T2i Blown up image doesn't look great
- Thread starter kevinkt
- Start date
How are you transfering the footage from the camera to the computer? You should see no artifacts at all unles you are in super low lighting situations. i have had problems with artifacts until I found that something was up with the transferring from the Canon USB cable. I switched to a card reader and it is as clean as it can get.
coldasice0004
Active member
What is the best way to transfer the footage? I've been using image capture on my mac, then dumping the footage into final cut.
Michael Carter
Veteran
Get a USB card reader - you can get them for ten bucks. Drag the files to a folder on your drive.
As I type, Streamclip is transcoding last night's shoot in the background. It's really quite fast and it doesn't cripple your system when you run a huge batch in the background.
Michael Carter
Veteran
Here's another issue that perhaps deserves its own thread: on my 550d, the LCD is much, much brighter than how AE, Streamclip, and FCP display the footage. If you trust the LCD, you'll end up with very dark footage.
One quick thing you can do is shoot a scene with a good range of color and contrast - just a static shot, a few seconds. Transfer the footage to your computer, and then return the card to the camera. Open the same shot on your editing system and in the camera - compare what you see. My LCD is turned down two clicks from center.
The problem with this method is that highlights that are still pure white on your NLE will be grayed out on the LCD - you need to check histograms for bright highlights when you're shooting.
One quick thing you can do is shoot a scene with a good range of color and contrast - just a static shot, a few seconds. Transfer the footage to your computer, and then return the card to the camera. Open the same shot on your editing system and in the camera - compare what you see. My LCD is turned down two clicks from center.
The problem with this method is that highlights that are still pure white on your NLE will be grayed out on the LCD - you need to check histograms for bright highlights when you're shooting.
Snapper123
Well-known member
Are there any more details on why the Canon cable connector has a problem? I personally think that some, but not all, of my videos tend to at random times have more noise and artifacts than normal, along with generally extremely sucky quality, and I've entertained that it could be my cable, my card, or what have you. My card has some scratches on the gold chips from where it somehow didn't fit into my computer as well as another card did, and it scratched it up, so I started using my cable. But now I hear that the cable has problems!
Honestly, for the most part, my videos all look fairly stunning when I watch them in Quicktime with the player re-sized to about 720P, although there have been cases where not even that helps. When I watch them at full 1080P, though, they look so low quality (lack of detail, too much softness, no depth, even worse than those famous comparisons between video and stills on this camera.) and I've watched 2K Red videos on my computer full size too, and they look fantastic, so I know it's the specific videos coming from this camera unless the H. format is getting in the way, where as the Red's 2K file I watched was transcoded into MPEG4 I believe. To be honest, perfect videos at 720P isn't really a huge set-back, but I sure didn't pay $1,000 for a 720P camera that flares up with artifacting quite randomly, along with it's features *histograms, color shifts, settings* being not very useful at all. *you can't use any of these things while just looking at Live view, which would be 10X more helpful =/*
Is there any truth to the whole re-size thing? If these camera's create videos that don't have a resolution quality of true 1080P, doesn't it make sense that resizing the videos down to 720P *with the appropriate sharpening and whatnot* create an amazing looking video? Or can the same sharpening techniques that Quicktime uses when you resize the player be applied to create a perfect 1080P video as well? Is this truly an effect of resizing the video alone, or is it that when you resize a video in Quicktime, that it prompts the player to add sharpening and all that crap? Ugh, these players are so confusing, and it seems impossible that I can get ahold of a good free video transcoder/editor, all the free downloads I've tried freeze up; I'm not sure if I'm installing them right, it's very surprisingly hard to install crap pulled from zip. files, I never know if I'm unzipping all the contents right.
So, to make our videos look perfect, what is the steps we may follow? So far, I gather bunches of things like unsharpening masks, transcode to ProRes, straighten out the color channels to look less pixelated, noise filters ect ect. Rather than going through all that, I'd personally love to see a perfect example of the absolute best 1080P file someone has ever gotten from these cameras after editing everything and transcoding, honestly! Surely there's a download for one somewhere! My personal goal is to use these cameras for a true theater purpose film, and I feel like I have an eye of what to look for, so I just wish I could personally see the file of a video that had everything perfected and ready to be displayed on a true theater screen! I just didn't buy this camera to be stuck with a Youtube purpose, using this camera for projected films has always been my number one goal, DVD distribution being the second.
Honestly, for the most part, my videos all look fairly stunning when I watch them in Quicktime with the player re-sized to about 720P, although there have been cases where not even that helps. When I watch them at full 1080P, though, they look so low quality (lack of detail, too much softness, no depth, even worse than those famous comparisons between video and stills on this camera.) and I've watched 2K Red videos on my computer full size too, and they look fantastic, so I know it's the specific videos coming from this camera unless the H. format is getting in the way, where as the Red's 2K file I watched was transcoded into MPEG4 I believe. To be honest, perfect videos at 720P isn't really a huge set-back, but I sure didn't pay $1,000 for a 720P camera that flares up with artifacting quite randomly, along with it's features *histograms, color shifts, settings* being not very useful at all. *you can't use any of these things while just looking at Live view, which would be 10X more helpful =/*
Is there any truth to the whole re-size thing? If these camera's create videos that don't have a resolution quality of true 1080P, doesn't it make sense that resizing the videos down to 720P *with the appropriate sharpening and whatnot* create an amazing looking video? Or can the same sharpening techniques that Quicktime uses when you resize the player be applied to create a perfect 1080P video as well? Is this truly an effect of resizing the video alone, or is it that when you resize a video in Quicktime, that it prompts the player to add sharpening and all that crap? Ugh, these players are so confusing, and it seems impossible that I can get ahold of a good free video transcoder/editor, all the free downloads I've tried freeze up; I'm not sure if I'm installing them right, it's very surprisingly hard to install crap pulled from zip. files, I never know if I'm unzipping all the contents right.
So, to make our videos look perfect, what is the steps we may follow? So far, I gather bunches of things like unsharpening masks, transcode to ProRes, straighten out the color channels to look less pixelated, noise filters ect ect. Rather than going through all that, I'd personally love to see a perfect example of the absolute best 1080P file someone has ever gotten from these cameras after editing everything and transcoding, honestly! Surely there's a download for one somewhere! My personal goal is to use these cameras for a true theater purpose film, and I feel like I have an eye of what to look for, so I just wish I could personally see the file of a video that had everything perfected and ready to be displayed on a true theater screen! I just didn't buy this camera to be stuck with a Youtube purpose, using this camera for projected films has always been my number one goal, DVD distribution being the second.
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If people are noticing that HV HD content is better than the t2i/7d than Canon is doing something worse than a simple upscale from a 1600x900ish footage (and they are since 720p vimeo videos -heavily compressed- from the GH1 look better than my 1080p RAW footage from the t2i). WAKE UP CANON:angry:
Michael Carter
Veteran
I've certainly found that going from 1080 to 720 really cleans up the Canon footage; same deal as shrinking a noisy image in photoshop, the noise seems to integrate into the pixels to a great extent. It's hard to judge this stuff from a web file, but here's my broken-record rant:
These are primarily still cameras. Video was an afterthought - someone at Nikon likely said "we're sending a lot of pixels to the LCD in live view, wonder if we can capture it?"
We've seen Nikon address their Jello lately, go to 1080, and that was about it; the 60D is pretty much the same Canon video we've been playing with for some time. We won't learn what Canon really feels about this market until the Mk3 appears (unless they release something that's maybe more of an AF100 type of thing?). The video of the "24" second unit guys strapping Mk2's all over a vehicle gives me some hope, as they say they're getting closer to a "straight from the sensor" image with Canon's help, and they go on to say "Canon is listening" and "Surprises coming in the future".
But I just can't get angry at what we're getting from a $1k camera (other than what it's one to the resale of my like-new DVX). For an "afterthought", it's a killer creative tool. if the image artifacts are really bugging you, head over to the AF100 thread (where everyone is arguing constantly about what that thing will be upon release), but it looks like a really exciting camera to me.
These are primarily still cameras. Video was an afterthought - someone at Nikon likely said "we're sending a lot of pixels to the LCD in live view, wonder if we can capture it?"
We've seen Nikon address their Jello lately, go to 1080, and that was about it; the 60D is pretty much the same Canon video we've been playing with for some time. We won't learn what Canon really feels about this market until the Mk3 appears (unless they release something that's maybe more of an AF100 type of thing?). The video of the "24" second unit guys strapping Mk2's all over a vehicle gives me some hope, as they say they're getting closer to a "straight from the sensor" image with Canon's help, and they go on to say "Canon is listening" and "Surprises coming in the future".
But I just can't get angry at what we're getting from a $1k camera (other than what it's one to the resale of my like-new DVX). For an "afterthought", it's a killer creative tool. if the image artifacts are really bugging you, head over to the AF100 thread (where everyone is arguing constantly about what that thing will be upon release), but it looks like a really exciting camera to me.