1st experience - advice please

R

robster180

Active member
Hi
I'm hiring an FS100 this weekend for evaluation. I have a spec music performance shoot in 2 weeks using a pair of these cameras.
So just wondered if you guys had any advice? I'll be arming it with fast Nikon manual glass and will try some low light indoor as well as some nearby woodland.

Looking forward to it.
 
+1

A Heliopan variable ND filter is in order and make sure you got good class 10 cards.
Get the 8Gig cards. If one is acting up, you don´t loose that much footage.

Go to the AbelCine site for recommendations on picture profiles.

Frank
 
...Thanks, yep the hire company packs a Vari-ND into the bag as standard.
Any other idiosyncrasies I should be aware of?
 
and the results here

The compression has played havoc with the low light and flat coloured walls but you get the gist.
This short was devised shot and edited in a 24hr period so I know it's not perfect but it was good incentive for me to play around with its features. Mainly you'll see the use of 50fps slow down and some Saving Private Ryan shutter speed.
...and apologies for the over-used shallow DoF but I used available light from the window.

Overall I enjoyed the experience of using the FS100. I was all over the place trying to find buttons such as enlarging the viewfinder image and shutter speed, zebras etc. but not enough to put me off.

I shot some other experimental stuff as well which I'll post up at some point.
 
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I'm assuming this is a live continuous performance. If so, then stagger your recording between your FS100's as it forms clips in increments of 2GB.

I've seen that they may miss a second of footage in between 2GB files. So by staggering them you will guarantee at least one of your cameras to capture the footage.
 
ectobuilder said:
I'm assuming this is a live continuous performance. If so, then stagger your recording between your FS100's as it forms clips in increments of 2GB.

I've seen that they may miss a second of footage in between 2GB files. So by staggering them you will guarantee at least one of your cameras to capture the footage.
Click to expand...

I don't know why you would miss anything....it does form separate clips (I thought they were 4 gig clips but I can't
remember for sure) but I've recorded sports and events for over 2 hours continuously and never had it miss as much
as a second. FCP Log and Transfer, as well as Clipwrap, and Magic Bullet Grinder all were able to convert it into
one long movie file.
 
It's 2 GB clips.

But for music performance if you even miss 1 millisecond of a note you can tell. For sports not so much.

I'm assuming the worst case scenario which is classical music with fine instruments.
 
Well, the coaches I work for would beg to differ (yeah, they are pretty demanding). But besides sports,
I've done ballet performances (with music), and marketing research studies. Trust me, if there was even
a frame missing when it stitched the clips together, I would know. And this is because I actually went
to the EXACT point where the division was on all the clips and tried to find anything missing. And
then I looked all around the division point, the previous and next 10 seconds, just trying to see
if I could find a dropped frame anywhere. You see, I had exactly this same question. I could find
nothing. Now I'm not saying that your idea (to offset two FS 100's) is a bad one, because anything
to give extra security is good. But I have noticed that my FS 100 does NOT miss even a frame....
maybe I've just been lucky.
 
ectobuilder said:
I've seen that they may miss a second of footage in between 2GB files.
Click to expand...

Don't worry - this is only a workflow issue. You will not drop a frame between clips (not even a millisecond) when the clips are joined by something like Sony's Content Management Utility, ClipWrap from Divergent Media, FCP-X and so on (I didn't personally test NeoScene). It seems the very worst thing one can do is drop camera's MTS files onto a timeline and try and glue them together yourself. Lots of tears before bedtime.

+1 on 8 GB cards, as these (like 8GB SxS cards) can be backed up onto Dual Layer DVD-Rs. Having access to your original card data (rather than transcoded versions) prove super-useful in clip-joining, and even more so when more NLEs begin to support metadata such as the FS100 geo-tagging.
 
The only idiosyncrasy I've run across on the FS100 is that when you are in "S&Q" mode (to shoot over or under cranked) - if you go into the camera menu at all you will be bumped back into 24P (or whatever base framerate you were shooting at) once you exit the menu.

It's not a dealbreaker - but a bit annoying, and if you're not paying attention you could possibly shoot something at 24p when you meant for it to be overcranked at 60p.
 
Oopsie - just re-read the Original Poster's question...

robster180 said:
just wondered if you guys had any advice?
Click to expand...

GO EASY ON THE SATURATION!

Unlike the EX1 or Canon cameras, but JUST like the AF101, it's easy to blow the chrominance in-camera, or in other words give the camera too much saturation (e.g. band under theatrical lighting) which leads to ugly posterisation of areas with strong colour in them.

I'd recommend playing with picture profiles, with the specific aim of reducing saturation (-3 or so, maybe even less) and and a little bit of high knee on a negative curve (95%, -2).

Working with a trusted monitor, work out what pictures look like on your LCD screen vs what they look like on your trusted monitor. Keep an eye on the histogram. I'm aiming to underexpose by half a stop and keep my highlights kissing the barely visible grey bar in the histogram, as if I went by the viewfinder, I'd be overexposing and oversaturating. You can't repair overexposure or... OVER-CHROMA (now that I've learned that nasty lesson).
 
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