Tuesday, June 7, 2011

"Canon 7d Test: No Woman, No Cry" Raw Footage

Hello Gnarly Gninjas,

We’ve gotten lots of comments about the “Canon 7D Test: No Woman, No Cry” video on Youtube.  This was a one-camera test video, but a lot of people were concerned that there was some foul play involved with another rogue camera angle that snuck into the edit.  These are a few of our favorite youtube comments:

@gnarlybay please explain) maybe you have two cameras and your friend took from the other corner
strannik 1 month ago

OR

The jump shot at 2:09 is impossible if the band doesn't play the song twice or if you don't have a second camera. Or if you're Harry Potter getting into video.
Anyway great editing and video.
Cheers.
xavlexav 5 months ago

We really appreciate the attention and conspiracy theories, but before the Mythbuster weirdoes come to The Bay, flaunting their berets and fantastic facial hair, we’d like to address some of those myth-conceptions.  Lisp. 

So, here is the raw footage.  If you’re feeling super ambitious...

CLICK HERE TO DOWNLOAD THE RAW FOOTAGE AND PROJECT ASSETS (969 mb)

When everything is downloaded, double click the project file.  You’ll need FCP7 to make everything work.  We compressed the assets to 640x360 PRORES LT codec, so that the folder is quicker to download (969 mb total), but the quality will be diminished from the HD originals.  Also, we lumped all of the b-roll shots into one clip to separate it from the main 2 original clips of the “No Woman, No Cry” performance.  Lastly, the audio clip was 3 hours long because we captured the whole night with the zoom H4n, so we provided the original “No Woman, No Cry” snippet and the sneakily edited version from the video.  Compare and contrast.  It will give you a closer look into the mythical madness, and you can stir the witch’s cauldron a bit. 

It really was just a test…with booze involved.  We had just gotten an early shipment of this exciting new contraption that day, and we were excited to try it out.  At the time, we only had a 4GB card and a 2GB card.  We actually ran out of memory on the 4GB card in the middle of “No Woman, No Cry”…so there was a gap during the card-swap, and as you’ll see from the footage/edit, the added effort was put into covering those mistakes with looping/re-using parts of the song and fragments of other footage captured throughout the night…therein LIES the trickery or tomfoolery or shenaniganiliciousness…nonetheless, real eyes, realize, real LIES….and there are no real LIES in this video…only TRUE LIES…whatever that means…Get to tha chopper.

Also, looking back, it’s interesting to see that we really pushed the ISO to the brink.  Most of the band footage was around ISO400, but the crowd stuff quickly bumped up to ISO3200 and beyond.   That first day/night, I remember being blown away by the low-light capabilities.  You can almost film in the dark with high ISOs and an F1.4 lens, but when we got the footage on the computer, we quickly realized that the 7D should be limited to 800 ISO to avoid crazy grain.  Nonetheless, we were primarily shooting with an EX1/M2 encore at the time…so it was a HUGE improvement over that light sensitivity.  We haven’t looked back since.

We hope you enjoy this journey into the archives…nothing super-fancy…but thanks for watching.
 
Gnarly.