Hi All,

We’re launching two new/relaunched sites next year:

Silksoles.com Gorgeous girls getting naked and barefoot. Sexy stripteases and playful fun feeling, with a focus on the soles of the feet because that’s what I like 🙂

NudeInMetal.com Girls doing day-to-day tasks nude in metal bondage. In the world of the website, being a Nude-In-Metal girl is a lifestyle choice, something a lot of pretty girls decide to do. Some love it so much they do it 24/7, others enjoy it for sexy occasions. It’s a development of the “Restrained Elegance Days” video series from RE.

We’ve been shooting updates for them since the summer and we’ve had GREAT fun doing it. It’s very sexy and we find it very energising, it has already generated loads of new ideas for RE as we’ve done them. I’ll be publishing lots of teaser sets, videos and examples as soon as I have hosting for the sites and asking you all for input.

I have one big question already which I’d like all you folk out there to help me with:
Would you prefer to see stills and videos of everything? Or should we concentrate on ultimate quality even if that means sometimes doing one or the other?

Thus far, we’ve shot stills and video for each storyline/update for the new sites. For stuff shot in summer daylight, this was fine. But as winter draws in doing it in the studio is more of a challenge than I was expecting.

We can’t use stills lights for video. I like working with studio flash, and you can’t do that at 25 frames per second for video.

We can use video lights for stills but with our current equipment I’m not happy with the quality and consistency of the full-sized stills. Video is shot at 1/50th of a second, on a tripod, and motion blur of the subject is a natural part of that. To get sharp stills we need to be at 1/250th of a second, which means five times as much light as we need for video! That’s a Hollywood lighting truck plus generator truck to get that much continuous light on set. There’s just not the studio room, the electric power or the budget to do it.

It isn’t that the photos suck under video lights. They’re atmospheric and detailed at normal web/full HD size and at least as good as most websites produce.

But I see them at 100% zoom in at 17 or 31 megapixels. If we do full-sized JPEG versions for the new sites, you’ll be able to see them that way too. This is where the lack of critical sharpness caused by camera shake, subject movement, sensor noise, shallow depth of field and lens limitations shows up. It troubles me.

To deliver a stills set 31-megapixel maximum RE quality we have to relight the set with studio flash half way through everything we shoot for the new sites. We run into problems of physical space in the locations (although at least we don’t need a generator truck). It’s slow and the context switching is a downer on shoot days.

What is the “value proposition” for you as enthusiasts and future members?

For RE, we made the policy decision years ago that we’d shoot EITHER stills or video for a given idea, not both, because we were aiming for quality, quality, quality. We can go this route for the new sites too. You’d get either stills of a set, or video-plus-framegrab, but not both.

Or we can shoot stills and video for every update, but accept that the quality of the full-sized still images may not always be up to RE standards. Does that matter to you? Do we even need the full-sized images or are full-HD JPEGs enough? Most sites best resolution is only the same as our “web sized” ones anyway!

Actually even our video framegrabs are better than most website’s stills. Good enough for the cover of Vogue, literally. They’re captured from a RED digital cine camera in RAW with a higher resolution sensor than a lot of stills cameras. Even if we don’t have the dedicated stills, we’ll get great frame grabs from each video, but it is more limited than shooting dedicated stills (e.g. they’ll mostly be in landscape format).

If we shoot stills with full-size RE quality stills, we might not have time to get a video of it as well. Or if we do, we’ll end up shooting half as many updates so you’d probably get a stills set OR a video each week, rather than one of each as we are currently planning.

Which would you prefer?

1) Dedicated stills and video of every update (no full sized JPEGs)
2) Dedicated stills and video of every update (with full sized JPEGs but accepting they’ll be lower quality)
3) It is fine to shoot either stills or video, not both, for ultimate quality
4) Dedicated stills and video of ultimate quality for every update, but half as many updates

Cheers, Hywel.

Here’s a few images to illustrate the quality differences.

This is a still shot under video lights, at normal web size. It is possibly a tiny bit soft, but overall I think it looks pretty good

This is the same shot at 100%. Now you can see the limitations of the noise from shooting under video lights, and the limitations of the lens wide open. I don’t think this holds up to an RE still captured with studio flash.

A framegrab from the video, shot on the RED. (I didn’t have an exactly comparable frame). You can see there’s some blur from Kate’s movement, and the grade is different, but overall I think the level of detail and sharpness is acceptable. I’m not sure the stills add all that much to the set overall.

A full sized shot of Kate in the same studio, but using studio flash and the full “RE quality procedure”. This is from an RE stills set, we didn’t shoot a video of it as well.

Please let us know what you’d like the best:

[cardoza_wp_poll id=1]