AF100 Night Test

EidolonFilms

EidolonFilms

Well-known member
Went out with the camera tonight to try and get a shot of the moon with my 300mm. There was too much cloud cover so I decided to test out the high ISOs. Focus issues and a soft lens aside, I was very happy with the result.


Shot on various ISOs, either 800, 1600 or 3200. I am very surprised by how clean 3200 is (the dog at the end). Coming from an XHA1, gaining up to +12 resulted in the nastiest noise I've ever seen, and it didn't really make the picture that much brighter. On the AF100, I was over cranking 60fps-1/120 shutter in a baseball field lit only by a couple of overhead floods for crying out loud!. It was quite dark. 800 is very nice. My only issue really was getting focus. Focus in red doesn't work so well in darker scenes, and I'm realizing how soft one of my lenses is wide open!
 
Very nice. Makes me wish I lived in a real city just to get shots like this. Downtown Syracuse after 6:00 is a ghost town.
 
Fantastic! Looks great!

I'm just starting to play with my camera as well but noticed that focus in red isn't that bright. There's probably a way to change that setting but I haven't found it yet.

If you don't mind, what were your camera settings?
 
Stephen Mick said:
Agreed. Very nice. Can you share your camera settings with us?
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Thanks everyone. It is nice to live near interesting things to shoot!

Settings were:

Detail -5
V Detail -4
Coring +2
Chroma -1
Master Ped -1
Cine Like V
Norm 2

One question though. On the left side of the LCD it says FLUO, but when I go to the scene file it still says Norm 2, so what is going on there? Or is that some different FlUO I don't know about?

Biggest surprise from this test was that the high ISOs had the same amount of noise as the first time I shot with 400 ISO, but used Cine-D and Cine-Like Matrix. So those settings definitely affect apparent noise as others have discovered.
 
footage looks pretty good but I can defiantly see the ghosting and tailing in the scenes with motion at the end. something I noticed in my night time footage as well.
 
Neil Burner said:
footage looks pretty good but I can defiantly see the ghosting and tailing in the scenes with motion at the end. something I noticed in my night time footage as well.
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To be fair I think some of that is from vimeo. Looking at the original it is barely there.
 
Steve Kahn said:
I'm just starting to play with my camera as well but noticed that focus in red isn't that bright. There's probably a way to change that setting but I haven't found it yet.
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Tips on focus-in-red:
1) turn the color off in your EVF, and use the EVF. Forget the LCD. Set SDI to OFF, turn EVF MODE to "ON", and turn EVF COLOR to OFF, and then turn on focus-in-red. That'll make the red pop out incredibly easy to see.
2) Focus-in-red works on sharp hard transitions. It doesn't work on soft mushy stuff. If you've got no sharp transitions in your scene, it won't show up. Sometimes that's a problem and you have to add sharp transitions; if you're shooting a face and you can't see the F.I.R., you can usually add a catchlight or hold up a focus chart in front of the subject's face to get something for F.I.R. to latch onto.
3) F.I.R. can accentuate the EVF DTL peaking. Normally I like to use F.I.R. by itself, but if it's too difficult to see what it's doing, turn on the EVF DTL. The combination of EVF DTL ON and F.I.R. usually results in a whole lot more red showing up.
 
EidolonFilms said:
On the left side of the LCD it says FLUO, but when I go to the scene file it still says Norm 2, so what is going on there? Or is that some different FlUO I don't know about?
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It's the name of the scene file. You can assign names to the scene files, and when you have all the screen info displayed, that name will show up. Change your scene file to F2 or F3 or F4 and you'll see that "fluo" change to "spark" or "cine" or whatever other names are preprogrammed into the existing scene files.
 
Hey Eidolon, awesome stuff. I'm coming from the A1 too, it was awful in low light, and I love to shoot at night. Plus, Canon's grain was ugly, less filmic, Pana's always feels more organic, like S16. I'm using some Minolta AF lenses too, just got my cam and haven't had a chance to mount them. Are you using the rainbow imaging adapter? It was the only Minolta AF w/apeture control I could find. Hope you are, 'cause it's look like it's working out just fine.
 
Barry_Green said:
Tips on focus-in-red:
1) turn the color off in your EVF, and use the EVF. Forget the LCD. Set SDI to OFF, turn EVF MODE to "ON", and turn EVF COLOR to OFF, and then turn on focus-in-red. That'll make the red pop out incredibly easy to see.
2) Focus-in-red works on sharp hard transitions. It doesn't work on soft mushy stuff. If you've got no sharp transitions in your scene, it won't show up. Sometimes that's a problem and you have to add sharp transitions; if you're shooting a face and you can't see the F.I.R., you can usually add a catchlight or hold up a focus chart in front of the subject's face to get something for F.I.R. to latch onto.
3) F.I.R. can accentuate the EVF DTL peaking. Normally I like to use F.I.R. by itself, but if it's too difficult to see what it's doing, turn on the EVF DTL. The combination of EVF DTL ON and F.I.R. usually results in a whole lot more red showing up.
Click to expand...

Thanks! That really helps especially the EVF DTL button. It's a subtle thing but once one gets used to it I'm sure will be perfect.
 
DrHST said:
Hey Eidolon, awesome stuff. I'm coming from the A1 too, it was awful in low light, and I love to shoot at night. Plus, Canon's grain was ugly, less filmic, Pana's always feels more organic, like S16. I'm using some Minolta AF lenses too, just got my cam and haven't had a chance to mount them. Are you using the rainbow imaging adapter? It was the only Minolta AF w/apeture control I could find. Hope you are, 'cause it's look like it's working out just fine.
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Thanks. Yes it is miles above the A1 in low light, and everything else I can think of. The rainbow imaging adapter has worked perfectly so far. It has the aperture ring on it, and it actually makes the lens act as if it is de-clicked, so changing aperture doesn't result in stair-stepped exposure changes. Pretty good for less than 30 bucks. I am realizing though that neither the 50mm AF or the 50mm Rokkor are the sharpest of lenses wide open. The 50mm AF is also pretty tricky to focus with. I'd love to one day get a zeiss zf or something similar.
 
The High ISO stuff really impresses me. It looks nice.

Maybe I'll catch you shooting around sometime. :-)
 
EidolonFilms said:
Thanks. Yes it is miles above the A1 in low light, and everything else I can think of. The rainbow imaging adapter has worked perfectly so far. It has the aperture ring on it, and it actually makes the lens act as if it is de-clicked, so changing aperture doesn't result in stair-stepped exposure changes. Pretty good for less than 30 bucks. I am realizing though that neither the 50mm AF or the 50mm Rokkor are the sharpest of lenses wide open. The 50mm AF is also pretty tricky to focus with. I'd love to one day get a zeiss zf or something similar.
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I was not a big fan of the A1 either, but it payed it's keep. I have the Minolta 28 2.8 as well as the 50, looking forward to taking that for a spin as well. Agreed, at $30 these are a deal, I picked up a couple of the rainbow adapters, hoping to take them for a spin on the AF this weekend.
 
I think Panasonic has just released something just as important as the original DVX100. So far this rig seems to have a lot of what i've been wishing but not expecting.
 
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