I filmed a short at f0.95. Here's what I learned.

so last month I shared with you guys a little short I did out in the desert with some dancer friends of mine and this amazing lens with a Blackmagic pocket Cinema Camera 4k using only the power of the moonlight so much of what I loved about this video is the aesthetic the characteristics of shooting wide open M 0.95 you have a much softer image it's dreamy there's all these characteristics that you don't normally get when you shoot it like f 5.6 F 0.95 is a really tricky aperture to film anything in if I were to film you right now straight on your eyes would be in focus but nothing else so how do you nail focus with such thin margin for error on this blazing-fast super expensive lens or even on this kind of affordable blazing-fast lens the answers autofocus just autofocus no [Music] first of all I do not own this lens I rented this lens this lens is like eleven thousand dollars on its own and then it had a five thousand dollar rehousing job where they put all these fancy gears they measured all the distances and they changed everything over to t stops ended up renting it for two hundred ninety five bucks from Share grid which is like peer-to-peer rental stuff share grid is a great way for you guys to earn a little extra income renting out your gear that's just sitting on the shelf if you have no idea what I'm talking about I left links down below share great you better pay me some money for saying that so how do we nail razor thin focus on these lenses alright there's two ways to do this there's the professional way with a focus puller first AC and marks for talent that's the Hollywood gold standard or there's my way $169 DJI Ronin s follow focus this is so easy to set up [Music] [Applause] now it's dope about these lenses is there already housed with gears and they match perfectly with the follow focus so you're good to go but if you're using a lens that doesn't have this DJI includes these bands pop right on the reason why I like the DJI Ronin s and the follow focus is because to program the end points and out points takes like 10 seconds you have this thing mounted all you have to do is plug it into the 12 volt down here and then hit this button twice oh my god to be honest with you I shot one night with the Jenn Crane too and the follow focus and one night with the Ronin s follow focus where as I like how the Jin Crane handles the heavier weight of the camera this follow focus how fast that is wracking focus lightning quick not that you need it that fast because it's more like it's like that still pretty awesome okay so out of all the monitors that I have the one that I'm gonna use for this build is a small HD focus mostly because it has a incredible zoom I mean I don't want to rely on focus peaking it's gonna be too dark there's not a lot of contrast oh you want a two hundred and eighty times zoom no problem at that point all you can see is grain but you'll know if it's in focus okay so this may be obvious but I staged a lot of the shots with talent to run parallel so talent is walking camera is walking with them I keep the distance the exact same that way I only have to set focus once and then I kind of gauged the distance as we come along made my job easier to pay attention to the performance rather than worry about it they were in focus or not for close-ups where the shallow depth of field is unforgiving it's definitely harder at this point I just kind of prioritize what I want in focus most of the time with performances it's gonna be the eyes they're the window to the performance you get a lot of the information from the scene from their reaction shots what they're thinking about all the stuff that's going on behind the eyes that's the important thing now with close-up shots I'm instructing the talent to give smaller movements and then I'm blocking focus on them and I'm just leaning left and leaning right just little tiny movements and that is just enough well here we have talent he's being very cooperative today is his eyes are in focus everything else is out of focus including the tip of his nose if I scoot back about five feet now the tip of his nose is in focus and his eyes are in focus now in this example we're actually talking about hyper focal distance and picking imaginary spot between the eyes and the nose and splitting the focus between the two now this is a basic observation many you guys already know this as the subject moves further and further away from the camera closer to infinity the plane of focus what our eyes perceive as in focus gets bigger and more forgiving regardless of the aperture what's actually happening is our eyes are unable to perceive what is in focus or not as the subject gets smaller and smaller away so this is a really good tactic to keep in mind the next time you're composing these low-light shots put that subject way out there see if you can tell the story further away while these shots are incredible if you're watching on a small screen chances are you can't tell if it's in focus or out of focus if I were to take this same exact short and blow it up on a movie theater screen there would be glaring moments not hitting focus at all and that's because what we perceive as in focus is subjective to the final output and the final viewing of the project what is the final viewing of your project gonna be if it's gonna be on the phone then you could probably do more creative risky things and get away with it but if it's gonna be for television or film then you might not want to shoot lower than F 2.8 most TV and film is shot from F 2.8 to 5.6 for a reason now a lot of you guys asked why I didn't just shoot on a speed booster and to be honest with you I didn't do the math I didn't think it was gonna be nearly as bright as a F 0.95 but the truth is I was wrong a speed booster XL 0.64 matched with a 1.4 cannon not even the fastest cannon class there is one point four is gonna give you a brighter exposure than f zero point nine five I think it comes in at like F zero point nine I'm game the reason why I rented this lens is because legendary I never shot on it I wanted see what it is all about but I got a video around the corner that has some very interesting affordable lenses that in terms of t-stops the amount of light that they let in I think you'd be very very surprised at how they compete with this bad boy right here I know more empty promises it's around the corner this is Josh o saying thank you very much take rift to make smart [Applause] holy

Channel: MAKE. ART. NOW.

Views: 278,401

Rating: 4.9347196 out of 5

Keywords: noctilux 0.95, how to nail focus, how to focus better, how to film fast aperture, how to film wide open, how to focus on a gimbal, bmpcc4k insane lowlight, leica noctilux 50mm, noctilux 50mm f0.95, slr magic 50mm, setup ronin-s follow focus, BMPCC4K NIGHT FOOTAGE, MAKE ART NOW, JOSH YEO, HOW TO FILM BETTER AT NIGHT, how to film cinematic shots, how to film unbelievable low light with bmpcc4k, bmpcc 4k footage

Id: ab8BlBSVio4

Length: 7min 0sec (420 seconds)

Published: Wed May 22 2019