PandoraFilmmaker
Member
I'm thinking this may be a general problem with HDV, but this has been my experience so far. I was shooting interviews for a PR film. In the flip out monitor , the exposure looked great. Didn't have a professional feild monitor with us, but were using a cheap flat screen TV monitor also - mostly to check framing. When I digitized the material, it looked gorgeous on the HD Apple computor monitor. But on the NTSC monitor, not so good. Almost no contrast to the blacks. For example, one of the subjects was wearing a black jacket, and it looked like one big mass of black. True, we had a minimal lighting kit, but we thought at the time, it was doing the job. Faces that look sufficiently highlighted on the HD monitor, disappeared into shadow and background on the NTSC monitor. Most of the material which I shot documentary style, relying only on the eyepiece monitor, look okay (but still tend to be darker than I thought). Once the material is burned to DVD and then played on my clients crappy LCD projector, it looks positvely awful...a sea of darkness. I'm beginning to think I should have shot everything in SD. I've had other problems that haven't shown up on the computer monitor. For example, and awful pixelated look that I later corrected by turning the detail down. This only showed up in the NTSC monitor. Perhaps none of this will matter when everyone starts using HD monitors, but in the mean time....
Let me know your experiences with this.
Let me know your experiences with this.