Beauty In Nature By Andre Meyer

Watch this: Andre Meyer’s Beauty In Nature, shot on a Canon 5D III with custom RAW output, showcases the beautiful fauna and flora of SA.

Local videographer Andre Meyer‘s Beauty In Nature is an amazing short film showcasing Southern Africa’s massive diversity in natural fauna and flora, as well as the technical ability of the Canon 5D Mark III.

The beautiful film features a series of animal video portraits, shot with a Canon 5D Mark III using custom Magic Lantern* firmware for RAW video output.

Here’s Andre’s full description:

“After five trips to the game reserve, some test footage and a 10 day holiday in Mossel Bay we ended up with 1 terabyte of raw stock footage. I’ve now edited this down to 3 minutes.

Everything was graded with the new Resolve 10. Finally the pink fringing problem is completely gone with Resolve 10! Another great new feature is a special RAW sharpening tool designed for RAW footage that really improves the quality.

After filming and grading 1 terabyte of footage with zero drop frames or any problems whatsoever I am starting to trust Magic Lantern RAW firmware more and more. I am still running an old build of 27 July. It can only get better from here on!

Once you get to know the workflow, working with RAW footage is a breeze. I think of RAW as Proress 444 with a conversion step in between.

I used the 3x crop mode on a lot of these shots. I discovered that the crop mode has the same effect as the 2x extender in that it magnifies the image, so any imperfections of the lens get more noticeable, although this is hardly noticeable as you will see from the footage. Turning my 200mm 2.8 into a 600mm 2.8 with a click of a button was really great. All the wildlife shots were filmed from a car with a big pillow rested on the window.
Workflow: Import into Davinci Resolve and export proxies. Edit sequence in FCP. Import xml into Davinci. Automatically relink to original RAW files. Grade and export beautiful proress 4444 sequence.

The part I loved most about Resolve’s workflow is that you can apply the BMD Film color space and gamma to all the clips which turns them into super flat gradable footage. An excellent starting point.

For archive of the footage I decided to render all clips in Resolve to Proress 4444 with the BMD super flat color space applied to it and the white balance and exposure set as desired. I did a few tests and applied the exact same grade from a RAW clip on the same Proress 4444 clip and even at 400% there is no difference at all. The only difference between RAW and Proress 4444 is that you can change the white balance and recover exposure, so do this before you export to Proress 4444. By archiving Proress and not RAW you save 60% on storage. Proress HQ is just not good enough as you can see the difference so be sure to use Proress 4444.”

Equipment