Lighting the 'Cats

 Kentucky sophomore Terrence Jones/Derek Poore

During the past few months I've had the pleasure of producing visual content for Yahoo! Sports' Rivals.com website - Cats Illustrated. It's tough to covering the University of Kentucky football and basketball team in an oversaturated media market and maintain any creative edge. Sportswriter Michael Smith once called UK sports the small-market version of the Boston Red Sox. The website is one of only three Rivals.com websites that has more than 50,000 registered members.

Sophomore guard Stacey Poole/Derek Poore

For the site's men's basketball preview content, I wanted to present the players in a documentary-style setting, with a gritty and consistent feel. Lots of hard light on the edges and soft up front. I also wanted to maintain a consistency between the video content and still photography.

For the video interviews I used two Kino Flo four-bank lights in front of the subject on the left and right of the camera, a 5D Mark II, with a flozier to cover and soften the medium-sized light source. I used two ARRI hot lights -- around 150 and 300 watts -- with barn doors behind the player to the left and right pointed at the side of their head and shoulders to add rim and provide for some separation with the black background.

Kentucky sophomore transfer Ryan Harrow/Derek Poore

The photographs were a bit more involved. I ended up working with photographer Jonathan Palmer to build a light set up that mimicked the video interviews. The only difference would be a white background instead of black that was used for the interviews.

Starting with an Alien Bee AB800 up front in a softbox and two AB1600s on either side of the athlete in smallish strip banks. Aside from the strip banks there was no modifier between the light and the player. This created a hard light on the edges of the athlete that contrasted nicely with the soft fill up front. The Alien Bees performed horribly, by the way. Other Alien Bees in use at the photo shoot by other photographers wreaked havoc with the AB's internal slave. The next time I'll opt for Einsteins or White Lightnings. To light the white seamless background we used two Nikon SB-26 Speedlites aimed at the background to blow out the highlights so the it was solid white.

 Kentucky senior Darius Miller and sophomore Terrance Jones/Derek Poore

Kentucky freshmen Kyle Wiltjer, Anthony Davis, Marquis Teague and Michael Kidd-Gilchrist/Photos by Derek Poore, Illustration by Jonathan Palmer

If you can't be somebody, be somebody else

I love when three months of production and editing come together. After shooting principle photography for "stalkTALK" in Louisville, Ky., in December, the team at Kertis Creative edited the nine-part web series and saw it launch in the spring of 2011. 

The show follows the life of Natalie Walsh, a therapist who counsels court-ordered celebrity stalkers. B-listers like Chuck Norris and David Hasselhoff are a little too admired by a disfunctional group of stalkers who only want to get noticed. 

Check out the show's website and YouTube channel.

The show was shot with a Canon 5D Mark II, using several lenses, including the Canon 24-105mm f/4 L and the Canon 200mm prime 2.8 L.

Andrea and Brett: eHarmony TV spoof

Engagement videos do not have to always be a serious, romantic montage of a content couple. Not that there's anything wrong with that. 

This is a parody of eHarmony’s TV commercials. They really did first meet on eHarmony. Sort of. Check the video for the full story. Jonathan Palmer and I made this for the upcoming wedding of Andrea Uhde and Brett Shepherd. Watch in HD.

Jason and Tara: Wedding Video Preview

I’m currently working on a wedding video for Jason Mudd and Tara Underwood. The couple married in July 2010 during an evening ceremony at Gingerwoods in Prospect, Ky. The reception was held on-site. Brad Luttrell shot stills.

Canon 5D Mark II video workflow and you

http://www.flickr.com/photos/nickwheeleroz/ / CC BY-NC-SA 2.0UPDATE: This post was updated in June 2010 to reflect trending codec use and Canon's firmware upgrade to the 5D Mark II DSLR.

The Canon 5D Mark II is a year old and many newspapers have adopted this DSLR as their video camera of choice.

The 1080p high definition video is stunning. Throw a fast lens on it, like a 50mm 1.4, and the short depth of field make you think you're shooting on an outrageously expensive film camera. All for US$2,799.

A lot of people have been asking me how it fits into our post-production workflow at The Courier-Journal in Louisville.

While serving on the faculty at the Mountain Workshops inOctober I solicited the help of video gurus Chad Stevens and Bob Sacha, who produce work for MediaStorm. I adopted MediaStorm's workflow at our shop and came up with our own streamlined process from captured 5D Mark II footage to Final Cut Pro export.

INGEST: First I dump all of the video files into one folder on a hard drive. 

UPDATE: With the new firmware updates during the spring of 2010, the 5D Mark II can now shoot 29.97 or 23.978 frames per second, negating the need to convert files to new framerates.

29.97: Since the Mark II shoots in 30 fps I convert the files to 29.97 fps. (Philip Bloom has said a future firmware upgrade might take care of this.) But for now I must convert because QuickTime interprets the files as 29.97 fps. To do this I use Final Cut's Cinema Tools and after a few clicks the files are converted: First, open the application and click Create New Database from the pop up. Cancel out the dialogue box that opens and go to File>Batch Conform. Next, I pick one video file from that last ingest. Select 29.97 from the drop down menu and Cinema Tools will conform every video file within that folder to the proper spec. It should only take a few seconds.

CONVERT: While newer MacBook Pro's have on-board h.264 decompression built into their video cards, Apple's big bad Mac Pro tower machines do not. At our newspaper we're working on those towers, so viewing the gorgeous 1080p h.264 files that the 5D Mark II captures is a struggle. I convert from 1080p to 720p h.264 and Final Cut Pro on those Mac Pro's seems to handle them OK. Another method is to convert to ProRes 422. (Vincent Laforet outlines how to do that with either MPEG StreamClip or Final Cut's Compressor here. Since ProRes codec decompresses the h.264 files, a lot more storage space is needed for those video files.)

UPDATE: ProRes 422 or ProRes 4444 is being widely used as a codec for 5D Mark II files being edited in Final Cut Pro. Rendering is realtime and ProRes Final Cut projects are ready to be exported back into h.264 for posting on the Web or exporting to other compressed formats or uncompressed formats for use on HD TVs.

When I use Compressor I have a custom conversion method setup to scale the files down to 720p and keep the 29.97 framerate. It works for us and our online video player created by the people at Brightcove.

Once the files are converted they can be dropped into Final Cut.

To check out MediaStorm's full workflow head over to their submissions page.