Brand new EX1, and some questions....

jeffmiller

jeffmiller

Active member
My EX1 arrived yesterday and I have to thank everyone here for helping out with the decision, love the camera. My initial samples are fantastic.

Hope you can help me answer a few questions, I want to start shooting some B roll stuff for a future project, the resulting footage would most likely be put onto DVD and down res/sized for internet.

Coming from a DVX the HD stuff is still quite confusing, plus Im a newb with FC.

1. What should I shoot in to give me the most flexibility, 1080/60i, 1080/30p, 1080/24p, or down in the 720/...

2. If I shoot some slow mow in camera with the 720 setting should this affect the above? Or should I just do slow mo in post?


:dankk2:
 
If your final delivery is for broadcast then I'd shoot 1080i or 720/60p.
If your shooting for cinema I'd shoot 24p
If your shooting for DVD and the web I'd shoot 1080 or 720p

When you're shooting slow-mo realize that shooting 720 30p at 60fps is different than shooting 720 60p. The data rate is much higher (thanks Craig!) so the picture quality will be better. But some people swear by shooting 720 60p so they can have the option of doing slowmo or not. Personally I haven't done any testing with this yet.

I've shot mostly 1080 30p since we bought our camera in January and have been mostly happy with it.
 
Mitch is right on.

In the HD space, you need to be more aware of your output medium so you can choose the framerate accordingly.

What is tough is when you need to deliver for Blu-ray, DVD & the web along with a "film look".

720p60 is a very versital format as it translates to interlaced very well along with being part of the Blu-ray spec.

Most everything looks good on the web but 60fps might be too much of a bandwidth hog for the web designers.

I shoot 720p60 for a lot of stuff and shoot 1080p30 for web content.
 
Just a few comments...

When I author for DVD release, I frequently favor 24P over 30P now, unless I have to mix with HDV footage which is 60i, because at 24fps, you have 25% more bandwidth available to encode each frame on the DVD and on an upscaling player, output to a 47" LCD, the difference is noticeable. If you want the absolute best quality on DVD, use the lower frame rate.
I don't like the interlaced formats at all because the 4:2:0 subsampling looks pretty bad when interlaced. I noticed it when I tried to convert some 30P material to 60i for a Blu-ray project and found the colors became blocky on the interlaced encode, where they were clean on the 24P encode. I went with 24P and lived with the pulldown issues because there were too many intense colors in the program material and it degraded significantly in interlaced renders.
The jury is still out on overcranked 720P. I did some 720P 60/24 shooting and I noticed that a red colored opject in the picture had noticable stair-stepping and the color appeared painted on instead of part of the object as it appears in 1080P. One of these days, I'll do some testing with a colorful set of objects and try to find out which modes suffer the most degradation.
Theoretically overcrank 87.5mb/S footage SHOULD be cleaner than 60P footage at 35mb/S, but I wonder if the hardware encoder doesn't take shortcuts when it has to encode that quickly, resulting in fast 'n dirty encoding (like they way set to DVD recorders work). Will have to do some testing with that to find out what looks better, or if there's a visible difference at all.
Bottom line is, the EX1 is fairly sophisticated and you have multiple formats, whereas with HDV and DV you basically had only 60i. Given this, you have to plan to use the format that works best with your target media.
 
Some things to know about EX1

Some things to know about EX1

jeffmiller said:
My EX1 arrived yesterday and I have to thank everyone here for helping out with the decision, love the camera. My initial samples are fantastic.

Hope you can help me answer a few questions,

:dankk2:
Click to expand...

My experience relating to broadcast has been trial and error. EX1 /EX3 are awesome cameras but they are finicky at times.

1) Watch your detail setting, turn it off, especially if you are shooting fine horizontal/vertical lines. Sometimes known as moray.

EX1 is way too sharp at times we don't really want it to be, that is on fine knit fabrics on an interviewee or perhaps bricks on a building. It can drive you crazy in any setting or shutter speed. Trust me or use Gblur later.

2) Rolling Shutter, soft vertical blanking from non synced tube neon lighting, computer screens, bad ballasts on kinos etc... Changing your shutter speed can help greatly, play around till you are satisfied.

3) Set the default gain to low -3db mid at 0db, hi at +3db that is standard even with the f900s

4) Take of steadi shot or whatever they call it. (the little hand icon) It can result in severe strobing or judder (stepping) when panning. In general try and pan as slow and smooth as possible, if you pan fast make sure you have a 1/48 if you would like it to appear filmic at 23.98 108024p oh i recommend you get a 77mm uv/clear or haze filter to protect the front glass.

Anyway enjoy the great camera , i thought i would help prevent the headaches i went through!
Cheers mate
 
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Thanks for the responses, so let me narrow this down, I know the final content will be web for sure and on internal network so Im guessing at the end I will be converting to h.264?

With this in mind can I still shoot 720/24p for overcranking and 1080/24p for the rest?
 
Thanks Mitch, I was reading some similar info on another site which only ads to the Newb confusion. If I just gave up on in-camera overcarnking and did that in post would you still stick with 720 30p, or move up to 720/60p?
 
You'll have to do some tests and see which look you like better. 60p will have smoother motion. 30p will have a bit of jutter. It's a personal choice.

Just realize that you'll get the best quality slowmo using in-camera overcrank. But software based slowmo is pretty darn close if you don't mind the long render times that come with it. If your using Final Cut, you'll need Motion to do the best slowmo's. Or Adobe After Effect. (I can't remember the exact names for the slowmo technology in those programs....you need to use the right settings to get the best results)
 
your framerate will determine the look and feel of your project. that should be the only deciding factor. don't worry about what your output is going to be. if you shoot 24p and your output is 60i tv, pulldown can be easily inserted as it has for years. when someone shoots a "made for tv" movie, they still shoot it on film at 24p most of the time.

if you want your stuff to look like video, shot 60p or 60i.

if you want it to look like film shoot 24p. the strobing effect when panning is not a characteristic of this camera. it is a 24p thing. film cameras do it too. try a slower shutter speed to reduce this effect.

if you want a film look but not quite as surreal, go 30p.

as far as deciding between 1080 and 720, it's really up to you. personally i always shoot 1080. it is sharper than 720. the exception is shooting slow motion or 60p. then i jump down to 720, but usually only for those shots. i would rather uprez a few of my shots than have the whole project be shot at a lower rez.
 
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