Best Settings For Stage Play

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Red Jacket Mike

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I just got my HMC150, and I'm pleased so far; my first shoot with it will be this weekend; a local high school stage play. The school auditorium will be dark, and the stage well lit. The camera will be on the main floor, about 50 feet back from center stage.

I won't have a lot of chances to experiment with settings before I do this, so I'm wondering what some good starter settings for this type of environment would be, as far as scene files, gamma, 1080p, 720p, 30 or 60, etc. I will be editing in FCP 6.0.5 and converting for standard letterboxed DVD in Compressor.

I've shot similar events before, with my Sony V1-U, and really had to crank up the gain/(grain!) to get the image bright enough. I'm looking for detail in the darker areas of the stage, but don't want to blow out the bright white areas. Any suggestions?
 
Operating the iris manually is the best way to get the exposure you want. Otherwise, if you have to use autoexposure, set the A. Iris Level to something close to the minimum to avoid blowouts on wide shots. Are there a lot of complex lighting changes in the show?

I tend to use HA mode, with the shutter set to 1/30, which yields progressive footage, smooth motion, and great results for dark scenes. It also gives you good still images if you extract them from the timeline. FCP still has issues with PH mode that make me not trust the combination much.

DRS is helpful if you want to shoot interlaced... but that's a tradeoff I don't find worthwhile. When I do get to trusting PH mode, I'll try it in 720/60p. It won't work with the slow shutter that I prefer.
 
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I shoot a service at my church every week, and have found that rather than do my own white balance, for stages it's easier... and a bit more accurate... to just use the 3.2k preset. Unless they have some sort of funky lighting setup, the lights will be tungsten, which when white are 3.2k. This helps bring out the color of any colored lights they have, and prevent accidentally white balancing in light with an odd colored light or splash from one that you don't notice.

Use a Zebra pattern, it will help with over-exposure. And read up on how to use a waveform monitor. Coupled with the Zebra, I'm finding the one in the HMC increasingly useful for this sort of situation.

As far as 1080 vs 720, i vs p, 24 vs 30 vs 60, or which scene files to use... that's really a matter of your personal preference. One isn't inherently better than the other. I like 1080p/24 the best, with sharp, contrasty, saturated colors... but that's me.
 
The scene files “handbook” would suggest the B-STR (“black stretch”) scene file:

“This look broadens the contrast of the dark parts of the image. And would be effective for a scene which has dark & bright areas together (wedding ceremony etc.). This mode expands gradation at the darker areas (Black stretch) by assigning a ‘HIGH’ gamma curve. Suitable for some shooting locations such as ‘sunsets’ and ‘in the Theater.’” SOURCE: “AG-HMC150 series Handbook” from Panasonic

From my experience -- ALWAYS shoot “PH” mode -- always. 720/60P is going to give you the best motion. If you want the larger dimension of 1080 go with progressive -- 30p or 24p. For a play, 24p should be fine. Higher shutter speeds help with smooth motion.

The best thing you can do to prepare is to test film a rehearsal -- or even better, film as many performances as possible. In theory you could review what worked and readjust to re-capture what didn’t work.

The camera's automatic settings (especially at 60p) will get you by (24p auto focus is slow) -- but effective manual exposure control (iris/shutter speed) is the difference between "okay" and "professional."

If I was in your situation -- I'd use B-STR, add +2 to "Detail," and shoot in 720/60p. Auto focus, manual iris, and the highest shutter speed that works with your lighting conditions. Higher gain settings are surprisingly not-awful with the HMC.

Good luck!
 
The downside with higher shutter speeds is that they reduce the amount of light that hits the sensors. Also, at 24p, you get that stroby "Saving Private Ryan" look.

If you don't have time to tweak your own custom scene file (it took me two weeks to come up with mine), I agree that B-STR is a good way to go. Same with +2 detail. Depending on how you feel about colors, I also would bump up the saturation to +2 or +3. (like I said, I like my colors to pop a little without being over the top).

I actually would go manual focus. I would zoom in to the point where the actors will be closest, set focus, and then don't touch it. Being as far away as you are, you shouldn't have stuff go out of focus really, and as noted before, in 24p autofocus is slow. I just do not like being at the mercy of the camera, and having it decide to focus on some random prop at the back of the stage.
 
Later today I will be shooting a rehersal of a school concert--using an HMC150 and a Canon XHA1. Actual shoot of the performances will be Friday night.

I did this once before at the school's holiday concert with just the 150, shot it on Automatic, 720/60p. No external mic, even. Did it at the last minute with no real prep. Came out pretty decent just the same.

This time I am being more thorough in my approach, and am going to see if I can patch into the sound board. If not I have a pair of AT825's I can use, one per cam.

I thought I would use the HMC150 to capture from te back of the auditorium, and place the Canon towards the front right.

My biggest concern is in color matching, so I will be running tests tomorrow with the "Panalook" preset on the Canon, and see what develops. Any suggestions as to what settings may work best with the Canon? Any of you ever shoot them both togerher? How did it go?
 
Thanks for all the excellent advice; for these events, in the past, I've usually used auto focus and manual iris; my V1U was poor in low light, and the auto focus sometimes had to hunt, especially after a blackout/scene change, etc.

I'm torn between the 1080p/30 and 720p/60; I love the smoother motion and pans with the 720p/60, and I like the extra detail with 1808p/30. I know that Compressor will do a better job with 30 than 60, but I really hate the jittery look, so I'll probably go with 720p/60.

I will probably try the scene file with the black stretch, and adding the detail and saturation; I do sometimes feel that color looks a little undersaturated, with all of the cameras I've had. I also like to use manual iris, and toggle the zebra on/off now and then.

I may be able to attend a dress rehearsal tomorrow night to try some options; at any rate, I'm already looking forward to a tapeless (drop-out free!) recording, and hopefully much better low light performance than a V1U.

By the way, my V1U is mint, has a lot of accessories, and will hopefully soon be up for sale, so that I can purchase a 2nd 150; PM me if you might be interested; I have 100% positive ebay feedback with over 200 transactions.

Thanks again for the suggestions.
 
Well, make sure you do a test of a shot as long as the play in the mode you'd like to use, and see if FCP handles it the way you'd like, especially around 4GB file splits!
 
I haven't noticed these 4GB file splits; i've captured nearly an hour's worth of footage as one long clip, and it shows up when I log & transfer as just one clip; I haven't actually looked at every frame closely, though; would the 4GB point (in ph mode) be around 25 minutes?

I've read about the camera dividing footage into separate 4GB files, and how downloadable utility programs are needed to rejoin the clips, but I haven't seen this with my camera; I am using FCP 6.0.5 (the latest version), and my camera also came with the latest firmware, 1.19.

So, is there a chance I'll have corrupted frames on either side of the 4GB point, even if it's in the middle of a longer clip, or do these latest versions correct this?
 
I doubt it. I don't use FCP, but I shoot an 1 - 1.25 hour service every week, and don't have any issues. I've not heard of any one else having issues either.

And yes, 25 minutes roughly equals 4GB.
 
I see them occasionally in PH mode, which is why I don't yet use PH for anything critical. HA with "fake" progressive 1/30 shutter has not had any significant inferiorities.

The problem is not irrecoverable - it's an FCP transcode issue, and you can get the footage without the glitches via HDMI out, via other software, etc. But that's more complication than I want to deal with, and given the longer record time, HA is for me the way to go.

But I'd say yes, with FCP and PH, there's still a chance of ugly artifacts at 4GB boundaries in the middle of long clips.

If you have, say, VLC player to play the raw MTS, you can identify the exact boundary points to check in FCP.
 
Settings aside, definitely use manual focus, I've shot a few dance performances where they had a blackout that I didn't know about, and auto focus went hunting, when the lights came back on the shot was unusable, luckily I had a second camera set up in manual focus getting a wide shot, but definitely use manual focus.
 
Well, I went to a dress rehearsal tonight; just to try out this camera. I've only had it for a few days, and haven't really shot any real footage yet.

High school drama club, nice auditorium, good lighting. 16x9 fills the stage nicely with a wider shot.

i started out with scene file #4, the black stretch, as suggested earlier in this thread, and I bumped detail up to +2; chroma is already set to +3 in this mode, so I left it there. I used the auto shutter, and auto focus, with manual iris. I have the middle gain switch set to +6. I also used the zebra at 100%.

I shot about 30 minutes in 720p/60 and then another segment with all of the same above settings, but switching to 1080p/30. I purposely jacked around with the iris control and too-fast panning. The autofocus was great; i tried as best as I could to make it hunt, but it was flawless, even after a blackout.

Compared to my Sony V1U, I am really impressed with this camera; once I got home I played the clips I shot via the HDMI output to my 60" Kuro. To me, the smooth motion of the 720p/60 was excellent; I really couldn't see much added detail with the 1080p/30, and the motion was not quite as good. Autofocus was way better than with the Sony, too.

Tomorrow, I'll transcode these clips to FCP/ProRes, and export them via Compressor for letterboxed SD DVD. I wonder which format will look best after compression; hopefully the 720p/60 will come out on top, because it definitely looked better to me out of the camera.

As for low light performance, with similar stage lighting, my V1U would've been opened up to 2.0 with 6-9 dB of gain; with the 150, I'm at 4.8/5.6, and no noise visible at all with gain on +6. I could probably shut off the gain and open it up one more stop.

Lastly, also taking advice from an earlier post, I didn't do any white balancing; I used the 3.2K preset, which nailed the colors perfectly; an exact match for the look of the stage. I'm pleased so far, and looking forward to shooting the production on Saturday night.

Thanks to those who posted suggestions; I'm really liking this camera so far!
 
Good to hear.

From a technical point of view, there is no reason to use auto focus. If you are on a tripod, you are shooting in a fixed length environment. The distance from your camera to the performers on stage never changes except for stage depth.

But the 1/3" chips will have enough depth of field that if you focus on the closest third on the stage floor, you should have everybody in focus.

Auto anything in a live environment is dangerous. what if somebody stands up to leave? What if they put a prop on the very front edge of the stage and the performers are against the back wall?

Too many what ifs...
 
You're right, and I probably will go manual focus for the performance, but I just wanted to compare the 150's autofocus ability with the V1U's; from what I've seen so far, the 150 is quite a bit better.
 
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