"Truth Be Told" Shot with a 7D. Tons of Effects Here.

by jared1November 17^th, 2010

Director Steve Petersen sent me this short film that he shot with the Canon 7D. He managed to add a ton of VFX to this little film. He was kind enough to break down the gear he used and some of the effects used to make it. Here is the breakdown from Steve. I find the part about the “Quicktime having varying gamma pedestals” to be very interesting.

“Shot on the Canon 7D

– All 7D H.264 footage was immediately converted to Apple ProRez HQ 422

– Edited in Apple Final Cut Pro

– Colored in Apple Color

– 3D software used was Cinema 4D.  2D software used was After Effects

– I used a combination of high quality still photo lenses with great glass behind a matte box with plenty of ND to achieve the shallow depth of field even in the brightest scenes.

– Canon 7D built in audio is pretty rough so I used a small ZOOM field audio recorder (attached it to a boom and lav’s)  for the audio and sync’d it up in the edit.

– Tracked the shots for the motion graphics using Boujou Bullet

– I learned that when hand-holding a DSLR of this size it is imperative to have the camera body attached to some kind of mount.  Whether it is a shoulder mount or some kind of glidecam.  Without it, and without a lens that has a built in stabilizer, handholding the body results in a wild jitter than is distracting and causes ‘rubber artifacting’ on some of the hard edges of the image.

– I worked on the final effects and color correction on a few different MAC G5 towers.  I was having issues where some of the footage was showing up unexplainable dark when opening the quicktime on different machines.  After troubleshooting for days, we found the problem to be that different versions of the OS and different versions of Quicktime actually have varying gamma pedestals.  Once we found the machines that kept the color true to how the image was intended, we stayed with that combination of machines.”