First Time Out with EX1: Nighttime Video

Pretty an d makes me homesick ( a teeny bit) for Connecticut as well. We have nice country in California too though.
What were you doing with the color set -up? I'm curious.

Lenny Levy
 
Buck, part of the idea of buying this camera was to eliminate the need for a lot of add-ons to achieve results. I was a little bit concerned when most of the nice footage I'd seen online was shot with a Letus Extreme. However, I can confirm that the "naked" EX1 has tons of differential focus to burn.

Lenny, each day, I get the impression this forum is full of ex-Connecticut folks. It's starting to feel like the Twilight Zone, like perhaps I missed the call to evacuate the state. :) Anyway, I've been around the country, and geographically, I feel most at home here. I'll deal with the rough economics to enjoy the stability and beauty of the area here in the northwest hills.


The settings I made to the color are subtle, but noticeable when switching among profiles. The one used to make "Winter Thaw" is below...

I've set the Picture Profile up as follows (including only non-default settings below:

MATRIX
Select: Cinema
Level +20
B-R +20

DETAIL
ON
Level -20
Frequency +20

SKIN TONE DETAIL
On
Level -99

LOW KEY SAT
+5


I hope this helps.
I'm still trying to figure out exactly what the matrix adjustments do. I need a chip chart and a vector scope to really see how each adjustment affects color pairs. But I can sense the power of its selective ability to adjust or enhance narrow ranges of tone.

BTW, the 720P version of this video will be live on Vimeo in about an hour:

http://www.vimeo.com/707969

It is processing/converting now. In that version, it should be possible to see an upside-down image of the forest and sky in the water droplet in the opening scene.

BTW, what do you guys think about the artistic aspect of the video? A close friend of mine tells me it should tell a story, but doesn't, so he thinks it's nothing more than a technical demonstration (which it was mostly intended to be).
 
Mark,
I was looking at Sony Vegas but couldn't find anything that says if it work on a Mac? I was told by someone that Vegas was a nice set up for editing. I don't care much for FCP and have been happy with imovie. I wonder if I down load the footage from the Sony Ex1 into FCP and turn it into QT file and than transfered it to imovie maybe that might work? imovie now has HDV 1080i and HDV 720p set up.

I'm heading to Aussie land to shoot a short film but need to be able to get footage downloaded without any problems. I was thinking tape because I will be out in the field but have been told that the tape isn't as great as P2 or SxS card. So I need to be able to download quickly to get to my next shot. The toss up I have is HVX200, JVC HD200 or SONY EX1. But from what I have been reading from you the EX1 is very nice but also I have heard great things about the HVX200. Thanks so much for keeping all of us up to date on how your camera works out.
 
To my knowledge, Sony Vegas is Windows only. So the only Mac application that I hear success stories with regard to EX1 files is Final Cut Pro.

Whether there are tools available that can convert .mxf files to something you can use with imovie is something that remains to be discovered.

Not sure if P2 is any better off. Anyway, P2 is based on a discontinued architecture. And if choosing between the HVX and the EX1, if you see side-by-side shots in 1080P, the EX1 would be most anyone's choice, based on picture quality alone.

Now there is a 'fallback' method that might work too (although I have not been able to capture from the i-link port), which is to record SQ mode and enable the i-link port. It should be theoretically possible to capture an HDV-compatible stream in this manner, but I haven't been able to do it so far in my testing.

The two 'HDV' modes are 24p and 60i. Not sure if my capture system is messed up because I have Cineform installed. It seems that even my normal capture deck is "offline" too, so maybe Cineform has broken the HDV capture drivers for Premiere Pro CS3. However, it SHOULD be possible.

I know that taking the .mp4 files into Premiere appears to work, but without sound, until they are rendered, and then the image dips to black once per second on the rendered file, so not a working solution there.

Bottom line: for either camera, be prepared for a substantial investment in ancillary equipment and software needed to make use of the files.
 
"I got my replacement EX1 from B&H on Friday..."

Hi Mark,
I just joined and I missed some details. Replacement EX1?
Thanks
Bill
 
Bass Pig, what shutter time did you use shooting "New Milford in Wintertime"? Movements seem to be a bith washed to me.
 
The shutter was off for the night scenes. It gives 1/2 stop more light. Some of the flaws can be blamed on Flash compression though. Banding was introduced in the compressed versions.


I'm outside right now, doing time lapse of the lunar eclipse. This should be interesting...
 
Fantastic!

Mark you have posted just the kind of clips from the EX1 that I've been waiting for. I loved the lunar eclipse and am watching Winter Thaw now. I am pleased to see how this camera handled the eclipse since I want to shoot a lot of moon content.

I can't wait to see the EX1 with a Schneider 1.6x tele doing some moon shots.

FYI I'm not from nor have I ever been to Connecticut but it sure looks like a nice place to visit.
 
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Holy crap!!!

Another Final Fantasy fan!! Aeris' Theme!!!

Sweet! This made the movie for me. :D Best EX-1 video EVER posted. Period.

Did you go to the Square-Enix Symphonic!?!?!
 
contentlab: I think it did okay, but I was concerned because on the high def original, there's a considerable amount of chromatic aberration in the form of red and green fringes around the outline of the moon when it's not in the center of the frame. I can't reproduce this problem with bright studio halogen lights, so I don't know why the moon footage brought it out so much. But in general, this camera inspires creative cinematography.

Kholi: Ah, another Nobuo Uematsu fan! If you notice my signature, the URL that references anime music is my weekly radio show on a CT FM station.
I did not attend the concert you reference, but I do have YouTube videos from that DVD. I work with a major symphony here in the northeast, and the manager of the orchestra told me his secret ambition to do a Final Fantasy concert. I was so thrilled that a US-based orchestra might be soon performing this music--and I hope that I get to record the concert, as I did their Beethoven concert last fall.
 
Nobuou Uematsu fan and a Tetsuya Nomura inspired director. Grew up on Final Fantasy and SQUARESOFT games. Favorite game on the planet: Chrono Trigger.

My friends went to the concert and said it was amazing. I was moving to CA at the time so I missed it!

:D I gotta look out for your work more often.
 
I didn't realize that my radio show URL wasn't in my signature on this particular forum. Here it is: www.adventuresinanimemusic.com Another of my favorite composers of the anime world is Joe Hisaishi. You'll find his music on just about any Miyazaki film.

The EX1 is inspiring, because my eye is not constantly distracted by flaws in the picture, the way it was with my V1Us (I own two of those and a Canon HV20). With all the tweakability of the picture profiles, endless creative possibilities exist.
 
The P2 cards like the Panasonic HVX200 uses are PCMCIA form factor (these will fit many older PC notebooks and Apple Powerbooks)

SxS (S by S) is a solid state card, its form factor is ExpressCard 34 (think MacBook Pro) right now the capacities are 8Gb and 16Gb, with 2 card slots in the camera, its 30 minutes for 2 8Gb cards and 140 minutes for 2 16Gb cards. All in HD, this cam doesn't support SD except through the HD-SDI port. Which is fine, this cam will do broadcast quality video and 24p, heck it will even do many PAL (EU, Asia etc.) formats too. Which in my book is very cool!
 
In actual use, I'm getting about 27 minutes on an 8GB card. So that should mean about 54 minutes for two cards, and double that for the 16GB cards.
 
It's the same - all formats do 35Mbps in HQ mode, hence the same amount of screen time per card no matter what format you shoot.
 
Correct. Only the two SQ modes give you 35/25 more recording time.

Time to take out a second mortgage and stock up on SxS cards! :)
 
basspig-

thanks for sharing the low light footage. quite lovely, creamy colors.

the zoom function was impressive. the pullback went on for ever! and then u go back further via feet/glidecam/dolly? very smooth.

perhaps because i was viewing on a g5 imac but i didn't see the "banding" that was spoken of earlier in the thread. there was some jagged movements but i assumed that it was either the g5 imac's video card trying to handle hd or my dsl connection.

now all i'm waiting for is indoor low light footage for a no-light talking head interview that i have coming up.

again, thanks for sharing your experiences. i appreciate the effort.

be well

rob
 
Thanks, but the credit goes to the camera--I'm just the dummy that pointed it and hit the 'record' button. :)

Those zoom shots that went to wide angle were done entirely with the lens. No dolly used. I was locked down to a tripod at all times. My trick was to set the top handle zoom speed to 2 and that gives a creep zoom that takes about 90 seconds to go from wide to tele.

Curiously, I cannot get a good creep zoom out of the main zoom rocker--it starts suddenly and there seems to be no smooth ramp up. So I set up the top handle zoom to 2 and 5 for lo and hi speed settings.

The first scene of Winter Thaw has more banding than a similar scene further into the film and the only thing I can think of was because CineForm was somehow converting that clip incorrectly such that Premiere would not load the clip, I resorted to Vegas to decompress the clip to an AVI file (huge) and then used HDLink to recompress to Cineform's format. Somehow it lost something on it's trip through Vegas (hmm, that could be interpreted several ways...)

The stuttered movement on pans and zooms was noted by several. Upon opening Task Manager (Windows), they found their CPU at 100% utilization playing the flash video. That could account for the stutter.

Anyway, my editing workstation suffered a RAID0 disk failure a few hours ago. I lost almost 1TB of newly-shot video, plus my Norton Ghost drive images of the system drive. What a mess. These drives are 5 months old.
 
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