Photo Phun 2022

Let’s polish off the year with another post of stills from my photography hobby. These stills were taken during this fall and Christmas season, plus a few oldies from other posts about Firstlight and Optics. As before, all of these images were captured with my iPhone SE using Firstlight, FiLMiC’s still photo companion to their FiLMiC Pro video capture app. Aside from the extra features, Firstlight enhances the phone with camera raw recording. This isn’t otherwise possible on the SE using the native camera application.

The workflow to “develop” these images started in Adobe Bridge, where it was easy to make the basic raw adjustments using the camera raw module. Bridge offers Lightroom-style control and quick processing for a folder of images. These images then went to Photoshop for cropping and resizing.

Boris FX Optics functions as both a Photoshop plug-in and a standalone application. It’s one of my favorite tools for creating looks with still photos. It goes far beyond the filters, adjustments, and effects included in applications like Photoshop alone. Nearly all image manipulation was done by roundtripping each file from Photoshop to Optics (via the plug-in) and then back. The last step in the workflow was to use the TinyJPG website to optimize the file sizes of these JPEG images. Click any image below to peruse a gallery of these stills.

Enjoy the images and the rest of the holiday season. I’ll be back after we flip the page to a new year. Look for a 4-part interview in January with legendary film editor, Walter Murch.

©2022 Oliver Peters

Frame.io Brings FiLMiC Pro to the Cloud

It’s not news that Frame.io has been pioneering camera-to-cloud (C2C) workflows. However, one of the newsworthy integrations announced last week was the addition C2C capabilities for iPhone and Android users with the Filmic Pro camera application. The update already popped up in your Filmic Pro settings if you’ve kept the app current. Frame’s C2C feature requires Filmic’s Cinematographer Kit (an in-app purchase), and a Frame.io Pro or Adobe Creative Cloud account.

Professional filming with iPhones has become common in many market sectors for both primary and secondary videography. The Filmic Pro/C2C workflow can prove worthwhile when fast turnaround and remote access become factors in your production.

Understanding the Filmic Pro C2C integration

Filmic Pro’s C2C integration is a little different than Frame’s other camera-to-cloud workflows, which are tied to Teradek devices. In those situations, the live video stream from the camera is simultaneously encoded into a low-res proxy file by the Teradek device. High-res OCF (original camera files) media is stored on the camera card and the proxies on the Teradek. The proxies are uploaded to Frame. There is some latency in triggering the proxy generation, so start and end times do not match perfectly between the OCF media and the proxies. Accurate relinks between file versions are made possible by common timecode.

An Android phone or iPhone does not require any extra hardware to handle the proxy creation or uploading. Filmic Pro encodes the proxy file after the recording is stopped, not simultaneously. Both high and low-res files are stored on the phone within Filmic’s clip library and have identical lengths and start/stop times. Filmic Pro won’t add a timecode track in this mode, so all files start from zero, albeit with unique file names. If you are shooting with multiple iPhones or double-system sound, then be sure to slate the clips so the editor can sync the files.

Testing the workflow

I have an iPhone SE and the software, so it was time to run some workflow tests in a hypothetical scenario. Here’s the premise – three members of the production team (in reality, me, of course), all located in different cities. The videographer is on site. The producer is in another city and he’s going to turn around a quick cut for story content. The editor is in yet a third location and he’ll conform the high-res camera files, add effects, graphics, color correction, and finish the mix to deliver the final product.

Click here to read the rest of the article at Pro Video Coalition

Click here for a more in-depth article about mobile filmmaking with FiLMiC Pro

©2022 Oliver Peters