4k crop and pan

Gabonviper wrote on 11/3/2015, 12:33 AM

Hi,

I have recently discovered the benefits of shooting concerts in 4k over HD, as that allows effective use of the crop and pan tool. Here's a split screen video of 4k footage I shot at a Joe Bonamassa concert in Helsinki last September.

Shot in 4k with the Panasonic LUMIX DMC LX100 and rendered in 1080p HD 12mbps.

On the left is the original footage straight from the camera and on the right is the finalized edit of Joe's amazing performance from the second gig on Joe's Fall European Tour 2015.

The footage has been crop and panned frame by frame virtually throughout in an effort to zoom in on and follow the main subject and to eliminate unwanted elements. This also stabilized the footage but Mercalli V4 was used throghout (apart from the Hey Baby part) for additional stabilization.
The following plugins were used (keyframed) to adjust color and contrast:
NewBlue CF ColorFast (in some parts two instances were added - one for the whole clip and another to make more radical changes to colors where exposure was washed out (keyframed))
NewBlue FE Film Color (keyframed) mostly for gamma and diffusion but also near black and white at one spot
NewBlue V7 Video Tune Up Plus for contrast
NewBlue PE Cartoon Plus (keyframed) in two places where exposure was really badly off (this was because the camera was accidentally on AE lock and in the dark I could not correct it but had to use the exposure compensation wheel to correct whatever the center spot metering happened to be based on; sometimes I forgot which way the darn wheel was supposed to go). I don't really like to tamper too much with gimmicks such as these but in this case, given the psychedelic nature of the song, I think the effects were ok)
Sony Unsharp Mask throughout (I have the default sharpening and contrast on the camera a few notches down, as otherwise the camera overdoes it and leaves little room for adjustment).

A curious thing with the Mercalli V4 for Sony Vegas plugin was that it tended to show the Mercalli logo for a split second in a few places without any reason, which is why, after like five 1½-hour attempts at rendering this mp4 file, I finally gave up on stabilization for those parts (the end of the intro in Hey Baby).

Anybody with similar problems with Mercalli V4 for Vegas?

The render took 1½ hours and I doubt my computer will be able to handle a bluray 30mbps render with this many adjustments to the 4k footage. Still, had I shot it in HD, I wouldn't have been able to crop and pan it in this way.

I hope you like it. Took me a week to do.

The audio was recorded with an H1 Zoom attached to the hot shoe of the camera, 24-bit 48kHz (mp3 320kbps here). The recorder and Panasonic LX100 are a killer combo.

Comments

john_dennis wrote on 11/3/2015, 1:10 AM

I subscribed.

ritsmer wrote on 11/3/2015, 7:27 AM

@ Gabonviper: Thank you for sharing. Most interesting to follow the steps you did to improve the final picture.
I also own and use the NewBlue FX's - but as they, for some unknown reason, are very slow on my 6-core machine with Nvidia GTX 970 I tend to use Sony Levels etc plus Vector Scopes whenever that is enough.

OldSmoke wrote on 11/3/2015, 9:14 AM

This is just my personal opinion. Everything is fine I just find that there is too much zooming going on and I would have gone for straight cuts and zommed some times or different parts of the picture to give the impression it was done with multiple cameras. There are parts that seem out of focus; was that on purpose or did the camera loose focus?

I have an AX100 that records at 100Mbps and yes, it helps greatly if you deliver in HD and can crop in without loosing detail. If the lighting is good and there isnt much noise I crop until 720p and it still looks good rendered to HD. My only issue is that it's only 30p, I would love to have 4K at 60p and double the bit rate.

I am a Jazz fan and a bit of Rock too. I recently subscribed to Apple Music to get acces to old records I used to listen when I was young. Herbie Hancook, John Mayall, Cannonball Adderley, Dave Brubeck, Miles Davis just to name a few and of course the J. Geils Band.

Gabonviper wrote on 11/3/2015, 12:25 PM

Thanks for the feedback OldSmoke. To a certain extent I agree with you on the zooming part, as there are times where it could have been cut straight. I actually did not only use long zooming in on the subject. At 2:48 there was a very fast zoom in on Joe for dramatic effect (another one at 3:59) (though of course the impression is not equivalent to a straight cut, just different) At 3:29 a straight cut from wideangle to portrait, probably the only one I made. Perhaps this could have been used more.

The problem with staight cuts was the fact that I was basically filming only Joe most of the time, and there really weren't many other subjects to choose from: the bass player would have made for too small a crop to be useful, for example. I could have made a straight cut into Joe's fingers but for the most part there was not much happening there and the crop would have been drastic, maybe too much so to be useful.
What's more, the solo part I think, due to its psychedelic nature, rather allows the camera to follow the guitarist as he comes closer and then goes further back. His facial expressions would of course have made for good close-ups, but extreme crops like those would have resulted in noise and I doubt they would have looked good. Of course I could have used other effects there, or slow motion etc. The possibilities are many, but not limitless. Often you do what you can. I tried to make the zooming smooth and fit the flow of the action.

The out of focus part certainly exists (camera's fault, not intentional) in the original footage too and there I used near b&W, which I think works ok.
But yes, I am working on a bluray of this concert and things and ideas develop all the time. Thanks for the feedback again.

Here is the edited version only:

And I too am a big jazz fan, figuratively, that is ;-). And actually I have a John Mayall concert awaiting editing, among many other shows in the pipeline ... sometimes I think I should get a life ;-)

Gabonviper wrote on 11/3/2015, 12:44 PM

Thanks ritsmer for the comment.

NewBlue fx works smoothly in my system. I bought an old gtx580 on OldSmoke's recommendation and that made a big difference over the newer card I was using.
The Mercalli V4 stabilizer slows things down, though...

My setup is:
Computer: IntelCore i5 2500K CPU 3,30 GHz with 8 GB RAM and 64-bit Win7
Graphics card: Sparkle GeForce gtx580 Guru, driver 296.10
Motherboard: MSI z68A-G43

Vegas Pro program files on Samsung SSD EVO as main hard drive (on SATA 6gb)
footage on Buffalo Ministation extreme 1TB ) on usb 3.0
rendered to Buffalo Ministation 500gb on usb 3.0
Project file on another external hd, usb 2.0 only.
(probably not the best way to go, no?)

Note that the split-screen version doesn't really tell the whole picture as I had to use the file I posted on YouTube and rerender it with the original footage (which was only rendered once) as my computer probably would not have been able to handle two 4k tracks playing simultaneously, the edited one being what it is..
I wonder if I should buy a faster processor plus another two SSDs for the render and original files to be able to render the whole of the 2-hour 20-minute show as MPEG-2 (m2v) for bluray?
Most likely I will have to render it in bits as mp4 and import those files into the timeline, rerendering the whole thing and thus losing quality big time.

Or do you know how I could import m2v files into Vegas?

john_dennis wrote on 11/3/2015, 4:23 PM

"[I]Or do you know how I could import m2v files into Vegas?[/I]"

Vegas Pro 13 will accept .m2v elementary streams, they are just not included in the media type filter when you open files. If you change the filter to *.m2v the files will be shown and accepted into the Media Pool and can be placed on the timeline.

You should probably think about getting a new system as you are a little behind and you are editing 4K. I would personally spend more on processors and less on SSDs since you are editing compressed files. If you were using uncompressed intermediates or multiple camera inputs, I might think differently.

Gabonviper wrote on 11/4/2015, 7:04 AM

John,

thanks for the reply. I am currently using Vegas Pro 12, which apparently does not accept m2v elementary files. So I am now testing the trial version of v13 and following your instructions, I was able to import a m2v file into the Project and rerender it using the same template and apparently it did not recompress it (stating "no recompression required"). But on closer scrutiny, the new m2v file (6 seconds, MainConcept MPEG-2 is smaller (22 892 833 bytes) than the original (23 082 67bytes) - how's that possible if no compression has taken place? Sorry, maybe this is obvious to you, but...

As I will have to upgrade a lot of hardware (processor to a 6-core one, no?, a new motherboard with more RAM capabilities, etc), what other benefits would Pro13 bring over Pro12 with regard to 4k editing? In other words, as the word on the street is Vegas might be going out the window, is it worth upgrading?

One thing I noticed about the trial version of v13: Auto preview of 4k material runs much smoother than on v12...

Mind you, I am just a hobbyist (in case you haven't figured that out yet ;-)), and all I am asking for is a powerful enough machine and NLE to do blurays of 2-3-hour concert footage, perhaps multicam, too. (Not much,eh?)

NickHope wrote on 11/4/2015, 9:08 PM

For long-GOP formats like MPEG-2 (as opposed to intra-frame formats) the very ends of the file usually get rendered with recompression, even if the main body of the file is unchanged. Those would be the parts outside of complete GOPs, typically up to half a second. That might account for some change in file size.

For me, no real compelling reasons to use V13 over V12. m2v support would be one of a very small number of reasons I might use V13 sometimes. Day to day I use V12 still, despite having both.

ritsmer wrote on 11/5/2015, 2:33 AM

@Gabonviper:
as to the m2v issue - have you tried to simply rename .m2v to i.e. .mpg or .mts and then drop them on the V12 timeline?

To my opinion there is such a mess about the .mxx extensions - and sometimes one has to be a little creative.

Recently (with other programs than Vegas) I had to rename some .m4v to simply .mp4 - and in another case some .m2t to simply .mpg which immediately made these files fully acceptable and usable for that software and hardware.

Quite funny: I also own V12 and V13 - but prefer using the V12 as it in many cases seems to be faster - on my machine, that is.
That said I'm gonna change that GTX970 to something more suitable - probably to a R9 -something.

Gabonviper wrote on 11/5/2015, 12:35 PM

ritsmer,

How do you change the file type from .m2v to .mpg, since simply writing .mpg at the end of the filename in Windows doesn't actually change the file type - at least v12 still does not recognize the file as a viable import.

Probably another obvious question but ... hey, the damage is done :).
(P.S. I like the obscene language filter here: only st*pid people use the word st*pid, so instead of ***** you now have "obvious")

john_dennis wrote on 11/5/2015, 2:12 PM

You can use tsMuxer to wrap the .m2v elementary stream into a .ts or .m2ts wrapper. Vegas Pro 12 will happily recognize these file types with its normal filters and work with it just fine. It won't smart render, however, as Vegas Pro 13 does. There will be some generation loss throughout the file not just within partial GOPs.

Glenn Thomas wrote on 11/6/2015, 3:59 AM

Yes, cropping and panning is a brilliant way of working with 4k! Especially in Vegas which makes it so easy. And that's nice looking footage you've shot there on the LX100. The zooms especially looked like they done in camera. What I love the most with 4k is how you can create multiple different shots from just one clip of footage.

Here's an example, a video I made using this method.

Apart from the shot at the start, this was all edited from just one 4k clip I shot on my Lumia with the phone sitting on the ground leaning against my bicycle tyre. Now in one part of the edit, there's a shot of this lady on the left of the screen. And then it cuts to another shot of the seagulls on the ground with the lady no longer in view. Both shots were the exact same clip of footage. Just cropped to different sections. There are other shots of just the trees, and other close ups of the seagulls. Of course, always remember to check when you crop that the width doesn't drop below 1920. From memory, I kept all the crop widths here above 2000 to ensure no detail was lost. The footage from the phone was only 50mbps though.

I'm keen to try more of this stuff now that we also have a GoPro 4 Black and RX100 IV. Definitely opens plenty of possibilities.

Another application 4K to 1080P would be killer for is shooting greenscreen or bluescreen. Normally at 1080P, I shoot greenscreen footage with the camera flipped vertical for extra resolution. At 4K veryical though, there would be even more area for cropping. With just 2 clips of someone filmed vertical in front of a greenscreen, you would have all you need for everything from a full body including feet shot, to a shoulders up close up. Loads of potential there.

JanL wrote on 11/6/2015, 10:29 AM

Interesting thread. I am using Sony AX100 and experimenting with pan and crop, there are many new opportunities when filming in 4k.

I have experienced the same issue with the Mercalli v4 plugin. The first frame is stabilized, the second frame is not (zoomed out and showing the Mercalli banner), all following frames in the clip are stabilized as expected. This happens now and then; I cannot see a pattern. I have submitted a ticket to ProDad, waiting for their response.

Gabonviper wrote on 11/6/2015, 5:35 PM

Oldsmoke,

Thanks for the comments on zooming and straight cuts. After a second look, I found several places where a straight cut would've have been better. I guess I have not shaken off the role the audience taper, zooming in when I wouldn't have to. I'll certainly revisit this and see how I could be a little more radical here. Certainly plenty of fertile ground forthat. What makes straight cuts a little challenging is the fact that often you are having to negotiate with the actual zooming in and out in the footage itself. Sometimes a straight cut at the end of a zooming in doesn't fit the song. But great feedback.

ritsmer wrote on 11/7/2015, 3:15 AM

Gabonviper
Right - and it was just an idea where simply changing the extension made it work nicely - with other hard- and software, however... And beeing on a holiday in Beijing for the time beeing I did not have Vegas on the laptop to try it out :- )

Gabonviper wrote on 11/7/2015, 4:06 AM

John,
The ability in v13 to import m2v files into Vegas and rerender without compression takes the heat off from having to upgrade my outdated system right now. Sure render times would diminish and all that but I would still get the job done and that's the main thing. Better hold my 4k horses till prices come down.

Gabonviper wrote on 11/7/2015, 5:08 AM

nice work Glen :)

Glenn Thomas wrote on 11/7/2015, 11:39 PM

Thanks!