I'm looking to buy a nice Cinema lens for a Canon DSLR.
I've been eyeing the Samyang/ Rokinon 24mm f/1.4 lenses, but I had some questions:
1) Are these the best lenses in their field, or are there others?
2) Is there a substantial difference for film between the regular and the T1.5 Cine lenses?
3) Is the cheapest option to buy the
Sony A Mount version from BHPhoto and separately buy a Canon adapter?
Thanks for any help!
1) They're probably the best cost for performance.
2) Same exact glass, only the bodies on the Cine lenses are built for video (declicked aperture and built in lens gears).
3) Go to ebay, look up the seller "bestpriceoptics". They are cheaper than anyone I've seen, and they don't charge tax or shipping.
Looks great man!
Do you mind me asking how much time, effort, and budget goes into the green screen stuff strictly for those in-car driving shots?
I'm about to direct a short that takes place inside a parked car in three different locations, and location scouting is driving me insane. Since the car would be parked, I assume it'd be easy to edit in the (window) footage... but I don't want to assume anything.
Thoughts/opinions?
This whole project was a minimal budget, crew worked for free for two days, stuff like that. Everything should be pretty high effort...do a pass, show someone, see what they say, do it again, keep refining. Once you have a good green screen key set up, it's quick for the rest. It's just getting that first one right. Making sure outside is blurring the correct amount for the lens you shot on. A good way to check for that is to drive to where you're going to green screen them into, and get a still photo (or video) of the shot with them parked. Look at how the background falls out of focus, look how the surroundings reflects on the car. Things like that. The details matter.
Green screen is by far the way to go. Shoot outside so that you are getting the real sunlight in the car and not faking it somewhere. If the car is supposed to be driving, you should drive around in the areas that it's supposed to take place and shoot as steady of video as you can. Every angle that you'll be showing. And don't forget to shoot out the windshield (pointed up at least 45 degrees) so you can put the reflections of the trees/buildings/whatever on the winshield (in SCREEN mode so that you only get clarity in the blacks).
One thing we learned is that if it's daytime, try and expose the green screen high. Since naturally it would blow out if you actually shot it live, it's okay if it blows out a bit. That VFX before and after wasn't with final color, the final looks more like this:
See the before (it's still RAW here), it's a very light green.
Since the car is naturally darker than outside, it looks natural for outside to blow out a bit.
If it's nighttime, I see a lot of people try and expose it nice and bright and this causes complications with the key. You want to have it roughly match the exposure of what you'll put outside. So still get a nice, evenly lit green/blue, but keep it dark enough so that you can see it (and pull the key), but that if there's any clipping, it won't look like this bright edge on the talent.
