editing Adding camera movement in Post. Are there any issues?

PositiveFuture

PositiveFuture

When I get my 5D or 7D I was thinking of taking a lot of tripod shots but adding subtle camera movement in post, slow zooms, fake-pans and the like, so it didn't look too boring. Sure I will move the camera when I shoot but as a relative newb I want to learn the camera slowly.

A Few Questions

Are there any issues with this?
Is it done a lot?
Can audiences generally notice?
Are there problems with grain/gain/pixels when you do this a lot?
 
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Spielberg loved camera shakes and handheld feel so much he invented a device to add it back in manually for his film "Monster House" he produced.

I don't know of any other times this has been done...
 
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PositiveFuture said:
subtle camera movement in post, slow zooms, fake-pans and the like, so it didn't look too boring.
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Very common to find this in documentaries. Ken Burns uses it to great effect, but even the crap/rehash docs on the History Channel at 3am have their fair share of it.

Very useful if you need to use a lot of still photos, or document images.

I can't think of anything right off that's used it for actual narratives. Not sayin' there isn't, though.

Try it & post a video of it. :)
 
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I've done this a bit. It's nice because you'll get very smooth pans and zooms.

Two things to consider:

Make sure you leave enough room if you are going to do a pan. By that I mean, frame it with a bunch of extra space to the sides so you don't accidentally end up with some black space.

The other thing is that you'll need your footage to be as high quality as possible. Because when you zoom in (either to get your pan, or if you are just zooming), there will my a slight loss of quality. If your footage is good, it shouldn't look pixelated or anything, but it's not going to be quite as sharp as the original shot.

Give it a try and let us know how it turns out!
 
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Pan and zooms of live footage seems strange, there is something about parllax that you just pick up on when its NOT there..

Iv just learned a cool technique for great camera shake in post and after effects.

Go film some shaky footage, anything, keep some object in the frame but let the camera move naturally... you might do this for a moving around circle etc..

When you have that nice shaky footage use AE motion tracking to track the motion in the frame, then you apply that motion to the footage from the tripod. crazy simple, but works brilliantly.
 
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I've done this a few times, but so little, it's not noticable if you don't look for it.

I've only done it when I neded to frame out something, and then make sure another movement was frame right.

It looks nowhere as good as a real pan or tilt, and should be avided in narritive on purpose.
 
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Yeah, I wouldn't really do it intentionally. Like CDCosta, I've done it, but only because I had continuity issues that needed to be cropped out of the beginning of the shot. There was also once, when a fairly long shot just looked boring, so I did a very, VERY slow zoom in post. In that shot, you'd be hard-pressed to know that it was done in post, but the changes I made were very subtle. And, again, I didn't originally plan it that way.

Anyway, my issue with it is that you're doing something that the human eye wouldn't do, in real life. Meaning -- if you tilt or pan, that matches the way a human head would swivel on it's neck. If you do a fake pan or tilt, in post, it's not going to look natural because nothing is actually panning or tilting. You're general audience won't know why it looks unnatural, in fact they probably wouldn't even be able to mention that something was weird, if asked about it. But somewhere, in the back of their mind, something is telling them that this shot looks weird, and it will pull them out of the narrative.

Zooming in post won't look significantly different than zooming in-camera, assuming you have a high-resolution camera, and aren't zooming too far. However, for the exact same reasons listed above, I'd toss out the idea of zooming at all (as a general rule). The human eye doesn't zoom. Tracking more naturally matches what we're used to seeing. Of course, every rule has it's exceptions -- there could be a million reasons why you WANT to use zoom in a shot, but if you watch what Hollywood's doing, tracking and/or steadicam is what most directors use to keep a shot moving.
 
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I've done some digital zooming, panning, and cropping, and in my opinion if you go conservative and do it right you will like your product a lot more. If you are worried about your novice then steer away from flashy shots and focus on doing bread and butter shots really well. Figure out every shot perfectly, make it beautiful, and no one will care if it's tripod mounted.

Think of it this way, would you rather be credited for the stylish hand held shots in Bourne Identity, or for the perfect photography in No Country for Old Men?
 
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Thanks a lot everyone for some in depth replies. I've been very busy recently so haven't had a chance to respond. You've all given me a basic overview of the issues involved and I'll mull over all your posts.

I'll type more another day...
 
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M1chae1 said:
As long as it's artfully done, and doesn't resemble 'pan & scan'--a technology used by the television studios to work widescreen picture information into 4:3.
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hahahaha...:lol:...I was going to say the exact same thing. When you watched any video (you know, VHS back in the day) before widescreen TVs came out and they didn't have the option of widescreen on the menu for the movie, then you have seen this. It use to be debated in the past on the effect of 4:3 ratio on video tape from the widescreen format because in a sense, they are changing (and adding) the editing from the original film. Hence, you are not watching the film in how it was intended to be seen. In which then it can change how the story was told and etc, etc, etc.

Ahhhh.....the good old days.
 
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