From film to DVX100A

Z

zgenie

New member
K well I have a lot of experience on working with film but making the big move to the DVX100A. I don't know much about this camera at all. I have read alot about it and have some quick questions.

1. Black Pro Mist 1- I heard this makes your 24P look even better. Any takers?
2. Measurment- I'm used to using a light meter but have read to calibrate your monitor and you should trust your eye, is that correct?
3. Has anybody used a warming filter?
4. I want to keep my image as flat as possible so I can do more things in post. Any particular settings for this?
 
Welcome to the dvx world. I too come from a film background, there are some differences but most of what you have learned will be beneficial in shooting digital.

Now, for your questions:

1) The use of any of the pro mist family of filters is going to have a similar effect, perhaps just a bit more exaggerated in degree. I would caution you not to go too far. A 1 is fine, but anything more and the image is going to get pretty soft.

2) I meter my shots, but not so much for setting exposure as for setting lighting ratios. I find that a spot meter is often more useful when shooting digital than an incident meter. A properly calibrated monitor is an essential tool. Highly recommended.

3) Like a 85B? I often use one when shooting in high color temperature environments as it seems to reduce the blue channel noise a bit. I still set my white balance, but I do it after installing the filter.

4) Unlike film where you expose for the shadows, for digital you want to be really careful to control the highlights. When digital clips, there isn't much that you can do to bring it back at all. 8 bit digital has a lot less latitude than film, so you really need to keep things within the camera's capabilities. Learn to use and trust the zebra patterns and the spot meter mode is pretty useful as well.

The great thing about digital is that you can get nearly instantaneous feedback from your setups. No waiting for dailies to see if things worked out as planned and no real costs to test, so test a lot and learn to get the camera to do what you want when shooting and use post to fine tune the look you are going for. Remember its only an 8 bit system and the color space is under-sampled, so don't push it too far.
 
Making the big jump from film to digital? Most people I know want to do it the other way around. :)

1) Because of DV's low res, it needs less powerful diffusion than film would to get the same effect. However, you may want to check out the Detail and V.Detail settings on the camera before going with diffusion. Lowering these can take the video edge off without any extra glass in front of the lens.

2) You've got it a little backwards... you need to calibrate the monitor and then trust the monitor. A light meter is still handy, though.

4) Check out the gamma curves. CINELINE is very flat. CINELINE_D is fairly flat with a little more dynamic range, but doesn't look great by itself and will requires some curve application in post. It's also a tad noisy, or seems that way.
 
use zebra. set to 100 and avoid going over. you can soft and color correct in post so careful with any filtering on the lense.
 
Is zebra 100 recommended for normal shooting or just when filters are used?

jmf

drpaluga said:
use zebra. set to 100 and avoid going over. you can soft and color correct in post so careful with any filtering on the lense.
Click to expand...
 
Zebra is always a good idea. Never overexpose if you can help it, within reason. You can actually set the zebra higher, up to 105%, and still capture detail, consider "ultra-whites."

I had a recent shoot in a salon with exposed light bulbs all over the place. There was no fighting this, the lights themselves would overexpose, but it didn't look bad. Some things you just have to let go.
 
I'm kind of skeptical about the Black Pro-Mist everywhere I have read to use 1/8 or anywhere in the fraction range and kind of scared the black dots will appear really bad. My 3 light set-up is 2 1K's with Basterd Amber as the key. 2 1k soft lights for fill with silks, backlight- 2 1ks. Is that too much light I'm sorry but I'm used to getting a bunch of equipment. I was looking into a warming filter to bring more color in as well. I also read best to shoot without auto/focus and autoexposure correct? Ex: I'm using a jib arm and dolly what would ya'll do? Thanks!
 
I usually just dial down the detail a bit for softening. I have used a 1/8 Black ProMist before to good effect. When I was shooting HD a lot I liked the Soft FX filters for softening I haven't used one on my DVX yet but it should work well.

I worked a film where the Scene settings were "flat" (Zero on all of the detail/chroma/black, etc. . .) and this gave a lot of latitude for post color correction. We did try to expose exactly what we wanted rather than under expose 1 stop over-all as was originally suggested for the DVX way back when AND we never did a film-out. There were a couple of times on exteriors that we had something in the background that clipped out tho'.
The film is "No Regrets" it runs on Lifetime occassionally. Stars the late Edward Albert Jr. and Kate Jackson.

DUring some commercial shoots:
I had times when things were being warmed up (gelling the lighting) the same amount we usually did for film/BetaCam and the DVX really started warming up a lot. SO I'd say when using Cine_Like Gamma and Matrix (especially) pay careful attention to warming the look, we had to back off because the Chroma in our actress' face was blocking up.
Also Shooting on a white cyc, make sure the cyc isn't clipping out. It'll sometimes get a magenta color cast.

Good luck!

MR
 
zebra on always. manual focus and exposure always. white balance every new location. keep dvx settings fairly normal. in post you can do most anything to a normal image if you have the time.
 
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