NEVER GIVE UP: A CANON 5DMKII/7D Documentary

Never Give Up: The Making of Never Let Go from Justin Montgomery on Vimeo.


This documentary takes you behind the scenes of a Full Sail University Final Project in the Film Bachelor's Program. The class had many challenges in organizing this project and succeeded despite them, always as a team.



Documentary Production-to-Post
We shot with a Canon 5D MK II / Canon 7D / Nikon D90 [Time-lapse] using the following lenses: Canon L 24-70 f/2.8, Nikon 24-85 f/2.8-4, Tokina 10-17 f/3.5-4.5, Nikkor AI-s primes > 24 f/2.8, 35 f/2.0, 50 f/1.4, 85 f/1.8, 105 f/2.8. Sound was recorded to a Tascam DR-100, using a generously donated Sennheiser ME 66. A Line Out was sent to camera (7D) using a dampening cable. In hindsight I would have synced audio from the master recordings or fed signal to the 5D instead. The dialogue mix came out fine but the AGC is audible with good monitors, so lesson learned.

Workflow

I had a simpler workflow but a few clips became corrupted (though eventually salvaged), so my first export to Pro Res became my master file for color correction and subsequently the only file I took through the post pipeline. This was my first major edit in Premiere Pro CS5 and a test as to whether or not FCP was worth the transcoding. I chose Premiere, or rather, Premiere chose this project due to drive space constraints, tight deadlines and ease of use (regarding a rough assemble, as per my original intent, then transfer the rough to finish in FCP, though that logic grew fuzzy to point of removal.) 

Editing in Premiere Pro was a joy, even without the perks of the CUDA GPU processing, RAID or a quad-core system to ease caching and conforming (which Premiere does a lot of, a hidden expense, but considerably less space than transcoding). In total, the conform applied to clips for playback in the Mercury Engine was a 10:1 = 250GB cached to 26GB. Not the most accurate account, since that includes cache files from another project, but you get the idea.

Cut using Premiere Pro CS5 > Output Pro Res 422 (HQ) > Ingest to FCP > Cut master clip into subclips > sent to Color > color corrected > sent back to FCP with Color renders > Export Pro Res 422 (HQ) > Adobe Media Encoder CS5 > VImeo

Music -Used not for profit- Labradford "Twenty" from Fixed::Content
Credits
Directed/ Edited/ Cinematography/ CC
Justin Montgomery
Stills Photography/ B-cam Interview Op/ Inspiration
Daniela Bauer


Head here Production Stills.