Motion and video

Hi Steve and Sumfun, thanks for the feedback. I know I'm in the market for a better monitoring solution than my current setup. The 24" broadcast JVC's look nice for a reasonable amount of money, but I'm sure that for some time we'll all be trying to work-around the fact we simply can't see our material as well as we'd like.

I will try and do some live tests the next time I'm hooked up to something, er, "nice", which is usually only on a shoot day.

As to the whole Panasonic vrs. Sony color issue... I suspect there's some basic differences in the way the CCD and processing on the Pany and the CMOS and processing on the Sony work that would make it difficult to match up perfectly, but I honestly have never tried.

I am very happy with the look of the Sony, running 24p at 1/48th and simply turning off detail, setting black to -4 and doing manual knee adjustments when necessary to STD gamma 3 give me what I need right now...

... that and my cheap SD memory, thanks to you all, of course... :)

Jim Arthurs
 
Thanks Jim.

Let us know if you get a chance to check out different monitors. I've had my EX1 hooked to the JVC at one time, but at that time I was not paying attention to motion.

I have another camera operator associate that uses the JVC with his RED ONE. He paid like $4K for the monitor. I do remember we compared the overall look to the
DELL 2405 connected BM HDLINK SDI>DVI(HDMI). The JVC looked better in just about every aspect, especially color rendition. It also handled the EX1 pulldown correctly for the SDI 24P over 1080 60i. Well, now that's not an issue since the news software 1.11 offers 24PsF via SDI.
 
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Jim,

I just went and read your post in the other forum, and I realized that you may be saying 2 different things here. Here, you are saying that the image does not degrade when you pan the camera. But on the other forum, you clearly show that the image does degrade when you pan the camera. True, the pan speed is much higher, but you showed that the 35mbps codec can be stressed, and that there is significant improvement with a 100mbps codec.

So I went back and looked more carefully at the video of the test target that you posted above, and I noticed that the image was sharper when you paused the pan. This is easy to see if you look at the "DV RACK" lettering. The letters seem to go slightly out of focus when you pan, then come back into focus when you stop panning. Can you see this, too? I don't think the blurring is caused by LCD lag or the post processing, because when I paused the video, the picture is still blurred.

So could it be that the 35mbps codec is stressed even at slow pan speeds? Your test picture is not as complex as a field of grass, so the blurring would probably be more noticeable in more "organic" scenes. So maybe there is some truth in Buck's original conjecture after all.
 
This test was at 24fps and 1/48th sec and does show slight blurring when the camera is moving, but an amount equal to natural motion blur and not greater than that. I should have done it at the 1/2000 shutter speed as well, and maybe will if I have some time this week.

I'm trying (poorly) to say two things;

1.) The EX1 doesn't "mess" up motion by some internal processing that's not related to codec stress.

2.) On the other forum, if you apply the perfect storm of codec stress (very high detail and an insane amount of temporal change combined with sharp detail due to high shutter speed) you can break the 35Mb/sec codec far quicker than the 100Mb/sec variant used by Convergent Design.

It's a perfectly valid question to wonder at what point is the codec breaking under "natural" conditions and that's the grey area. I just don't believe that's happening at slow pan rates and "natural" shutter conditions and normal nature detail.

Jim Arthurs
 
Yes, no doubt motion blur at 24P 1/48.

I'm looking forward to purchasing a Convergent Deisgn, or maybe the Cineform if that ever gets rolling. I'm a fan of the Cineform codec.
I wish Cineform would update us on where they are on this. It's been a long wait.
 
Jim, thank you for doing this test! And Stevet, thanks for doing your own testing too. It's nice to hear from those who know what they're doing and talking about. I'm just going by what I "see", no technical specs at all.

I was watching some shows on HDNET a couple of nights ago and the footage was spectacular (technically... the Bikini Destination gals weren't too bad either, ha!). I went to their website to see what they have listed as cameras and they are shooting (mostly Sony) 2/3" CCDs. Maybe that's the 'standard' I'm used to seeing and it's sharp with motion and gorgeous. My EX1 looks just as good 'still', but throw in the movements they're doing and it's just not looking like I ultimately want it to look (on specific stationary object 'movement' shots).

I strictly go by 'feel', by 'sight'. I'm the least technical guy you'll meet. Same way with my photography, I just learn primarily through experience (not technical stuff) and know what I want and keeping testing and shooting until I can get my camera to predictably capture what my "vision" is. What I see is what I see, and if specs and charts tell me I shouldn't be seeing it, but I still am, I have to go by what I see. I know in video there's LCDs and CRTs and Plasmas and codecs and bit rates and all that crud, but I just want to produce my 'vision' which will look pretty darn good on anything you watch it on. I see stuff on my computer that looks good, and my tv, and when I hook up my 'stationary object' motion shots to these same things it doesn't look how I want/need it to look.

Maybe I'm in the wrong league of cameras and expecting way too much, maybe I'm trying to get the 'motion' look of a $100,000+, three 2/3" CCDs camera in my EX1. I don't want an artsy look, or a film cadence look, I want sharp, crisp, in your face, freakin' awesome high-def "you're there... no, you're BETTER than there!" look.

That's why I wonder if using the NanoFlash at 100 mbps will provide me this look with motion, or if using it to shoot intra-frame will help. Or if I'm simply expecting $100,000 performance from a $6,500 camera. Don't get me wrong, I absolutely love my EX1 and it's the size I need and produces superbly fantastico images, even when running with it, it's beyond wonderful and I'd buy it again (and maybe another one, but I'm holding out for what Scarlet may offer), but I need to find a way to overcome what my eyes are seeing with slow pan motion on stationary objects. Maybe 1080 60i is my huckleberry, I'll be shooting some more field test stuff in that mode and see if it works for me.
 
I think everyone is in agreement that the Nanoflash will make a significant visible difference to what you're seeing. But if you're comparing the EX1 to a F900, I think you're ALWAYS going to be disppointed. The EX1 would have a hard time being a B-Camera to an F900. Their lenses cost more than our cameras.

I think 1080/60i is going to get you what you need. And from what I've seen, it looks very good on our cameras.

-P



Buck Forester said:
That's why I wonder if using the NanoFlash at 100 mbps will provide me this look with motion, or if using it to shoot intra-frame will help. Or if I'm simply expecting $100,000 performance from a $6,500 camera. Don't get me wrong, I absolutely love my EX1 and it's the size I need and produces superbly fantastico images, even when running with it, it's beyond wonderful and I'd buy it again (and maybe another one, but I'm holding out for what Scarlet may offer), but I need to find a way to overcome what my eyes are seeing with slow pan motion on stationary objects. Maybe 1080 60i is my huckleberry, I'll be shooting some more field test stuff in that mode and see if it works for me.
Click to expand...
 
Buck, I've been where you have with motion on every video camera I've owned.
If you're looking for smooth liquid motion, it's 60i, or 60P.

The 1080i stuff I've shot with the EX1 look no different than the smooth motion high quality stuff i've seen on the HD channels.

Again, you really need to judge this after you're mastered your format to something like BluRay.
If you're shooting 24P 1/48 shutter or 30P 1/60 shutter , it's going to have motion blur at
these 180 degree shutter speeds. If you shoot 1080i at high shutter speeds you can get really sharp motion, but you will need light.

High shutter speeds at 24P and 30P, will give you a stoccata look like in Gladiator (or saving private ryan). The frames will be sharper, but it will look choppy with motion due to the slower frame rate.
 
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PerroneFord said:
I think everyone is in agreement that the Nanoflash will make a significant visible difference to what you're seeing. But if you're comparing the EX1 to a F900, I think you're ALWAYS going to be disppointed. The EX1 would have a hard time being a B-Camera to an F900. Their lenses cost more than our cameras.
Click to expand...

Interestingly, by Sonys own charts, the dual codec used by the FlashXDR/NanoFlash falls between HDCAM and HDCAM SR in terms of quality.

Recording HD-SDI out of an F900 to one of these units will result in a higher quality source than the on-board tape HDCAM. Remember that HDCAM is 1440 by 1080 3:1:1 while the dual chipset MPEG2 employed by the XDR is full raster 1920 by 1080 4:2:2. There's no question which I'd want to do key work with.

One thing to remember... using the XDR/NanoFlash is basically jumping ahead two generations of Sony prosumer cameras, since Convergent Designs is exploiting the full ability of the Sony codec chipset. Expect the next Sony model beyond the EX3 to use 50Mb/sec 4:2:2 and the generation after that to use the full 100Mb/sec or 160 Mb/sec I frame recording the chips are capable of.

Regards,

Jim Arthurs
 
Jim Arthurs said:
This test was at 24fps and 1/48th sec and does show slight blurring when the camera is moving, but an amount equal to natural motion blur and not greater than that. I should have done it at the 1/2000 shutter speed as well, and maybe will if I have some time this week.

I'm trying (poorly) to say two things;

1.) The EX1 doesn't "mess" up motion by some internal processing that's not related to codec stress.

2.) On the other forum, if you apply the perfect storm of codec stress (very high detail and an insane amount of temporal change combined with sharp detail due to high shutter speed) you can break the 35Mb/sec codec far quicker than the 100Mb/sec variant used by Convergent Design.

It's a perfectly valid question to wonder at what point is the codec breaking under "natural" conditions and that's the grey area. I just don't believe that's happening at slow pan rates and "natural" shutter conditions and normal nature detail.

Jim Arthurs
Click to expand...

Jim,

Thanks for clarifying that the blurring in the sample is caused by motion blur, and not codec stress. But since you did show that the 35mbps codec can be stressed, it may be interesting to see how much the picture is affected in, say, a 7-second pan.
 
A 7-second pan is real slow. You'd be hard press to find obvious artifacts under this condion. Although, I imagine if you blew up some footage of the seaside rippling, you'd see artifacts. High detail movement can show artifacts.

The soccer footage I posted a year ago when panning fast when following the players I could see some artifacts if I blew the image up to 200%.

Having said that, I'm sold on the Convergent Design NanoFlash. This with the EX1 is really going to be something else. From the examples on the "other" forum, everything just looks cleaner free of nasty artifacts and macroblocks under stressed movement and/or high detail.
 
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