’s not all gumdrops and lollipops, unfortunately. Denoiser is a great product, but it is not perfect. One should never expect that of a product but Denoiser certainly does a fine job. Those with a trained eye may notice some compression artifacts in the video. By this point my patience was completely gone and it does what I set out for it to do. It’s not what I wanted it to be, but it comes close.

Now we get down to the nitty gritty of the flaws of Denoiser. I can tell you right now that “Cannot Sample Frame” is an error you will curse many times. In Final Cut Pro I found Denoiser almost unusable. I came up with a few workarounds but Denoiser definitely has room to improve. Perhaps it is just FCP showing it’s age. I’m honestly not sure and would love to be corrected in the comments if anyone knows for sure. These are my best guesses. I am running the latest version of Final Cut Pro.

There would always be a certain point in the timeline where I would run into the infamous “Out of Memory” error and Denoiser would refuse to render. I tried several common workarounds for the “Out of Memory” error and closed all other projects, timelines, and even made FCP the only program I was running. At 8GB of RAM my user experience was hardly what I would call good. One thing I should mention is that the “Cannot Sample Frame” error will completely kill your job in Compressor, while this same error in After Effects won’t wreck your render and completes the job just fine.

To alleviate my woes I set After Effects CS4 to the task of “denoising” my footage. AE proved to be much more reliable in this task. For a workflow that involved an actual project with deadlines I would most certainly rely on After Effects over Final Cut Pro. I would also denoise the clips in need first, as this task should be performed before color correction. Another thing worth mentioning is how RAM intensive the plugin is itself – it’s not what I’d call fast.

Don’t take my words as all doom and gloom – FCP did handle around half my clips with Denoiser applied just fine. The render times were pretty bad, but at least it worked. My timeline ended up being 3:31, so you have an idea of what I was working with. Denoiser’s fine tuning options are definitely well thought out, kudos to Red Giant Software. The options I found myself coming back to again and again were “Enhance, Shadow Offset,” and the actual effect itself. Shadow Offset really saved me on a timelapse recently – it was long exposure so there were variable amounts of light in each frame, which resulted in the shadows for part of the timelapse being very “blocky.” Adjusting the Shadow Offset property saved me on that.

Chroma Smoothing was a bit tricky, at least for me – I usually left it alone. Most of the time it made the footage I shot look worse. Honestly I was surprised at what Denoiser could do with the footage I shot at ISO’s 3200 and 6400. It wasn’t perfect, especially at ISO 6400, but it was better than I was expecting. Now I’m not saying my EOS Rebel T2i is as good as a 1DMKIV, but footage shot at 1600 and 3200 is definitely usable depending on what lighting conditions you are shooting in.

Another thing I noticed was the “smoothing” in general it did. Like I said in my previous blog, there is such a thing as too much, but the more I looked at my footage there is a definite “smoothing” of things. How much is too much is definitely up to you. The most noticeable common area for me was on skin. It was almost like skin being smoothed in Photoshop, though definitely not as over the top as some fashion magazines that get dissected on the internet. It’s not a negative, in my opinion, but definitely something worth noting.

Again let me reiterate that color correction should be done after Denoiser has been applied. I did no color correction on this particular project. I made that choice so that the viewer could get a better idea of what things are like with just Denoiser applied. Hopefully you enjoyed the video! I wanted to use “In Motion” from The Social Network soundtrack and it fit this little side project. If you were wondering, all clips were shot at f2.8 on a Tokina 11-16mm lens. I love the way that lens flares, especially at ISO 3200.

Cheers!

First Impressions: Magic Bullet Denoiser

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Last night I made the best purchase I’ve made this year: Magic Bullet Denoiser. One thing you should note right off the bat is I’ve never used Neat Video, another popular solution for reducing noise in your footage. No posts on this blog will be about comparing the two, just focused on Magic Bullet Denoiser. A new entry from Red Giant Software, Magic Bullet Denoiser is, as Red Giant puts it, “state of the art video noise reduction, right out of the box.”

Red Giant Software needs no introduction – they’ve made, and I’ve purchased, many of their quality products for filmmakers and motion designers. Their new entry into the market, Magic Bullet Denoiser, does not disappoint and is par for the course for them as a company.

Before buying, I downloaded the free 30 day trial. As I already have many of Red Giant’s plugins for After Effects, it only made sense to get it for AE. Red Giant also offers Denoiser for Final Cut Pro, as with many of its plugins. Quick thanks to Aharon Rabinowitz of Red Giant – he read my post and pointed out that when you buy Denoiser, you buy it for both platforms, not just one. Definitely makes more sense than having to buy it twice for FCP and AE. Thanks for the tip Aharon! The plugin itself is fantastic – my first go-round with this software was quite fun, to say the least.

There’s not much technical insight I can give you into the plugin, just yet – why not go read Scott Simmons insightful blog over at Pro Video Coalition? Next, I’ll take you on through the process of reducing noise on a recent clip I shot while at an event in Washington, D.C.

This clip was a recent timelapse I shot at MLG DC. It was towards the end of the event. My camera was set up on top of the main stage area, pointing towards the rest of the venue. It appears to be so empty because the most of the crowd is actually is watching the MLG Halo 3 Championships, or World of Warcraft off to the right of the frame. I only had my 18-55mm kit lens available at the time. The timelapse itself was meant to capture people leaving the event.

First we have a frame grab from the clip itself. Not bad, but a little dark due to the large differentiations in lighting around the event venue. The lens itself is not particularly suited to this environment either at f3.5.

I brightened it a little with a simple adjustment layer using Curves.

When the image is brightened up a bit you can really start to see the image fall apart, especially at the edges and darker areas. The kit lens itself is not good, but that’s not exactly news.

As you can see, not pretty at all. Horrid, one might say – definitely in need of Denoiser. Once applied, Denoiser gives you an array of options. The ones displayed below are what Denoiser applies by default.

Many of these options are self-explanatory, and I can’t wait to try some of the other options for fine-tuning. The picture below is the same frame from before, only with Denoiser applied with a Noise Reduction setting of 200. The flexibility of this setting is impressive – but as I suspected, there is a certain point where too much noise reduction will blur your clip beyond acceptable limits. What those limits are depend entirely upon your clip, and what you define “acceptable limits” as, of course. Motion Estimation is another setting you should pay close attention to, and set depending on how much movement there is in your shot.

Just for good measure, here is a comparison screenshot of what we started with and what we ended up with, thanks to Denoiser.

This was a very quick test, but based off of first impressions with this software, this is the best $99 dollars I’ve spent on postproduction software this year. I’m excited to try these on more clips I’ve shot to test out the plugin. In particular, the fine tuning on this software looks fantastic. Do yourself a favor and download the free trial right now. It puts a nasty red X through the full frame of your footage, but you’ll definitely get the idea. My next post will be a reel of sorts showing off the capabilities of Denoiser in action. So be on the lookout for that.

Magic Bullet Denoiser is a powerful tool to have in your postproduction toolbox.

UPDATE:

Here is the video I promised showing Denoiser in action:

Denoise from Tom Baurain on Vimeo.

Photo of the Day: Burros

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Sorry I’ve been pretty mum on this blog for some time! Things have been pretty hectic. This picture comes from a trip I recently came back from, taken in the Black Hills of South Dakota. A friend of mine took me through Custer State Park. There, wild burros will literally come up to your car and beg for food. By beg, I of course mean stick their face inside your car, try to eat your camera, and lick the windows if all else fails. Pretty funny, honestly – this particular burro thought my lens was some sort of tasty treat.