7D HELP: Flickering Buildings and on the Water

Rick as well as others, have pointed out that using a HDSLR will ALWAYS have problems in certain areas. You will need to just plan ahead and rent/buy another camera for shots such as the one you having problems with now. Of course finding a different angle, not only fixes some of your problems but makes you a better shooter as well.
Different lenses will help, but that can be a costly endeavor. You will not be able to fix this problem much in Post production either.
Just learn and improve. The HDSLR can result in stunning video, but you need to know how to use and not use it.
I would look at your camera needs for the future, and head in that direction. But there is no need to fret about the 7D... it is an amazing HDSLR, as is my GH2 ;)
Playing with frame rate and iso speed and lenses are all part of the fun with HDSLRs, and will help you become a better videographer.
As always, make sure you have a laptop handy to preview your footage... until you are familiar with your camera.

Dai-Lon
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Hi, normaly I shot inside and in studios. There I use 720p for less blur. It was set to 720p :(

But there is no reason to use 720p.
 
It's the shutter speed that affects blur, not the resolution or the framerate. Yes, it will be more strobbish if you shoot at 24p with 1/120, but it will be the same as what you are seeing at 720p without the fluid movement of 60 fps.
 
Rick Burnett said:
It's the shutter speed that affects blur, not the resolution or the framerate. Yes, it will be more strobbish if you shoot at 24p with 1/120, but it will be the same as what you are seeing at 720p without the fluid movement of 60 fps.
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yes I know. But if I need a higher shutterspped than I need to shot at 50fps and 100 SP because of the 180 degrees rule. It was a mistake to shoot at 720p I know :)

..continue searching a tool to reduce dslr moire.. Just to check how good it would reduce Aliasing on my posted movie from monaco
 
etrust said:
yes I know. But if I need a higher shutterspped than I need to shot at 50fps and 100 SP because of the 180 degrees rule. It was a mistake to shoot at 720p I know :)

..continue searching a tool to reduce dslr moire.. Just to check how good it would reduce Aliasing on my posted movie from monaco
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Rules are meant to be broken...... Forget about the 180 rule and just try different things. In College I learned how artists came up with their own techniques to achieve amazing work, sometimes you just need to experiment.


Heck, why don't you slap A Canon Fd lens on your camera and do the same shot.... You might get an amazing Dreamy look that looks wonderful. As stated in a earlier post, this is what makes Dslr shooting great..... Experimenting!
 
if you can't put the camera on sticks and can't change the subject, it's going to be tough... prepare for some tradeoffs

sharpness and color are your enemies here; you could try a diffuser filter (I have a fotodiox $10 one and it works fine; it should reduce moire and aliasing, but induces a very specific look), or maybe shooting black and white (the worst kind of moire on these cameras is chroma-related)
 
Lets see to the future!!

I have to go to Monaco again and shoot following scenes. For which scenes would you use another cam:

Of course I would like to use my 7D in all shots because I have a Rig, ND Filters, Pol Filters, Follow Focus, Blabla

- Close Ups inside a Yacht
- Close Ups on the beach
- Beach
- Panorama Shots like my post
- Yacht driving on the sea
- People dancing in front of the sea
- Following the yacht from a helicopter

I have a 7D and a Sony HDR-XR500.
 
No, the 5D has the same problems. Anything wide (or panorama as you say) will have a hard time. If the water is choppy, you are going to get rolling shutter on the bounce hits. If you are in a helicopter, if you are not on a gyro system, you are going to get LOTS of rolling shutter. The other shots sound like they might work.
 
My $600 solution to aliasing/moire (which is a lot cheaper as far as time is concerned than many others....and it actually works!)

Buy any one of the consumer Canon's with 1080P 24P and 30P (to match the 7D) and shoot your deep focus landscape shots that way and you're done worrying! They are so small and light, believe me it's worth it....and the image is very good. Use the 7D where it shines and the HFS20/ M400, etc.....where it will shine. Also the Canon color is very similar between the camcorders and the DSLRs but of course may have to be adjusted a bit in post to match.
 
pulpfiction007 said:
My $600 solution to aliasing/moire (which is a lot cheaper as far as time is concerned than many others....and it actually works!)

Buy any one of the consumer Canon's with 1080P 24P and 30P (to match the 7D) and shoot your deep focus landscape shots that way and you're done worrying! They are so small and light, believe me it's worth it....and the image is very good. Use the 7D where it shines and the HFS20/ M400, etc.....where it will shine. Also the Canon color is very similar between the camcorders and the DSLRs but of course may have to be adjusted a bit in post to match.
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There is a surprising amount of truth to that. I have an HV30 (and had an HF200) and for deep wide shots with decent light, they are pretty exceptional for what they are. Although the HV series are tape based, I found them to be THE BEST of the Canon burrito cams. I also loved that they used some of these in Crank 2: High Velocity (I think they were HF100s).
 
Yeah it became evident to me real fast when doing a test shot out of my sliding patio door...I was actually testing the real world DR between the HFS200 and the T2i. (going from indoor lighting to outside) Both cameras actually held the outdoor sky in check fairly well (the t2i won out) but on the straight edges of the frame on the screen door the T2i had bad aliasing where the HFS200 had zero- I should note that the HFS series will show aliasing from time to time (like many cams) just not nearly on the level of the DSLRs.

The HFS series also will allow you to do shots where you want stability via the great OIS....that would require a full on rig to do with a DSLR. Sorry if I'm going on so much about these cams....but I really believe people who can't afford an AF100 or FS100 are missing the boat and causing themselves a lot of headache by not going the DSLR/high end consumer cam combo route. So many issues can be solved it's silly and when used in conjunction they can rival very expensive set ups.
 
etrust said:
So should I use my Sony Hdr xr500 for critical (moire) shots?
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The reason I suggested the Canon models is that they shoot at 24P and 30P and would be easier in post with the 7D than the XR500, because it only shoots interlaced if I'm not mistaken.
It still should give you much better deep focus shots than the 7D, but I don't know how much pain it would be to get the interlaced and progressive formats working together in your NLE.
If that's not an issue for your workflow I would use it anywhere where it will beat the 7D - (That Sony OIS is unbeatable) Stable tracking shots of subjects in motion, deep focus landscapes or deep focus urban scenes, etc.

The 7D will shine on close ups, shallow dof beauty shots and of course low light scenes.
 
pulpfiction007 said:
but on the straight edges of the frame on the screen door the T2i had bad aliasing where the HFS200 had zero- I should note that the HFS series will show aliasing from time to time (like many cams) just not nearly on the level of the DSLRs.
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Right- the reasoning is quite simple: The Canon DSLRs have very large 18Mpix sensors. 1080p only requires about 2Mpix of that.
The way the Digic 4 chip compresses video is to skip all the irrelevant lines and just capture what is coming off of 2Mpix worth of sensor pixels. That means entire rows and columns of definition are being skipped over, and since each pixel is so small, entire sections of definition are missing (instead of having larger pixels closer together as would be the case on a lower-resolution sensor). Those missing areas are then supposed to be approximated by the encoding algorithm, which results in artifacts on sharp jagged lines that aren't perfectly straight (part of the line lands on a pixel, while the next part may not, causing a jagged no-entirely-there line).

The reason the smaller cams shine here, is that they have lower resolution to begin with, so we aren't actually skipping many lines, if any at all.
This is why the Canon T3i's zoom crop mode actually alleviates a lot of the aliasing/moire problems to begin with: You are using 2mpix worth of pixels in a smaller, closer together formation, instead of spreading out over the 18mpix sensor.

Just figured it was worth mentioning in case anyone was about to ask "why can't they just make their DSLRs record without moire/aliasing like they can with the burrito cams?".
Ironically, the problem here is that our sensors are TOO detailed!

The next wave of DSLRs with the Digic 5 chip, should hopefully solve our problems by NOT skipping lines, but rather scaling down a full sized image to 1080p in real time (this is I believe how the GH2 manages to get around the problem as well).
 
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This is why the Canon T3i's zoom crop mode actually alleviates a lot of the aliasing/moire problems to begin with
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so do i understand, if you activate the digital zoom at say the min 3x then compensate for that with a wider lens. you would stand better chances of avoiding the moire?
 
Rick Burnett said:
No, the 5D has the same problems. Anything wide (or panorama as you say) will have a hard time. If the water is choppy, you are going to get rolling shutter on the bounce hits. If you are in a helicopter, if you are not on a gyro system, you are going to get LOTS of rolling shutter. The other shots sound like they might work.
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If I were shooting a Music Video with a wide angle lens, think tokina 11-16mm shooting in a helicopter with my settings at 720 60fps for slow motion, I'm more than sure I can get some really nice footage

Thoughts?
 
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