I can't get used to how STUNNING the EX1 image is!

Thanks for your compliment. I posted this image because Basspig did mention an 8 megapixel still camera. But I do not think megapixels matter in this instance. 1080p is around 2 megapixels, more than enough to cover most monitors fullscreen. 8 megapixles just allows one to print larger. The lens and the sensor capture the detail to the max resolution of the camera.

That image was shot RAW, then exported from Adobe Lightroom to 900x600 size.

The point being that even if it was shot at 2 megapixels, it would look the same as the screen we are viewing it on outresolves the image. I do not think extra resolution leads to more detail, just larger detail. I could be wrong though.

I agree though, the images from the EX-1 do look very good. It is amazing how far everything has come in five to ten years.
 
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Just thought I'd throw in a cool shot of the week.
Melting an engine block for Prestone. Very hot that day, 10ft away.
4utjc4.jpg

r8c6yp.jpg
 
Hey Buck,
To keep images in focus that are constantly changing their distance I'd try and stop down as much as I could while keeping exposure. Obviously, by stopping down you will increase your depth of field - but at the loss of light. So, to balance it out I'd play with gain settings and picture profiles to give you the most light while stopped down to increase your depth of field (focal range).

And if some noise is introduced via gain - you can always reduce it in post. It's always a balancing act... Just depends on your main goal as too which gets moderately sacrificed. I'm sure you know most of this - but the newer noise reduction software is pretty amazing in what it can do. I've personally tried the Boris BCC6 noise reduction and was quite impressed.

Good luck,
Lonnie
 
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I'd go so far as to say that a good image from an EX series camera will compare well with a 1920x1080 crop from *any* DSLR camera that is tripod-mounted and taking a static shot. Remember, the DSLR suffers the same color fidelity issues as RED ONE, due to the Beyer filter. Color accuracy is just not quite right, nor is saturation that great--it looks 'washed out'. But further, the colors aren't reproduced as vividly or with as much gamut. When I look at images from single CCD/CMOS cameras, it's obvious (at least to me) because the color gamut is restricted.

Another factor is that the color resolution is just not there. With 3 2.2 MP imagers, the resulting image (pre in-camera processing) is equivalent to a 6.6 MP Beyer filtered imager. All DSLRs deliver something on the order of 4:2:0 or 3:1:1 color subsampling due to this factor. You have a dedicated imager for each primary color. This has other advantages, like higher ISO without increasing gain into noisy levels.

From a practical sense, I find that if I hand hold my 8MP DSLR and snap pictures without flash, the shutter duration is too long to get a sharp hand held shot. But I can get a sharper image with the EX1 while walking through a room. Now I realize DSLRs are getting better, and one made in 2005 is not going to compare as well as a Canon 1Ds Mk III with prime lenses, but it does illustrate that under some conditions, you can get more useable images from the EX than from a DSLR without flash.

Bassman 2003's image of the lion has lost all of it's supposed advantage when posted and downsampled. I have some stills I pulled from EX footage at the Beardsley Zoo here:
http://www.facebook.com/home.php#!/album.php?aid=2034854&id=1531592376

Facebook downsamples all the images too, so this proves nothing, other than demonstrating that great detail is present in these not-sharpened images shot with the EX1, detail OFF.

Oh yeah, my old 2 MP still camera does not even come close to the stills from the EX, and that's compressed to SxS card. I'd reckon the SDI raw output is significantly better, due to twice the color sampling resolution and removal of MPEG artifacts/blocks.

JDDallas: "Cash for Clunkers"?

Sometimes I do wish I had more channels of audio though.

I just got done shooting some incredible fireworks for Zambelli Fireworks on Friday night. Of course, we did the audio at 24-bits and 96KHz sample rate. Reduced to 16 bits, the background noise can't be reproduced accurately. It only sounds right when played on 24-bit hardware. The dynamic range is over 90dB between the mortar shells exploding and the background noise from the crowds 1/2 mile away. I was on the air field, just 200' from the mortar launchers. Stuff that was on fire was falling down to the ground all around me. I got great audio and an interesting angle on the video from 3 cameras. Should be an interesting end product.
 
basspig said:
From a practical sense, I find that if I hand hold my 8MP DSLR and snap pictures without flash, the shutter duration is too long to get a sharp hand held shot. But I can get a sharper image with the EX1 while walking through a room. Now I realize DSLRs are getting better, and one made in 2005 is not going to compare as well as a Canon 1Ds Mk III with prime lenses, but it does illustrate that under some conditions, you can get more useable images from the EX than from a DSLR without flash.

Bassman 2003's image of the lion has lost all of it's supposed advantage when posted and downsampled. I have some stills I pulled from EX footage at the Beardsley Zoo here:
http://www.facebook.com/home.php#!/album.php?aid=2034854&id=1531592376
Click to expand...

Mark, I went an looked at your Facebook shots and there is some detail there. The EX-1 looks very good no doubt. But we will just have to disagree on this one. The DSLRs I have in my experience have a lot more detail.

Regarding your comment about shutter speed & DSLRs, I think you need to take some photo principles into account. The EX-1 most often will be at a shutter speed of 1/60th or 1/48th. That is too slow to freeze motion in a still frame. The EX-1 is rated at around 500 iso IIRC. So to walk through a room with a still camera without a flash, if you set it at 1/60th shutter and at iso 500 it should be close to the EX-1 exposure.

Also, are taking still frames out of the video from your NLE and comparing to the DSLR images? One can not compare the video stream.

It is common to think that cameras are slow when one can not take still frames indoors, but there is not a lot of light indoors. You generally need the shutter speed to equal the 35mm focal length of your lens and overall be above 1/60th for sharp handheld images. So for a 100mm lens you would need at least 1/100th of a shutter.

But there is also the ISO setting. I have found that it takes about iso 1600 at f2.8 with a lower shutter (under 1/100th) to get decent exposure in normal indoor light. That is pretty challenging unless you have a camera with good ISO abilities.


I was testing some other things today so I made a couple of shots and uploaded them to compare. I took a still from from Edius using a 1080p30 EX clip on a tripod with a Nanoflash 4:2:2 50mbps. I took a shot from my 7D trying to match the frame. I then put the EX-1 still in Photoshop and resized the 7D shot to be the same size subject wise.

Now the first thing that jumps out is the color space difference. The 7D images looks great as it is in its native color space sRGB. The EX-1 image does not transfer well to this color space. It looks very nice on my production monitor.

Detail wise, I see more in the 7D shot. And color, well the 7D is not lacking.

BTW, the 7D was at iso 800 f 2.8 1/60th This is in a room with a lot of windows. The EX-1 was at a shutter of 1/30th wide open.

Let me know what you think. My testing method is not bullet proof!

EX-1 shot - 7D shot
 

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I think there's some confusion about detail here:

I said any 1920x1080 crop of a DSLR is not going to be any sharper than a frame from an EX1, because the EX1 is already resolving to the pixel. Of course if you scale a 1920 frame up to 8MP, it's going to look softer, since you're comparing to 4X as much data, assuming the MTF of the lens can fill those pixels with real detail. My EX3's stock lens can fully modulate from white to black in the boundary of one pixel, as in a shot I did up in Kent in April. So no 1920x1080 crop from a DSLR is going to be any better than that.

The main difference I see in your two shots is that the contrast is greater in the 7D shot. You lost information in the shadows (crushed blacks). If you equalize the EX1 image, it too will look punchier. Also, the picture profile can make it look washed out. But I can see the colors are all there. Another thing is the EX1 resolved the text better on the envelope label. I can read the larger bold text in the EX1 shot, whereas I cannot make it out on the 7D shot, though the edges of the envelope *seem* crisper on the 7D shot.

On the ISO, I have heard the EX1 quoted as anywhere from a low of 800ISO to 3200ISO, depending on the source of the information. I would place it closer to 800 than 3200 myself. I shoot at 24P, so it's even faster. I believe the 800 was 60i, which is a couple stops slower than 24P.

For me to get 800ISO on my still cam, I have to tolerate a lot of noise, and a loss of detail. Otherwise, an indoor shot requires a shutter speed of 1/15 at 100ISO.

We can't really evaluate shots at 1/16th their original size with recompression.
 
Yes, the blacks look a lot more crushed unce uploaded. The DVX site must do some further image manipulation upon loading the file.

It is hard to compare each because each one has to be taken out of its native color space (in my case sRGB) to be shown side by side in video or on a computer monitor. I purposely did not adjust each image in Photoshop to show the color space difference...

To speak to your point about adjusting the EX-1 image, I have uploaded two new versions of each file with exposure & gamma adjustments to look similar to each other.

BTW, you mentioned the EX-1 being compared to any DSLR. Well how else to compare the detail expect for taking the DSLR frame down to the full EX-1 frame? I did not upscale anything.

The EX-1 looks quite good

EX-1 - then - 7D
 

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Two more shots. These are 100% crops taken from the EX-1 sized 1080p frame. On my end, this shows the still image showing more detail, but the EX is quite good for a video camera. Nobody would have thought a video camera could be put up like this and hold its ground in the not so distant past.

EX-1 - then - 7D
 

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The biggest difference I see is that you have too much detail enhancement on the EX1 frame. I'd go for Detail Off, instead, as it adds that outline around every edge that screams "video!". I also see the noise issue that has been raised with EX1/Nanoflash combinations. Probably turning off Detail Enhancement would help this alot. Things look a bit different because of the vast difference in DoF, which makes direct comparisons tricky.

It would be interesting to see the EX1 with Det Off and post sharpened with 0.4 radius Unsharp Mask @ amount=75 and see how that looks.

The fact that we're even comparing a VIDEO camera with an excellent STILL camera certainly says a lot!
 
Just chiming in with my love of the Ex1.

Definitely recommend turning off the details - they add unnecessary edging.

I've recently dived into the Canon 5d realm myself, but I still enjoy my Ex1. Not nearly the amount of jello that I get from the 5d (although the DOF doesn't give me quite the same artistic freedom)
 
I had one of my camera crew over for a screening of the fireworks show that I shot earlier this month. We watched on my 60 sq ft screen from just 8' away. I had done some things differently this year, after experimenting with different gamma types, to see which holds the color saturation into the highlights better. Testing demonstrated that Cine gammas do this well.
I used Cine1 and had the black at -3 (so that 0% black displayed with the lens capped) and HiSat matrix with a +10 bump on saturation. This resulted in the cleanest fireworks video I'd ever seen. No noise in the blacks, yet enough shadow detail to see the twilight in the skies at 9:30PM as the fireworks were launching. The dynamic range encompassed both the dim sky to the west and the comet rockets that were launching in the foreground.
The fine details of the 'grains' of sparks streaking across the sky were just stunning. Color saturation held into the highlights, for brilliant and realistic displays of the pyro explosions in vivid colors.
This was encoded to Blu-ray disc, BDMV mode, with Dolby ACS surround at 512kbps (because Encore crashes with the Blu-ray legal 640kbps and won't accept 5ch PCM audio at all. Despite those limitations, the disc looks and sounds spectacular in our screening room, with tens of thousands of watts of amplifier power. My ears are still ringing from the playback this afternoon!
 
basspig said:
I'd go so far as to say that a good image from an EX series camera will compare well with a 1920x1080 crop from *any* DSLR camera that is tripod-mounted and taking a static shot. Remember, the DSLR suffers the same color fidelity issues as RED ONE, due to the Beyer filter. Color accuracy is just not quite right, nor is saturation that great--it looks 'washed out'. But further, the colors aren't reproduced as vividly or with as much gamut. When I look at images from single CCD/CMOS cameras, it's obvious (at least to me) because the color gamut is restricted.

Another factor is that the color resolution is just not there. With 3 2.2 MP imagers, the resulting image (pre in-camera processing) is equivalent to a 6.6 MP Beyer filtered imager. All DSLRs deliver something on the order of 4:2:0 or 3:1:1 color subsampling due to this factor. You have a dedicated imager for each primary color. This has other advantages, like higher ISO without increasing gain into noisy levels.

From a practical sense, I find that if I hand hold my 8MP DSLR and snap pictures without flash, the shutter duration is too long to get a sharp hand held shot. But I can get a sharper image with the EX1 while walking through a room. Now I realize DSLRs are getting better, and one made in 2005 is not going to compare as well as a Canon 1Ds Mk III with prime lenses, but it does illustrate that under some conditions, you can get more useable images from the EX than from a DSLR without flash.

Bassman 2003's image of the lion has lost all of it's supposed advantage when posted and downsampled. I have some stills I pulled from EX footage at the Beardsley Zoo here:
http://www.facebook.com/home.php#!/album.php?aid=2034854&id=1531592376

Facebook downsamples all the images too, so this proves nothing, other than demonstrating that great detail is present in these not-sharpened images shot with the EX1, detail OFF.

Oh yeah, my old 2 MP still camera does not even come close to the stills from the EX, and that's compressed to SxS card. I'd reckon the SDI raw output is significantly better, due to twice the color sampling resolution and removal of MPEG artifacts/blocks.

JDDallas: "Cash for Clunkers"?

Sometimes I do wish I had more channels of audio though.

I just got done shooting some incredible fireworks for Zambelli Fireworks on Friday night. Of course, we did the audio at 24-bits and 96KHz sample rate. Reduced to 16 bits, the background noise can't be reproduced accurately. It only sounds right when played on 24-bit hardware. The dynamic range is over 90dB between the mortar shells exploding and the background noise from the crowds 1/2 mile away. I was on the air field, just 200' from the mortar launchers. Stuff that was on fire was falling down to the ground all around me. I got great audio and an interesting angle on the video from 3 cameras. Should be an interesting end product.
Click to expand...

We love our EX1, and use it all the time, but our Red is not "washed out" nor is our 5D, which we only use for stills.

You can easily get extremely saturated images out of a Red with the latest color science build, including extremely rich skin tones.
 
Robert Ruffo said:
No only small interiors
Click to expand...

The article I read said the season, but that's me relying on an article, written by a writer, depending on what someone said. So it doesn't surprise me if its somewhat off.

I wonder if what they were trying to say was it was used thorughout the 3rd season?
 
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