Behind the Scenes: Commercial Shoot

Here's a short tour of my basement where we shot some dental and jewelry ads.

This is one of the final ads:

Dazzle Her - Jewelry Ad from Tony Reale on Vimeo.

PhoneCam: Corporate Video Shoot

We were down in Milwaukee this past week doing a corporate video shoot with a marketing firm out of Chicago. Here's some footage from the day.

Canon DSLR Video Monitor for FREE Using your Laptop

Episode 11 of Next Wave TV: Tony's Vidcast

In this episode, I show you how to use a laptop with Canon's EOS Utility software that comes free with any Canon DSLR to remote view and control your camera.

Hosted by Tony Reale

Become a fan on Facebook!

Produced by Creative Edge Productions

Cinematography Tips for Video Lighting - #2 Interview Lighting

The second episode of Cinematography Tips for Video Lighting. Hosted by Tony Reale.

Today I talk about how to set up lighting for an interview and the importance of back lighting.

Stuff I talk about:

Lights: Cool Lights 5600k CFL
Smith Victor Photofloods
Britek Lights

Produced by Creative Edge Productions

Become a fan on Facebook!







For more pictures from the shoot, visit our Facebook page.

Canon 5D MkII PC Workflow - Adobe Premiere CS4 [UPDATE]

I'm going to take a little time to go over two things: my editor and my workflow for 5D footage.

Editor:



My first setup was a HP Pavilion Intel Quad core Q6600 desktop. I used it for my HV20 thru my XH-A1 and some of my 5D MkII footage. I paid $1,100 back in January of 2007 and it still works great.

When we started editing the Doritos commercial Sean wanted to try out his new Intel i7 desktop, so we brought the footage over to his house. I was very impressed at how well the i7 handled the transcoded 5D footage (I'll talk about transcoding more in a little bit). So that got me interested in a new system...but this time I wanted to be mobile.



Which led me to my current editor, the Acer Aspire 8940G. It has an Intel Core i7 processor, 4GB RAM, Blu-ray drive, and 18.4" 1920x1080 HD screen. It is much zippier then my desktop and I'm really happy with how it edits.

What are the downsides? Well it doesn't have good speakers (at least compared to my monitors), so I always plug in my monitors before I finalize sound on any project. Also, even after calibration, I don't trust the laptop's screen to be truly color accurate. So before I finalize a project, I always color correct on a good external screen.

But all that said, for the price the Acer is a fantastic editor.

I love being mobile too. I can shoot on location and jump right onto my laptop and review the footage or start editing right away. Plus it lets me edit at my favorite coffee shop...which my desktop never could :)



Here we are on location at one of the Jewelery shoots and I'm reviewing footage. Pretty sweet!

Oh, and since I'm pretty much addicted to having dual screens, I bought a DoubleSight 9" USB monitor. It's not very good for video editing, but works great for viewing websites. I love it because it runs both signal and power over USB...no VGA or power cables to worry about.

Workflow:

I did a review on Philip Bloom's 5D MkII Training DVD and in that review I told people that I would recommend it if you are new to filmmaking. In his DVD, Philip goes over Mac workflow, but leaves PC users with very little so I wanted to give you guys a simple workflow method for PC users.

First I'm going to assume you have a quad core PC or are at least able to view raw footage from your 5D in Windows Media Player without it skipping. If you can't do that, your computer may not be able to handle 5D footage very well. Also we'll assume you've already offloaded the footage from your CF card to your computer. And lastly, I use Adobe Premiere Pro so this workflow will revolve around that. If you use Avid, Vegas, or something else try to substitute parts of this guide for your setup.

Now that it's on your computer, you'll need to transcode it. Raw 5D footage is encoded in H.264 which is great for capturing, but horrible for editing. Macs can read H.264 and edit it pretty well, but PC editors don't use the GPU of the computer the same way Macs do so transcoding is a necessary step in PC editing.



I personally use Cineform NEO Scene for my transcoding. Mainly cause it creates an editable, lossless file that is converted from 30 fps (which is the 5D's only frame rate) to 29.967 (which is the industry standard frame rate).



Now that you've transcoded your footage, open your editor. Select a project that is 1080 HD at 29.967 (sometimes shown as 60i). Go ahead and drag in your transcoded footage and try playing it back. You will notice that the raw footage from the 5D will barely play at 1 fps in your editor, but the transcoded footage should play back fairly smoothly. Depending on the power of your PC, you may notice some choppiness in playback, but that has nothing to do with the quality of the footage. It just means your computer has a hard time editing Full HD 1080 footage. HD editing is very resource intensive so the newer and more powerful the computer, the better.

Hopefully that helps. Remember, transcoding is pretty much a requirement of PC editing of 5D footage. If you're planning on buying a 5D MkII and a PC to edit it on, add Cineform (or something similar) to the cost of your purchase.

Good luck!

[UPDATE]
I thought I'd share one more thing. Cineform is great for commercial productions when you want the best possible editable copy of your footage. But what if you just want something smaller to edit and archive?

I've been using Adobe Media Encoder to convert my 5D footage down to 720p 29.97 which works great. The file sizes are much smaller and it's a standard format that I can work with.

I usually compress out an MP4 using an H.264 encoding. Here are the typical settings I use. Depending on your sequence settings, you may want to change a few of the settings around until you get something you are happy with.

Crash the Super Bowl Doritos Commercial - Want More?

This is a commercial we shot for the “Crash the Super Bowl” Doritos contest.

Written, Directed, & Edited by Sean Bowers
Director of Photography & Color Correction by Tony Reale

Starring:
Nick Wicker
Travis Calkins-Delforge

Shot on the Canon 5D MkII and XH-A1 cameras

This was the first shoot I did with my new Canon 5D MkII...and I have to say, it's FANTASTIC! The image we captured was beautiful and it let me light more artistically than before.

Click here for pictures from the shoot.

Raivu Industries Video Shoot

I recently did a video shoot for Raivu Industries talking about their new ministry Raivu for Kids. I'm working on editing the video and I'll post it when it is complete.

For more information about Raivu Industries, visit their website raivuindustries.com or raivuforkids.org




Visit our Facebook page for more pictures from the shoot.

NextWaveTV Ep 9: Professional Video Equipment

NextWaveTV Ep 9: Professional Video Equipment from Tony Reale on Vimeo.

YouTube Version

Episode 9 of Next Wave TV: Tony's Vidcast

In this episode, I show you all the equipment I use for my video productions.

Hosted by Tony Reale

Visit our Facebook page for pictures from the shoot

Produced by Creative Edge Productions

CEP Commercial Shoot

Last weekend I set up about 90% of my equipment for the first time to do a commercial shoot for Creative Edge Productions. While everything was setup, I shot an episode of NextWaveTV. I'll have the episode up soon and the commercial done in a few months. Here are pictures from the shoot.

Manly Man II Teaser Trailer Shoot

Last year, we put the Manly Man Conference together in a matter of months, running only one promo video, and it turned out amazing. This year, we're gearing up for it to be bigger and better.

Here's a picture from the teaser trailer shoot. I had my friend Eric Martin running follow focus whip. A special thanks to my good friend Tim Ray from Ray of Light Productions for taking a few snapshots of the shoot. Stay tuned for the completed video in the next week or so.

For more pictures, visit our Facebook page and become a fan!

For more information on the Manly Man Conference, visit our website at: www.themanlymanconference.com The new website for MMII is still under construction, so check back for details about this years conference.

Q90FM Video Shoot 2

We just finished with our second shoot for the HopeNet promo video for Q90FM. We worked with teens from Woodland Worship Center in Oneida, WI. All of the teens did a fantastic job in acting, especially since we were working with very emotional scenes.

To view more pictures from the shoot, visit our website creativeedgepro.com or become a fan on Facebook.

Check back in a few weeks to see the completed video.

Encap Commercial Shoot

Wow, it's been awhile since I posted here. Guess I've been really busy with work.

Back in late September we did a commercial shoot for Encap. We shot four 30 second commercials in one day. We should have them edited by late winter, early spring and should start airing before summer '09.

Here are a few pictures from the shoot:















For more information on Encap, visit their website at: www.encap.net