Fall Colors- California's Eastern Sierra Nevada

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RenewableEnergyNews

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As promised (probably back in Oct when we shot this), here are some landscapes and nature shots in 720/60p. For those that are interested, this was shot in the Eastern Sierra Nevada's over a 2-day stretch in Mid-October. The fall colors display was in full swing until an early snowstorm blew through. We shot this the same weekend that Mammoth Mountain enjoyed an early opener due to the early storm.

In comparison, Yosemite National Park is on the western slope of the Sierras and is much more "green." The Eastern side of the Sierras is much more arid, and IMO, even more spectacular.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z1y631q2NjY&fmt=22

Not happy with how YouTube processed this one... the edges of the leaves in some shots with lots of movement seem to display some undesirable artifacting. I have a version uploaded to Facebook that looks MUCH better. I'll upload to Vimeo this evening and share that link.

I encoded this one at 7.5Mbps CBR... think I should bump that up and try a 2-pass VBR with a 7.5Mbps target and 10-ish Max? At any rate... my original file is about 128MB and looks flawless, so I'm sure its just YouTube.
 
Here is the Vimeo version...

After a few tests, looks like the leaves don't like VBR compression. I keep getting some "pulsing" blocks of pixels in the blacks and artifacting around the edges that bothers me. This version was encoded at 20Mbps CBR for upload to Vimeo. I think this one looks much better...

http://vimeo.com/9944169
 
nice and purty.
the exposure correction you mention on vimeo, was that to reign in the highlights?
what exactly was the challenge, that you couldn't capture with the camera and had to fix in post?
your scene file works well outdoors. =)
 
Hey Averan,

Most these shots were from an elevation of about 8,000- 10,000 ft so it was BRIGHT as heck outside. Maybe a UV filter would have helped, but a few shots from the afternoon appeared a bit washed out after encoding, so felt they needed tweaked.

The scene file used is the HPX170 Vivid setting (adjusted for the HMC150) with the detail knocked down a few levels. Now that I think about it... Chroma level and phase were probably toned down just a tad too. I really like that vivid setting for landscapes and nature shots... the greens really pop without being too contrasty like the "Spark" setting on the default wheel.
 
you don't have a UV filter on all the time??
i thought most everyone kept one on just to protect the lens. i know i do.

sounds like maybe those shots were a bit overexposed?
i've been surprised by how quickly the image quality degrades if i don't have the exposure right....either under or over-exposed. while i've been able to correct some over-exposed shots in post, they never look as good as getting it right in-camera. i do a lot of run-n-gun shoots and have found that the auto iris does a good job of choosing the correct exposure. when i'm in a hurry i let the auto iris find the exposure while i'm zooming in to set focus, then i take it off of auto iris before zooming out and framing my shot.

i'll have to double check the vivid setting and see which gamma curve it's using. i use a customized cine-v all the time, with chroma boosted a bit and detail down. i like more contrast in most of my videos. i'll have to test your vivid and get back into actually using different scene files from time to time. =)
 
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