MAKE SURE YOU WATCH TO THE VERY END PAST THE CREDITS! ?
4 inches of ice is a micro doc I shot to get used to the Canon 1DC. Until this point all I had done were a few test shots. I needed to actually shoot something properly.
This was shot whilst visiting that smashing fellow Eric Kessler in Indiana. It was cold. Way colder than England, but I knew I was heading to Miami for a workshop in a few days so it didn’t bother me! Eric asked if I wanted to go ice fishing. Naturally I said good god man no! BUT, I did quite fancy filming it for a bit. So we went out for an hour. Talked to a father and daughter who didn’t want to be interviewed but let us take some shots then we met the guys who feature here who were really excited to be in it.
4 inches of ice refers to the minimum amount of thickness of the ice that you can go ice fishing on. So wikipedia tells me!
Shooting was a breeze. It’s a DSLR, it may have been shot in 4k but it operates the same way! Miller DS20 tripod. Lenses were Canon 16-35. 24-105, 70-20 F4, 100mm Macro (used for the interview for some utterly bizarre reason!) Audio was a Rode NTG2 into a Roland R26 and B-roll audio was the Rode Video Mic Pro.
I had a lot of issues in post though. This was shot in 4K, downscaled in to full HD for editing (I do plan to remaster as a 4k version soon.) In the edit I noticed a lot of problems, banding, magenta tinges on parts of the frame. Basically we worked it out and it was down to a number of things. The compression of the 4K, combined with the Canon log mode shooting below the native ISO of 400 which is a bad combination.
Andy Shipsides of Abel Cine says this “you are moving the middle gray to a higher level, making the image appear darker but causing limit dynamic range in the highlights.. bad news.”
James and I found that the image only did this in 4k in log under ISO 400. Go higher (not too high) and it’s fine. Shoot normal picture profiles and again it’s fine. Shoot C-log in Super 35mm or full frame HD. No problems. It’s just that combination.
In post I added a lot of film grain to even out those areas. That is why this short piece took about 10 times longer to edit than normal. It’s all good experience and it simply means next time I will shoot bearing that in mind.
Other than that the image issues in post I loved the image and the stuff I have shot since does not have these problems. We are ALWAYS learning.
Can I make a 4K version online? It would be too big unfortunately, but I will be showing this and other stuff from the camera in 4K at the BVE show in London at the end of February for Canon.
You can see my review of the camera, the good and the bad on my blog post here: http://gopb.co/1dc
Audio recorded by Eric Kessler
Music again courtesy of The Music Bed. Full credits in the video. Gopb.co/musicbed
