ALL: Loving my 130 for theatrical use!

ullanta

ullanta

Veteran
OK, this week is the first time I'm using the AC130 for a full theatrical production with complex lighting... and I'm loving it! The resolution is such a huge jump from the HVX/HMC! But most importantly, the light handling - DRS! - is incredible. For a show that would have me needing to change the iris on the HVX 30 or 40 times for a decent result, between fully open and F/5.6, I can leave the AC130 at a single setting (f/3.4 in this case) and get a decent result... a better result! And with a little tweaking (say, y, 4 iris changes in the whole show), I can get pretty perfect-looking results.

The DRS combined with the low-noise imagers really provides a great combination for wide-lattitude scenes. This allows my job to not only be easier (the AC130 is a second cam in a wide shot), but also represents the lighting design a lot better.

In post, I can blow the image up at least 200% and still match the apparent resolution of the HVX's 720p. The reframing possibilities are impressive!

So, really loving the AC130... it is EXACTLY what I've wanted for a long time, and exceeds all my expectations!

The one improvement I can imagine is somehow making zebras a little more apparent on small details on the LCD... maybe color choices for zebras? I'm talking about a face on a 70' wide stage... in motion... sometimes hard to see the zebras!
 
That's nice to hear!! What sort of scene file settings are you using for stage performances??? I will have one coming up in the near future and it would be neat to have some basic scene file settings for theatre shows without having to guess whats best to use.

Vaughan Wood does a lot of stage shows too.... what scene file settings are you using Vaughan???

Chris
 
DRS is very handy for stage lighting. It's one of the most difficult lighting scenarios to work with, maybe 2nd only to full exterior daylight at midday.

For the exposure, try using the waveform. You'll be able to see the spikes. Also, it might be wise to invest in an off-board LCD monitor (because I know you wanted a solution that costs you more money, right?). For events where your subject is a very small percentage of the frame yet it must be carefully monitored, the onboard LCD is just too small. Unfortunately I don't believe zebras pass through to an external monitor but if you get an 8" or larger monitor and calibrate it properly you'll be able to judge exposure fairly accurately even without zebras.
 
...and FWIW, I'd recommend SmallHD. They're quite good. There are other good brands, but those seem to be the best bang-for-the-buck and SmallHD support is great over the long term.
 
I don't like share scene file settings like some people do... not as "trade secrets", but because I don't find them to be so generalizable in my line of work... I find it best to tweak most settings for each show. However, in general, I use Cine-D (except in some circumstances where the lack of knee causes problems) and Cine matrix; detail in the +3 - +5 range for the wide shots, usually boost the chroma a bit (though for some shows - especially if there's a red wash - I'll drop the chroma). I'm still experimenting with the DRS a bit, but 3 seems to do OK on the wide camera with complex lighting. Depending on the show, I sometimes lower the master ped; but not for the current show where there's a backdrop that's pretty dark.

As a side note, I notice that the AC130 seems to be a bit more variable about the variable bitrate in PH mode than the HMC was... I'm getting 10GBs of footage for each 2 hour performance; looking at some analysis tools, some scenes seem to run at a pretty consistent 13kbps for minutes at a time, while others hold at 21. Most seem to be in the 17 range. It's convenient to have less data to back up, but I wonder, does this mean that there's no better that the codec could theoretically do with the rest of the bandwidth?
 
ullanta said:
But most importantly, the light handling - DRS! - is incredible.
Click to expand...

Nice to hear that the DSR works in Stage Performances. After playing with the feature I was worried about lighting during up coming performances I have to shoot. So any change on posting some of your footage?
 
Thanks Ullanta!!
I wasn't out to copy your scene file itself it was just what sort of setting you were looking at for DRS ...thanks for the info ..now I know that maybe 2 or 3 will be a good "ball park" to play with!! It's also personal taste!! I have tried scene files from others and they seem to be totally out of wack on my cameras (like have chroma set to -7 from a poster here gave me an almost mono image!!!) I like to keep mine around +3 ..but then again that's my taste!!

Hope you get some sleep soon!!!!

Chris
 
Hi Chris,

I'm not an expert in scene files as I just prefer to record a good clean image and do a bit of post to give it a boost if needed.

I've always shied away from DRS as all I've read suggested it puts in noise, but after reading this and trying it out here in the office I think I'll give it a whirl.

Also going out early May to shoot several rehearsals (am i MAD!!!) so I can try just recording SD and if if that makes better DVDs, just so I can say I've tried putting 2 hours on a disc both ways!

Any thoughts on this? Anyone used the SD record for concerts?

Cheers,

Vaughan
 
Thanks Vaughan

My concerts only seem to happen towards the year end so I have plenty of time to experiment!! Now I tried using SD with my HMC82's and on tests the end result was much the same with PQ...however I still think that I get a slightly better image with 1920x1080 and you have the distinct advantage of being able to crop the pic if you have to..on my last dance recital I messed up on the wide camera and found that my framing really was too wide AND out of horizontal!! I just zoomed in a bit in Vegas and rotated the image right 1.5 degrees and all was well..if that had been a 720x576 I would have lost a lot of PQ!!!
The other issue, especially with shooting concerts in SD is the file sizes!!! DV-AVI is HUGE so with concerts typically running for 2 hours with an interval you will still need maybe a 32 or 64 GB card!! Shooting AVCHD a 16GB card handles it easily ...I also found (again with the BIG SD files) it take a lot longer for the files to transfer to your drive!! The only time I would use SD is if my edit machine was an old DuoCore and couldn't handle the native format....it really dioes take a long time!!!

I would seriously stick to AVCHD ... even if you use HA mode you still get a good image as the overall pic doesn't change all that much!!

Chris
 
Don't see any reason to shoot SD unless some workflow need specifically indicates it (eg, need FireWire output or faster post processing)... Otherwise, image is better and data rate lower in HD, you can reframe, and it looks better on DVD (especially because of color space issues).

Hold on folks - I'm refining thoughts on DRS and will expound at length in a day or two... In the meantime, is there any official statement of how DRS works? Looks to me now like it adds gain to EVERYTHING then selectively compresses highlights, which has some implications...
 
I haven't really played with it seriously so the real answer is maybe set up a high contrast scene at home and then shoot with the scene file on zero, 1, 2 and 3 ...Jan did link us to the HMC40 video on DRS here : http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4YnW6tHf7Yg

It doesn't tell us anything about the technical aspects but surely Barry might touch on the subject in his book or might offer a few words of wisdom...basically gain increase should increase noise but it depends how much..the cameras are pretty much noise free up to 12db of gain but I have no idea what gain DRS 3 might apply to the image???? Also a bright sun and deep shadow scenario (easy for me to replicate here in Australia) might be a whole lot different to a pitch black threatre just very bright stage lighting???

Just for interest what technically does the "spotlight" feature do ???? The manual is very vague!!! On older cameras it was always to give better exposure for stage settings?? Anyone tried it????

Chris
 
Hi Chris,

O.K. I might give DV a miss. Last November, we sent out a cameraman to shoot a series of concerts, and because the AC130s were sold out, the store lent him a demo 130 for the weekend.

He'd never used one before, but he is experienced, and the concerts looked fine in HD, but when we encoded back to 2 hour DVD's they were soft and pretty awful. (we got complaints).


Yet all the concerts we did with our own 130s were fine, all edited and encoded with the same computer and Edius encoders. (Many were just over two hours on a DVD).

I spent all January experimenting with different settings and encoding programs before I manged to salvage the client, it was awful!

Thing is, I still can't see what he did that was different to what we were doing, as i said, it looked fine on the timeline in HD, and but was "overcooked" on the 'scope.

The main thing I did was strip off the 'enhancer' filter the editor I had put over the top of it, and bring the EQ back to legal levels, I think the new editor got a bit too carried away, and had too much info in the file for the encoder.

Also I used the new TMPGEnc Authoring Works 5 to encode, which took 5 - 6 hours each time, but did a much better job in the end.

I've lent out my copy of Barry's book to that cameraman, who hasn't given it back yet, so I won't attempt to accurately answer your question about the spotlight, but I assume it just lowers the iris by a stop or two when on automatic.

(I uploaded an image on the other thread you were talking on, too time consuming on this one).

Cheers,

Vaughan
 
Thanks Vaughan

Yep I got the image and the dynamic range was excellent..I'm now wondering if DRS would make it better. On my HMC82's I shot a fixed subject in a variety of formats with the camera and then rendered the clips to MPEG2 to compare..the DV footage was a little low in end resolution and definately a tiny bit softer than the HD rendered down to SD... I could have lived with it easily but it was taking so long to copy footage from the card and the HMC's also were single slot cameras so I would have had to go out and buy 32 GB cards!!

My footage goes into the timeline of Sony Vegas 10 in native format and rendered out to MPEG2 and no problems at all. I wonder if your cameraman just wasn't focussing perfectly???

Thanks for all the feedback

Chris
 
The main cause of that kind of softness in my experience has to do with interlacing issues, specifically, algorithms to scale interlaced footage. And this can rear its head at any stage of the pipeline - import settings, timeline settings, export settings, compression settings... so if you have issues, that's the first place to look!
 
Also, from a discussion with Panasonic folks and some experimentation long ago, Spotlight mode indeed takes exposure down from what the autoexposure would usually choose. This was at the time equivalent IIRC to a scene file setting of AE -2.

If I were implementing a Spotlight mode, I'd do something like an area-exposure that automatically centered on the brightest part of the image... but noone seems to do that...

When shooting staged productions, I've never found spotlight to be useful - too dark on most scenes, not drastic enough to prevent bad blowouts on others.

After reviewing footage, I backed off on DRS for tonight's show... because of the issues I touched on above... I'll report a bit later about DRS 1 rather than 3. And, Vaughan, I don't think I would ever use DRS3 (or maybe even 2) on a single-camera shoot, or on a main camera... just for an unattended locked-down secondary camera.
 
OK, I have a few moments... here's my current thinking on DRS!

Indeed it looks like DRS adds gain to the entire image, then compresses the bright areas selectively. This is a little different than what I had assumed: that DRS selectively added gain to darker areas, left some middle-ground alone (possibly playing with its gamma a bit), and selectively compressed highlights. Overall the effect is what is desired, but some things are problematic. The main issue I see with at least DRS 3 is that bright faces in the image lose more detail than necessary... they become flattened out by the compression. This drastic flattening happened even when the closed down the shutter significantly, kinda canceling the benefits of DRS in the dark areas. When I switched to DRS 1, I found I could actually open up the iris much more and retain full detail in the little faces. The dark areas were no as well presented as in DRS 3, of course, but I will see how the results of post-CC compares with DRS 3 on the dark areas.

So, my general conclusion is: Heavy DRS works great to capture a gestalt, and especially when the brightest areas are not what you are most concerned about. If my bright areas were anything but faces I'd find DRS 3 fine for them... and indeed, compared to the HMC150 without DRS, the result of DRS 3 on the 130 for these faces is still far superior. But a yet-better result for bright, fine detail areas can be obtained with lower DRS (I have tried 1).

On this show, I didn't spend a lot of time on DRS 2, so can't address it. My final product is SD DVD, so the fine face detail in the wide shot is not really a concern, but would be if I were to do a lot of reframing. If I were (as I sometimes do!) going in to record a single show, without seeing rehearsals, and wanted a second locked down camera that i didn't have to futz with much, I'd consider using DRS 3 because it gives an acceptable result without as much work, and actually blows away the HMC150 I'm used to. But given more time and the ability to do a little more adjustment during the show, I'd go with DRS 1.

I also didn't spend a huge amount of time with no DRS on this one, but I will note that the combination of cine gamma and DRS works very well... DRS seems to nicely tame the drastic blowouts that cinegamma can deliver, while the beautiful cinegamma look and latitude is preserved.
 
Thanks Ullanta

That is most helpful..it seems from all your exhaustive trials that unless you are really stuck for a decent image, DRS1 seems to be the way to go unless the situation is out of the ordinary ...in most cases it's a great feature to have on the camera!!

Chris
 
My thoughts on DRS is that I'll use 2 in an emergency with crazy lighting, like outside bright sun, subject in a shadowed area and trying to get some detail in both areas.
DRS 3 is unusable, the image quality just suffers too much......bad noise.
DRS 1 has come in very handy in some interview settings where the subjects have white hair ( a couple of times white hats in run-n-gun situations ) with stonger high angle lighting. The hair/hat would blow-out, and I could tell by the waveform that the face was more under-exposed than I wanted. DRS 1 fixed this with very acceptable results. DRS 1 for the win.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top