NOTE: I've added 2 additional Eat 'n Park commercials at the end of this video...
Here's a high energy breakfast commercial that I photographed with my Canon 5D Mk3 DSLR.
I used a 70-200mm F2.8IS zoom for all of Sarah's photography. 70mm for the widest shots and about 135-150mm for her close-ups. As far as I'm concerned the 70-200 gives the ideal range of focal lengths for most on-camera "spokesmen" photography. I used an ISO of 320 and a f-stop of between 2.8 and 4. The depth of field was about 1" on the close-ups.
The camera was mounted on my old (now leaking) Ronford head, attached to a Fisher 10 crab dolly. If you look carefully, you'll see that we dollied left to right on the wider shots of Sarah and very slight dolly movements on the close-ups. I'm not a fan of static, locked off shots, especially in a high-energy commercial.
The lighting setup was pretty simple. We used 3, 1200 watt Arri HMI's outside the restaurant to supplement the morning sunlight. Sarah is lit using a 3' x 3' Chimera with a 400 watt HMI "Joker". 2 layers of diffusion material is on the front side of the Chimera. All the restaurant florescent ceiling lights were either removed from their sockets or replaced with 5000ºK bulbs.
A daylight balanced Kino-Flo is suspended above and behind her head for soft back light. For fill, there's a clean white card on the table in front of her and a 4' x 4' breadboard reflector to her right. This setup also insures that there is only one highlight in Sarah's eyes in her close-ups.
I used the latest Marvels version 3.4 picture style in the Canon 5D. This give gutsy blacks with absolutely no black clipping. The camera was set at 1080P 23.98 using all "I" frame compression. (No external recorder was used for the video or audio.)
All footage was converted to ProRes422HQ using the excellent Rarevision 5D to RGB batch converter. It's slower than other converters but it does an excellent job with the 709 color matrix which is "punchier" than the previous 601 color encoding. (Make sure you set the converter menu to 709 "Full Range", not "Broadcast Levels".) I think the extra conversion time is well worth it.
Editing was done in Final Cut Pro 7. I used the standard FCP sharpening filter with a setting of 20%. Color correction was done with "Colorista 2" followed by the "Broadcast Safe" filter. I also added a slight amount of soft vignetting to some shots. Very little color correction was needed and most was just lowering black levels.
A couple other notes: I was originally going to shoot this spot on an "Epic" but last minute decided to use the Mk3. From experience, I sincerely believe Canon delivers the best skin tones for broadcast TV. Better than Sony or RED. Debi Maker did an excellent job on Sarah's makeup and I know this comment is subjective, but I always feel RED footage is technically accurate, but Canon just makes people look better...
Also note that the featured breakfast plate with the $3.99 graphics and another quick food cutaway were lifted from previous Eat 'n Park footage that I shot in 2008 on my Sony F900R.