Newbie needs some advice for shooting/video editing

[ARIELLimited]

Hi there

I am a completely new guy to video shooting with years of photography experience. I shoot RAW files with my Nikon D610 with no problems as the RAW files are so adjustable to almost everything. When I jump into video world, I find that things seem to be a little different.

I am using a Panasonic HC-X1000 to shoot 1080p 200Mbps All-Intra with -7 sharpen, -7 chroma, cinema dynamic profile and tried to leave things in post as I know this should get the most out from the camera sensor with lowest noise possible. Even though with those 200Mbps massive files, when I tried to adjust the sharpness, saturation in post. It looks like the footage end up with some kind of artifacts and false color. So, the question is: Should I change the settings of the camera as close as the result I wanna get with minimal post process when shooting videos?

In addition, I find that the playback of PowerDirector is quite jerky even with default settings, the quality isn’t good as well. To be frankly, it’s a nightmare to use for these video editing software including Premiere and Vegas. When compare to a photo editing software, the playback screen is small, the resolution is low. I am always not sure for the adjustment result until I exported the video.

My computer configuration as below:
Intel i5 4460 3.2Ghz
16Gb ram
MSI GTX960 2Gb
WD Blue Label HDD



Please free feel to comment. Your help and reply is highly appreciated.
Thanks.



AN

[Razz16mm]

Compared to raw footage you won't get much post grading room from any camera shooting 4:2:0 H.264 AVCHD. You pretty much have to nail the look you want in camera as close as possible. Camera settings are your main grading tool. Shoot a range of tests of the same scene with different camera settings to learn how to get closer to the looks you want.

[ARIELLimited]

Thanks for your reply.

I have just read a very good explanition to this from the sony website and would lkke to share.

http://pro.sony.com/bbsc/ssr/micro-x...est-XAVC.shtml

Fortunately my camera shoots 4K 8 bit 4:2:0 footage that can be down sampling to 1080 10bit 4:2:2
I guess that would fix the problem and gain more stablization headroom.

[Razz16mm]

Finding a useful in camera gamma curve that helps preserve as much dynamic range as possible is good practice, but desaturating color in camera is just throwing away data for no good reason. You can't recover what you didn't record. A more useful approach with video cameras like yours is to underexpose a bit to get more highlight headroom to work with. I routinely exposed bright well lit high contrast scenes 1 to 1.5 stops under with my old Canon GL2. Manually setting exposure using the zebras to indicate where you are close to peak clipping helps. You can dial back exposure to show zebras on only small specular highlights or direct light sources that show no detail anyway. Experiment with how far under you can go without getting objectionable noise showing up in low mid tones and open shadows. Generally -2 stops is going to be the practical limit.
I suggest hooking your camera up to a large screen TV and shooting some test scene setups with the live monitor to see how close you can get to the look you want with camera settings. Calibrate your TV to the camera's color bars first. Turn off the TV chroma to set brightness and contrast for good even grayscale in black and white. Then adjust color saturation and tint. If the TV has a color temp menu adjustment set it to the middle setting. Adjust any TV sharpness setting so that it doesn't show edge artifacts on the color bars and there is clean separation between the colors.
White balance the camera using a clean sheet of white paper.
Then play around with the various in camera settings to get the best results on your TV. You want neutral, balanced well saturated color with slightly flat contrast, and good detail with no obvious edge artifacts from over sharpening. In post grading compressed subsampled video it is easier to back out what you don't want than to add what isn't there.
A few hours spent learning how your camera actually responds to its different settings on a large monitor screen will teach you more than any generic setting recommendations from this forum. You can't see this stuff on the camera's viewfinder screens. Video standards are display referenced. What you see is what you get.

[ARIELLimited]

Finding a useful in camera gamma curve that helps preserve as much dynamic range as possible is good practice, but desaturating color in camera is just throwing away data for no good reason. You can't recover what you didn't record. A more useful approach with video cameras like yours is to underexpose a bit to get more highlight headroom to work with. I routinely exposed bright well lit high contrast scenes 1 to 1.5 stops under with my old Canon GL2. Manually setting exposure using the zebras to indicate where you are close to peak clipping helps. You can dial back exposure to show zebras on only small specular highlights or direct light sources that show no detail anyway. Experiment with how far under you can go without getting objectionable noise showing up in low mid tones and open shadows. Generally -2 stops is going to be the practical limit.
I suggest hooking your camera up to a large screen TV and shooting some test scene setups with the live monitor to see how close you can get to the look you want with camera settings. Calibrate your TV to the camera's color bars first. Turn off the TV chroma to set brightness and contrast for good even grayscale in black and white. Then adjust color saturation and tint. If the TV has a color temp menu adjustment set it to the middle setting. Adjust any TV sharpness setting so that it doesn't show edge artifacts on the color bars and there is clean separation between the colors.
White balance the camera using a clean sheet of white paper.
Then play around with the various in camera settings to get the best results on your TV. You want neutral, balanced well saturated color with slightly flat contrast, and good detail with no obvious edge artifacts from over sharpening. In post grading compressed subsampled video it is easier to back out what you don't want than to add what isn't there.
A few hours spent learning how your camera actually responds to its different settings on a large monitor screen will teach you more than any generic setting recommendations from this forum. You can't see this stuff on the camera's viewfinder screens. Video standards are display referenced. What you see is what you get.

Sorry for the late reply, being busy with the renovation work of my new house.

Thanks to your advice, shooting under scene 1 with +2 sharpness and chroma from the X1000 is very close to the look I would love to have.
I have shot a lot in these few days and find that I really need a simple LOSSLESS trimmer to trim what's useful from the master file before I have plenty of time to make a real video footage from those short clips. In the photography world, all I need to do is press the delete button if I want to throw away something. The rule of "shoot first, think later" leave me much trouble behind.
I am not sure if there's a way to make it simple?

In addition, I realized that the problem of jerkyness with PD14 is due to the fact that NVIDIA no longer support PD 14 with CUDA/hardware acceleration.