fireworks sequence from July 4, 2008

Good:
-shot is wide enough that almost no cropping occurs on the top or sides
-i set the camera to b.press mode, which crushes the shadows down to black to avoid excessive shadow noise. it worked quite well, and i only had to tweak the levels slightly (input black -> 7) to get the purely black sky shown here.

Bad:
-i thought i shot this at 60p. might have switched to 24p on the fly to get better exposure.
-i know i'm losing subtle details in the fireworks as they fade, but that's the compromise. the aperture is already wide open, so that only way to increase the exposure is to resort to gain, which will produce a much noisier image. also, if i somehow managed to increase exposure without increasing noise, my brights would get brighter and the image is already clipping to white at the core of each particle. there's still decent color and still a decent trail effect, so i'm cautiously optimistic about the results.
-HD video is still video, warts and all. when it overexposes, it looks very digital/awful. i want my matte paintings to always have a filmic look in terms of response to light, overexposure, grain, etc., not a digital one. i have a couple ideas for how to address this particular situation by track matting the footage with itself and eroding the matte to introduce an artificial, softer falloff for the highlights.

Notes:
-i shot this as a possible sky addition for one of my matte paintings. i think many people who have lived in the midwest have had the experience of driving on an open road and seeing a fireworks show on the horizon. associated feelings of nostalgia, distance, isolation, etc. are all relevant.

Nikon D2X, 15mm, 3.0 sec @ f/16, 4 sec interval

Good:
-lighting + rainbow = wha?
-8 seconds worth of footage is a pretty good run.

Bad:
-only 8 seconds worth! this was an incredible storm. i think i'd still complain if i had gotten 5 minutes worth...
-needs some dust busting and wire removal. i've heard this is tricky with something as smooth as rolling clouds since disturbances in the patterns are noticeable.
-again, not as wide a shot as i'd like. but hey, not bad for hanging a tripod out my bathroom window...

test render using frame blending (high quality / optical flow) and 1000% time stretch in after effects cs3.

Good:
-cloud motion interpolates well. this technique looks promising for images without any sudden changes.

Bad:
-obvious issues with the lightning. i was curious to see what after effects would do with those frames. i imagined the lightning slowing appearing out of the clouds over the course of a second or so. i didn't really imagine (or want) what it actually did.
-1.5 hour render time.

Notes:
-i could try running this through twixtor, a 3rd party plugin for after effects that has more controls for time stretching.

Good:
-excellent cloud dynamics
-lightning
-exposure is good for clouds and lightning

Bad:
-lots of noise and horizontal banding. might be fixed using add/remove grain in after effects, but that might soften a lot of the detail. i'll consider batching the individual images through noise ninja in photoshop before committing them to a quicktime.
-relatively narrow field of view. i'd like to see a much wider view of this.

Notes:
-fairly smooth motion. exposure time (2 sec) is almost half of the interval (3.5 sec), which mimics movie film cameras
-had difficulty compressing this to H.264. frames appeared to be dropped in the encode, playback was poor, and the subtle details in the clouds were getting pummeled by the compressor. i had to export as best quality (turning off restrictions on data rate), then set key frames to every 6 frames and turn off frame reordering.
-when i imported the images into after effects, the app read the .xmp sidecar files that lightroom created. these files contain info about all (well, *most*) of the non-destructive tweaks (exposure, white balance, saturation, etc.) i made to the raw images in lightroom. this means i do not have to batch export from lightroom before dumping the image sequences into after effects (a Good Thing). however, i did have to tell lightroom to write out the .xmp files to the same folder as my raw images since it normally wants to hide those.