Bloom's and Filippo's Scene File Settings

G

groveChuck

U-matic Member
There seems to be a lot of "what did they use? Cine D vs Cine V" questions, so here's what they say.
Barry, please add yours if you know what you used.

Bloom's and Filippo's scene files:

Bloom (from his site):
"Settings wise I simply had no idea if what I had the camera set up for was best, even Barry was not sure.
I had the sharpness up higher than for the previous shoot, this time at -3 as opposed to -7. Detail set to 0 had nasty halos.
Barry tweaked a few more of my settings but he said he was guessing, the key one though was Cine Gamma D which gave me a nice flat curve, I used cine gamma V last time (or was it other was around?) whichever one I used it was the flattest."

Filippo (from his Vimeo page):
"Camera settings:
Cine-Like D
Details -7
Saturation -3"
 
I'm assuming the AF100's menu and picture profile settings must be a radical departure from the other Panasonic cameras - Barry literally 'wrote the book' on the DVX and HVX, and especially their optimized settings. I remember tweaking my DVX based on his DVD.

DId Panny not leverage all those classic menus into the new camera? Or is it a completely new, foreign, strange and wonderful system for determining the image characteristics?

And ... I hate to ask... considering all the perceived malice in the last days .... but I get the impression that the cameras were handed out to the opinion leaders by the Panasonic engineers, or at least by someone really familiar with the cameras. Did the proud Panny mommas and poppas not take a couple of minutes to give some motherly+fatherly advice and say - "hey, use cine-d and crank that sharpness and contrast all the way down... it'll give you the flat, feathery filmic look that every American forum has been talking about for the last two years...."

But I'm assuming that didn't happen, and the shooters were left to their own wits + expertise. Which is actually good, because it simulates the experience of many of us in the wild, renting or borrowing the camera for the first time.
 
The menu settings are all the same. Presumably they do similar things, but -- it's a new camera with a new sensor, and things work a little differently. I originally told Philip to go with -2 on the detail settings, because that's what we normally use on the others. But -2 resulted in some visible halos on fine detail, moreso than I've noticed on the other cameras, so I ended up recommending he go with -4. Also, on the DVX and others, you usually had to adjust the chroma phase to -4 before you got proper balanced color rendition. I tried -4 on the AF100, and the color was slightly off. I've since found that the AF100 looks like it's properly colored and balanced at chroma phase zero. But to really know, it takes charts and proper lights. I had my Cambook, which is okay, but not like my normal arsenal. And my lighting kit consisted of a little on-camera LED, which I don't even know what the color temp of it is -- so the point is, while all the settings in the menus are the same, the actual performance in the camera can differ. Actually this was the same with the others as well -- putting the same settings in an HVX and a DVX did not result in interchangeable footage.

You'd think it would be simpler than it is. You'd think it should have been obvious, and that I should have been able to just rattle off a stock recipe that would make everyone's footage look great. But it doesn't work that way. Each new model has to be evaluated on its own to find out which settings perform best.

And no, the engineers didn't offer motherly+fatherly advice. Most of them barely spoke any english at all. We already have their advice anyway -- they created the stock scene files ("b-stretch", "spark", etc). Obviously those were their suggestions, but most of us don't use those. The cine-D setting gets used a lot I guess, and maybe spark for the wedding guys, but ... that's about all of the suggestions we got.

Time and experience will result in a substantial improvement in the quality of footage we can produce with these cameras.
 
That's what I was getting a sense of- that like the DVX and HVX, the scales are different.
It will be interesting to see if it can be boiled down to something like AF100 -5 is the same as HVX -2 or whether it's something more nuanced.

Thanks again for all your efforts Barry.
 
THIS is exactly the type of thread I've been waiting for... even though it isn't quite ready yet... I'll be glad when the speculation ends and the practical begins.
It's going to be an interesting year.
 
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