basspig
03-02-2008, 02:23 AM
I returned about midnight from my four-camera shoot of Dvorak’s Cello Concerto in B minor. One of the benefits of XDCam is immediate access to all recorded footage. Another is the astounding picture. It looks like a moving photograph.
It will take a full day to ingest the tapes from the other three HDV cameras, so I won’t know what that footage looks like unil late Sunday. There was also 10.8GB of 24/96 surround audio recorded, plus 2 tracks of 16/48 audio for a ‘balcony mix’.
Since I only had an 8GB SxS card, I chose to record only Miss Eldredge’s solo parts in three movements. I was able to get better than 85% of all her solos on the EX1 by shooting in this manner. This will be intercut with the other three cameras. (Three cameras trained on the soloist, who hired us, two in the balcony at opposite corners, one down in the auditorium and one up in the shell backdrop for the conductor.)
The interesting quandry will be the mixing of two dissimilar formats on one timeline. Since the overwhelming majority of the concert is shot in HDV, that pretty much dictates an HDV timeline.
Oddly enough, the EX1 exhibited no backfocus problems at either the rehearsal or the concert. Performance was consistently-stunning, with copious detail, yet a pleasing smoothness to the skin tones that is sure to flatter our leading lady. There was quite a bit of CA at points that were not smack in the center of the frame, however the focus was stable in full manual mode at all zoom levels. I’m not certain, but I think there is more CA at full tele than on our V1U cameras. I will be comparing footage as soon as I offload the other tapes to the NLE. No doubt the winner in this department is the Canon HV20, which, being a single CMOS sensor, is less prone to CA.
I’ll talk about the audio for a moment: Since we’re doing a full compliment of large diaphragm condensers flown over the auditorium, camera audio won’t be used at all, except for rough synch. That said, I listened to the EX1’s built in microphone on playback in Clip Browser. I heard nice bass in the string bass section and a fairly sweet upper range. The midrange was a little “honky” as the mic is probably taylored to speech recording, but a tweak of the lower midrange EQ on our mixing board smoothed it out.
The built in mic is easily overloaded, however. The orchestra peaks at 105dB (flat) in the balcony on crescendos. The EX1’s internal mic preamp clipped quite a bit there, even though the recording level was set low enough as not to ever go full scale on the meters. So any loud sound sources will require an external mic, because the external inputs have the additional capability to use attenuation. The camera will accept a signal up to -10dBm from the XLR inputs in mic mode, which few condenser mics will produce and only with something really loud, like a gunshot or explosion. Suffice to say, if you put a Rode NT4 on this camera, you’re going to get very fine audio for concert hall situations where they won’t let you have anything but your camera to shoot a documentary excerpt. In our case, we’re producing the whole concert video and we have special arrangements with the venue to fly our custom mic array.
The LCD panel seems to accentuate yellows a lot. I found that the wood grain orchestra shell was looking rather yellowish, instead of the pinkish tone that it actually has. However, when I observed the footage on the Clip Browser, it looks just fine, with no yellow cast. I did dial down yellow a bit in the matrix setup for the theater, but only -10. Red tones were boosted to +10 to bring the picture more into parity with the V1Us that were shooting the same general region.
Exposure lattitude was superb—in fact I had to dial it down a bit—it was too much and would make the other cameras look murky in a cut-to. Nice detail in people’s black suits and in the shadows on the black stage, under the performer’s chairs. The V1Us crush blacks in those regions. The EX1 reveals the scratches and chipped paint on the stage deck in those dark areas, while maintaining nice detail in highlights.
Zoom range: not quite enough for the theater. This camera goes very wide, but I miss the 20X zoom of the V1U here, for those all important closeups of the fingerwork on the cello. I could get in only far enough to get the bridge of the cello to the top of the neck to fill frame bottom to top. A 1.6X tele extender of very high quality would be useful for this kind of shooting. In all other respects, the EX1 shoots well in-theater.
My challenge now is to determine the best way to get this footage into Premiere, and the most fluid way to work with both HDV and XDCam on one timeline (project settings). Mixing square and rectangular pixels should be interesting. Since Vegas doesn’t have any good lossless output CODECs, I’ll have to export this 28 minutes of footage as uncompressed HD to the RAID array.
I’m going to get some shut-eye. It’s been a long couple of days. Will followup with some frame grabs later today…
It will take a full day to ingest the tapes from the other three HDV cameras, so I won’t know what that footage looks like unil late Sunday. There was also 10.8GB of 24/96 surround audio recorded, plus 2 tracks of 16/48 audio for a ‘balcony mix’.
Since I only had an 8GB SxS card, I chose to record only Miss Eldredge’s solo parts in three movements. I was able to get better than 85% of all her solos on the EX1 by shooting in this manner. This will be intercut with the other three cameras. (Three cameras trained on the soloist, who hired us, two in the balcony at opposite corners, one down in the auditorium and one up in the shell backdrop for the conductor.)
The interesting quandry will be the mixing of two dissimilar formats on one timeline. Since the overwhelming majority of the concert is shot in HDV, that pretty much dictates an HDV timeline.
Oddly enough, the EX1 exhibited no backfocus problems at either the rehearsal or the concert. Performance was consistently-stunning, with copious detail, yet a pleasing smoothness to the skin tones that is sure to flatter our leading lady. There was quite a bit of CA at points that were not smack in the center of the frame, however the focus was stable in full manual mode at all zoom levels. I’m not certain, but I think there is more CA at full tele than on our V1U cameras. I will be comparing footage as soon as I offload the other tapes to the NLE. No doubt the winner in this department is the Canon HV20, which, being a single CMOS sensor, is less prone to CA.
I’ll talk about the audio for a moment: Since we’re doing a full compliment of large diaphragm condensers flown over the auditorium, camera audio won’t be used at all, except for rough synch. That said, I listened to the EX1’s built in microphone on playback in Clip Browser. I heard nice bass in the string bass section and a fairly sweet upper range. The midrange was a little “honky” as the mic is probably taylored to speech recording, but a tweak of the lower midrange EQ on our mixing board smoothed it out.
The built in mic is easily overloaded, however. The orchestra peaks at 105dB (flat) in the balcony on crescendos. The EX1’s internal mic preamp clipped quite a bit there, even though the recording level was set low enough as not to ever go full scale on the meters. So any loud sound sources will require an external mic, because the external inputs have the additional capability to use attenuation. The camera will accept a signal up to -10dBm from the XLR inputs in mic mode, which few condenser mics will produce and only with something really loud, like a gunshot or explosion. Suffice to say, if you put a Rode NT4 on this camera, you’re going to get very fine audio for concert hall situations where they won’t let you have anything but your camera to shoot a documentary excerpt. In our case, we’re producing the whole concert video and we have special arrangements with the venue to fly our custom mic array.
The LCD panel seems to accentuate yellows a lot. I found that the wood grain orchestra shell was looking rather yellowish, instead of the pinkish tone that it actually has. However, when I observed the footage on the Clip Browser, it looks just fine, with no yellow cast. I did dial down yellow a bit in the matrix setup for the theater, but only -10. Red tones were boosted to +10 to bring the picture more into parity with the V1Us that were shooting the same general region.
Exposure lattitude was superb—in fact I had to dial it down a bit—it was too much and would make the other cameras look murky in a cut-to. Nice detail in people’s black suits and in the shadows on the black stage, under the performer’s chairs. The V1Us crush blacks in those regions. The EX1 reveals the scratches and chipped paint on the stage deck in those dark areas, while maintaining nice detail in highlights.
Zoom range: not quite enough for the theater. This camera goes very wide, but I miss the 20X zoom of the V1U here, for those all important closeups of the fingerwork on the cello. I could get in only far enough to get the bridge of the cello to the top of the neck to fill frame bottom to top. A 1.6X tele extender of very high quality would be useful for this kind of shooting. In all other respects, the EX1 shoots well in-theater.
My challenge now is to determine the best way to get this footage into Premiere, and the most fluid way to work with both HDV and XDCam on one timeline (project settings). Mixing square and rectangular pixels should be interesting. Since Vegas doesn’t have any good lossless output CODECs, I’ll have to export this 28 minutes of footage as uncompressed HD to the RAID array.
I’m going to get some shut-eye. It’s been a long couple of days. Will followup with some frame grabs later today…