Shooting options for optimal quality

If the material is intended for Pal Television use 25p, so where's the problem?
Or use 24p for 3:2 converting for 29,97fps NTSC and 4% Speedup for 25fps Pal...


regards Dennis
 
No problem - but its nice to shot a format that can do both.

25p would work fine for NTSC as well. Slow down 4% and add 3-2 pulldown.

Also - blu-ray doesn't support 30p.
 
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I have been shooting about 10 months on the HVX200 and I find I like 720p24 of all the choices of frame rates and images sizes. The reason it looks better, not like video and not quite film. I tried 1080i and 720p60 and they just looked like video. I recently worked on an awards ceremony and had the 720p24 footage intercut with 1080i60 images originated at the venue from sony HD broadcast cameras and almost everyone I spoke with thought the 720p24 footage looked superior. The bonus is also gaining a bit of extra recording time 8 mins per 8GB card at 1080i60, 720p24 is 22 min per 8GB card. On the EX1 I think the same would hold true, you would get a bit more running time at 24 as opposed to 60i (this would be in HQ mode 35Mb). I had a brief opportunity to run some tests on a friends new EX1 and out of the box the image looks like a crappy video camera, my words, but using the cinegamas and making image adjustments you can craft a really nice image that's very pleasing. Check out some of Philip Bloom's shorts, they have very different looks and are really a great example to what you can achieve with the camera. Crappy images have too much sharpness, to the point of ringing around the edges or areas with sharp contrasts, too much contrast in the wrong places and sharp changes of contrasts in shoulder and knee areas of the images. The goal is to achieve good looking images.

I really look forward to my EX1 arriving in the near future.

Cheers
Robert C. Fisher
VR Photography / Cinematography
 
On the EX1 I think the same would hold true, you would get a bit more running time at 24 as opposed to 60i
Click to expand...

Spot-on, I agree with everything you say, RCFisher. Don't know why anyone would shoot interlaced. Unattractive and very limiting.

Except one thing: Running time is pretty much the same for all formats on the EX1 - they all go 35Mbps.
 
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RCFisher said:
Crappy images have too much sharpness, to the point of ringing around the edges or areas with sharp contrasts, too much contrast in the wrong places and sharp changes of contrasts in shoulder and knee areas of the images. The goal is to achieve good looking images.

I really look forward to my EX1 arriving in the near future.

Cheers
Robert C. Fisher
VR Photography / Cinematography
Click to expand...

I hear you... Fortunately, the EX1 looks great with detail off. I know there are a lot of cameras that look real soft when detail is off. The EX1 detail off image looks organic and holds its detail. This is one important step in getting away from the video look.
 
Stevet said:
I hear you... Fortunately, the EX1 looks great with detail off. I know there are a lot of cameras that look real soft when detail is off. The EX1 detail off image looks organic and holds its detail. This is one important step in getting away from the video look.
Click to expand...


agreeeeeed!
 
I always shoot with detial off , too. I was amazed at how nice it looked when I tried it - to zoom in (on the NLE) and see the soft edges transitioning between colors - it has the look of a much more expensive camera, or scanned film.
 
I don't see how the data rate (or running time) for 1080i60/30p could be the same as 1080p24. There are 20% less frames to record. The EX1 records only the frames needed in the 35Mb mode not 60i with pull down. Can someone explain that!

Now this is not true of the HD-SDI out which only outputs 1080i in the 24p mode. It took a long time to find the right info on this since there is a ton of mis-information out there including from dealers. A friend told me that a dealer told him that the HD-SDI port only outputted a compressed signal, now that's not supported under the HD-SDI format. If it's a monitor signal it has to be a standard signal that most monitors can recognize. My initial question was why can you not output 1080p24 directly from the HD-SDI port? I think the answer is they don't want this camera to interfere with their other markets.

Cheers
RC Fisher
VR Photography / Cinematography
 
35Mbps means 35 megabits per second, not per frame, or group of frames.

This means that the codec always encodes to this bitrate - 35 megabits per every second of screen time, regardless of mode. It compresses the faster speeds and higher res more than the lower speeds and lower res footage.

Give or take. It's a VBR (variable bit rate) codec that averages 35Mbps.
 
Anyone have a link or can post some shots with detail on and detail off so I can get a view of what is so organic about having detail off.

Are there minus detail settings and if there are how do they compare.

Thanks
 
There are minus detail settings.

Detail -40 looks about the same as detail off (though I am sure they are intrinsically different).

Going below -60 makes for some ugly, boxy blurriness and is a pretty useless zone.

The "other forum" has some samples in the EX1 footage section.
 
LOL..
Organic bro!

For a lack of better words, I stole that from a post from the "other" forum where someone had posted an image with detail off.

What's important here is that the image STILL looks good with it off. This surely was not a claim from some of the sub $10K past cameras I've owned and tested.
I guess organic would be a good description, since you're looking at the raw image without artificial detail added to it.
 
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Don't get me wrong Steve , I wasn't questioning the word. I like its use here.

Searched the other forum and looked at the comparisons. I kind of liked the shots with the detail on specifically for a shot of a gravel ground with leaves on it. The texture of the leaves was great with detail on but lost with it off. But a shot of a store front with detail off looked great too.
So what happens when you do wide landscape shots when detail is important. On other cams like the HVX I'd have to tweek the detail up for wide. So if -40 is like detail off maybe a middle ground setting of -20 might keep fine detail in without the video look of the too much sharpness setting of 0?
 
mico,
Actually, sometimes I use detail level at -20 and freq +5.
This adds just a tad to the raw image.

I'll have to post some wide comparisions with several different settings including off.
 
I can tell you that there isn't any loss of detail with detail=off.
Detail=on adds artificial oversharpening to the raw video which leads to more artifacts in the resulting mpeg2 stream because it is more difficult to encode.

Better add a sharpening filter in post to the clean image (with detail=off) if you need it - it looks better.



regards Dennis
 
Me neither.
Clips shot with detail=off look a lot more like film :thumbsup:


regards Dennis
 
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:2vrolijk_08:If you are going from film to the EX-1 for the first time, your best bet would be to use the (HQ) 720p 24 format found on the camera's menu. This will give you the max amount of over and under cranking options while shooting, and also keeps it in a 24 frame per sec. mode, to my understanding. You should edit the movie in this mode for best transfer later to film for best image quality and lower transfer costs. The camera has the ability to output to the monitor in 30 fps for viewing. 1080p 24 (SD) is captured in the camera in 1080i and converted (3/2 pull-down) to give a "film look" on a monitor, and is not what a professional producer wants for a true movie image brought to the silver screen. Carl...
 
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