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Planet Earth II: Official Extended Trailer – BBC Earth


10 years ago Planet Earth changed our view of the world. Now we take you closer than ever before. This is life in all its wonder. This is Planet Earth II.

A decade ago, the landmark television series Planet Earth redefined natural history filmmaking, giving us the ultimate portrait of life on Earth. Planet Earth II, narrated by Sir David Attenborough, will reveal our planet from a completely new perspective, using significant advances in both filming technology and our understanding of the natural world.

And if you are not excited enough already it features an original score by legendary composer Hans Zimmer.

Coming soon!

News, Updates & Videos

Slow Life

Slow Life from Daniel Stoupin on Vimeo.

“Slow” marine animals show their secret life under high magnification. Corals and sponges build coral reefs and play crucial roles in the biosphere, yet we know almost nothing about their daily lives. These animals are actually very mobile creatures, however their motion is only detectable at different time scales compared to ours and requires time lapses to be seen.

Make sure you watch it on a large screen! You won’t be able to appreciate this clip or see individual cells moving in a sponge on a smartphone. This clip is displayed in Full HD, yet the source footage (or the whole clip), is available in UltraHD 4k resolution for media productions.

Visit my website to see more work: microworldsphotography.com
Learn more about what you see in this video: notes-from-dreamworlds.blogspot.com.au/2014/03/slow-life.html

The answer to a common question: yes, colors are “real” and not exaggerated by digital enhancement. I have only applied basic white balance correction. When photographers use white light on corals, they simply miss the vast majority of colors. Read more about fluorescence and why these corals are natural: notes-from-dreamworlds.blogspot.com.au/2013/06/fluorescent-colors-of-reef-coral.html

The duration of sequences varied from 20 minutes to 6+ hours.

=== Technical details ===

To make this little clip I took 150000 shots. Why so many? Because macro photography involves shallow depth of field. To extend it, I used focus stacking. Each frame of the video is actually a stack that consists of 3-12 shots where in-focus areas are merged. Just the intro and last scene are regular real-time footage. One frame required about 10 minutes of processing time (raw conversion + stacking). Unfortunately, the success rate was very low due to copious technical challenges and I spent almost 9 long months just to learn how to make these kinds of videos and understand how to work with these delicate creatures.

I am glad that I abandoned the idea of making this clip in 3D (with two cameras) – very few people have 3D screens and it doubles processing time.

Gear:
– Cameras: Canon 7D (died at the beginning of the project as I had overused it in my research), Canon 5d Mkiii (90% of footage is done with it)
– Lenses: Canon MP-E 65 mm lens, and a custom photomacrography rig (custom lenses are better for this type of task)
– Lights: adjustable custom-spectrum lamps (3 different models) – they were needed to recreate natural underwater illumination.
– several motorized stages, including StackShot for focus stacking. StackShot, is sadly not 100% reliable at all and kept destroying my footage.
– multiple computers to process thousands of 22+ Mpx raw images and perform focus stacking (an old laptop died on that mission after 3 weeks of continuous processing).

Edited in Sony Vegas, Adobe Photoshop CS6, Zerene Stacker, and Helicon Focus.
Music: Atmostra III by Cedric Baravaglio, Jonathan Ochmann and Zdravko Djordjevic.

=== Sharing/Use ===

Inquiries/licensing/press: find my contact details here: microworldsphotography.com/About

Please do not share this clip to promote or endorse marine aquarium industry. I simply want people to admire life, but not to be told to buy stuff, especially poses captive animals
More about using my videos:
microworldsphotography.com/Image-Use/Video-Use-and-Licensing

(consideration to buy a print from my website or to use the tip jar below the video is always welcome, but this option is better: secure.marineconservation.org.au/donate.php?campid=701900000006kqX)

News, Updates & Videos

10328×7760 – A 10K Timelapse Demo

10328×7760 – A 10K Timelapse Demo from SCIENTIFANTASTIC on Vimeo.

“10328×7760 – A 10K Timelapse Demo” is a video I put together showcasing the extreme resolution of the PhaseOne IQ180 camera of which it was shot. This footage comes from some shots I did while shooting 4K and 8K timelapses in Rio De Janeiro for a major electronics manufacturer. Each shot is comprised of hundreds individual still images, each weighing in at a whopping 80 megapixels. Each individual raw frame measures 10328×7760 pixels.

Each shot was very minimally processed and included curves, input sharpening, saturation adjustments. The h264 compression really kills alot of the fine detail. No noise reduction was done on any of the shots. I tried to keep the shots as close to raw as possible so you may see some dust spots, noise, and manual exposure changes I made while shooting. For a final video edit these adjustments would be smoothed out and fixed. Normally I run shots where I manually change exposure during the shot through LRTimelapse, but unfortunately the program can’t seem to handle such huge raw files. I also had to loop some shots in order to have enough runtime to do some zooms, so you may see a jump in the footage here and there.

Each shot sequence starts off with the full resolution footage scaled down to fit within a 1920×1080 resolution (14% scale). The next shot in each shot sequence is the full resolution shot scaled to 50%, so basically zooming in quite a bit. From there we go into the full resolution shot scaled to 100%, which is an extreme zoom/crop. As you can see, the quality and detail holds up extremely well, it’s pretty amazing.

I wanted to show a couple things with this demo video. First, the extreme resolution of this camera (and medium format in general). Second, the amazing amount of flexibility this resolution allows for in post production. You can literally get about 8-10 solid 1920×1080 shots out of a single shot. You can also get about 5-6 solid 4K shots out of a single shot.

If you enjoyed this demo videos please feel free to pass it around and share it. If you enjoy my work, or want to see some of my other work (including the full Rio video) you find me on all the social media outlets below.

BEST VIEWED FULLSCREEN IN FULL HD

Music: Licensed from themusicbed.com
Artist: Tony Anderson
Song: Hold On
tonyandersonmusic.com/

All footage is Copyright Joe Capra – Scientifantastic 2015, and may not be used without permission.

Special thanks to my local Rio producer/assistant/badass Jose Olimpio ( joseolimpio.com )

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