Mar 1

Mar 1 Denver Butterfly Pavilion

Took a trip to the Denver Butterfly Pavilion last weekend and thought I'd share some footage I shot. Enjoy and let me know what you think! I've been asked to share some details about my post workflow for this video. Even tiny videos have post workflows! I shot all the footage handheld on a Panasonic GH3 at 1080p60 for slow motion capability. All shots were on a Sigma 18-35mm f1.8 lens, with the Nikon to Micro 4/3 mount adapter, and most shots were at f1.8 for shallow depth of field. All post work was done in Premiere Pro CC (2015.2). I decided to use slow motion for the entire sequence because the movements of the butterflies was more interesting and easier to see when slowed down. If you're using 60fps footage in a 23.976 fps sequence like this, a 40% speed is the adjustment needed to slow down the footage to the point where no frames are dropped or duplicated. I decided I wanted to go even slower, and test out Premiere's new optical flow time remapping. I tried a few speeds and decided to stick with 25% speed (almost twice as slow as 60fps footage, so close to 120 fps). A few clips had some ugly artifacts caused by the optical flow so I had to cut them. You can still see some artifacts in the first shot of the video if you step through frame by frame. Overall I was very impressed with Premiere's optical flow, it took a lot less render time than expected and produced good results in general. Once I had the sequence at the speed I liked I started working on color. I shoot with contrast and saturation all the way down and sharpness half way reduced, so that I have more flexibility in post to change the color of the image. I white balanced each clip and brought up contrast and saturation, also changing exposure as I did. Once each clip was adjusted correctly I created an adjustment layer across the entire sequence and added a bit more contrast, as well as a very subtle split tone (blue in the shadows and yellow in highlights). Once I got the adjustment layer how I liked it I tweaked the grade on two or three of the clips to work better with the overall look. I also added sharpness to the whole sequence. All color work was done using Premiere's Lumetri color panels and the sequence was rendered using 32-bit linear color. I also wanted to test out Premiere's new H.265 feature. H.265, or High Efficiency Video Codec (HEVC) is the successor to MP4/AVC/H.264 and many say it is supposed to deliver the same visual quality as MP4 with half of the file size (bitrate). I always test my export settings before I decide to deliver using them, to make sure the most quality is retained. What I did here was to set the sequence to render at a number of different bitrates in HEVC and AVC to compare. I then imported the exports into the project and compared each to the original sequence. I put the export on a new track above the sequence and set its blend mode to Difference, then looked at which ones showed the least artifacts to determine which was losing the most and least detail. I found that HEVC at 5 Mbps actually retained more detail on all the clips in the sequence than AVC did at 15 Mbps! That's 1/3 the file size and still looking better, which is incredible. Also, I tested Cineform's lossless codec and HEVC at 10 Mbps retained more detail than Cineform at over 200 Mbps! Granted, Cineform is still 12-bit RGBA and HEVC is 8-bit, but it's still an impressive accomplishment for HEVC. If you actually made it all the way to the end of this description let me know what you think in the comments, and share this video with your friends if you like it! Feel free to take a look at my other videos as well.

Denver Butterfly Pavilion

Edited by: Chris Colton

coltonmediaproductions.com

Optical Flow

"All post work was done in Premiere Pro CC (2015.2). I decided to use slow motion for the entire sequence because the movements of the butterflies was more interesting and easier to see when slowed down. If you're using 60fps footage in a 23.976 fps sequence like this, a 40% speed is the adjustment needed to slow down the footage to the point where no frames are dropped or duplicated. I decided I wanted to go even slower, and test out Premiere's new optical flow time remapping. I tried a few speeds and decided to stick with 25% speed (almost twice as slow as 60fps footage, so close to 120 fps). A few clips had some ugly artifacts caused by the optical flow so I had to cut them. You can still see some artifacts in the first shot of the video if you step through frame by frame. Overall I was very impressed with Premiere's optical flow, it took a lot less render time than expected and produced good results in general."

To learn more about Optical Flow, read Optical Flow Time Remapping – Tips & Tricks for Best Results

Available now in CC 2015: http://adobe.ly/1Nhw9i7 Optical Flow analysis and pixel motion estimation are used to create brand new video frames that result in significantly smoother slow-motion, time-remapping, and frame-rate conversions with new GPU accelerated optical flow technology coming in the latest update to Adobe Premiere Pro CC.

HEVC (H.265)

"I also wanted to test out Premiere's new H.265 feature. H.265, or High Efficiency Video Codec (HEVC) is the successor to MP4/AVC/H.264 and many say it is supposed to deliver the same visual quality as MP4 with half of the file size (bitrate). I always test my export settings before I decide to deliver using them, to make sure the most quality is retained. What I did here was to set the sequence to render at a number of different bitrates in HEVC and AVC to compare. I then imported the exports into the project and compared each to the original sequence. I put the export on a new track above the sequence and set its blend mode to Difference, then looked at which ones showed the least artifacts to determine which was losing the most and least detail.
I found that HEVC at 5 Mbps actually retained more detail on all the clips in the sequence than AVC did at 15 Mbps! That's 1/3 the file size and still looking better, which is incredible. Also, I tested Cineform's lossless codec and HEVC at 10 Mbps retained more detail than Cineform at over 200 Mbps! Granted, Cineform is still 12-bit RGBA and HEVC is 8-bit, but it's still an impressive accomplishment for HEVC."

To learn more about HEVC (h.265), read 10 Things You Need to Know About HEVC (H.265).

Available now in CC 2015: http://adobe.ly/1Nhw9i7 Setting the standard for the best native file-format support in the industry, the latest update to Adobe Premiere Pro CC offers expanded support for Ultra HD & HDR formats to include DNxHR, HEVC (H.265), Dolby Vision, and OpenEXR.

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