Need SD Settings Advice due to previous problem.

nedcam

nedcam

Well-known member
Dear 300 Brotherhood,

I need quick advice before Monday! And PLEASE don't say shoot HD and dumb down in post. I have to shoot SD Mon-Wed, then each evening convert mxf to MPEG2 or WMV, FTP the files to a foreign edit house from the hotel (and that's the subject of another post since I never did that). So no HD...

A month ago I had an unhappy client because I shot SD with the 300 in what I thought would be the appropriate settings. The client dropped the HPX300 SD footage into a timeline with their cheap Panasonic DVC30 footage and they claimed their SD footage looked way superior. So I contacted my rep at Abel, also Jan Crittendon, emailed Barry Green, emailed the Midwest Panny Manager and spoke with Paul Celona the tech at Macies who does custom settings. I got varying opinions but Paul said that indeed, the cheap SD camera may look better because the 300 is optimized for HD and I should have a customized scene file for SD. I was planning on having that done but now this job came up. So here's the SD settings I used on the last gig and does anyone have any secret recipes as to how in 480 squeeze I could do better?

Detail Coring +5
0 db
No shutter
Black Level 0
Chroma Level +2
Color Temp Ach +2
DRS 3, but Off
Gamma Low
Knee Low but Off
Matrix Norm 2
480/Squeeze/60i/(I DON'T RECALL IF I DID DVCPRO or DV?)
and remember V Detail is automatically switched to Thick in SD.

I normally shoot with the Vivid setting but I am starting to think that is just for HD. Anybody have any thoughts as to how to maximize SD settings since I don't have time to send the 300 to Macies? I had promised myself that from now on I would shoot HD and dumb down in post but you can see that won't work in this case. Client as of Sunday morning now says to shoot in SD since the other crews in other countries will be doing that.

Also, if you know how to convert mxf to MPEG2 in a foolproof manner that'd be great!

Thanks,

Ned
 
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It will be FCP on my laptop, an older machine that I usually use just for download P2 files to drives.

UPDATE: Client says 4x3 is best plus WMV will be OK. Trying to talk them in to QT. Now my question is: do I do DVCPRO50, DVCPRO or just DV? Considering the size needed for internet upload.
 
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Hey Ned-

Did you ever get a good SD scenefile? I worked for the Fox Doc unit yesterday and they HAD to have 720/60P DVCProHD (which I used the Vivid scene profile.) Producer called today and said she was mistaken and now they want 16:9 480P (hopefully DVCPro50 if I can get it out of her) for next week.

I shot a media training last year in DV using Vivid and it was way, way too warm when I played it back.

David
 
Fortunately my SD client was expecting such LOW QUALITY it turned out to be a non-issue. The reason being is that I had to shoot for 3 days, a giant IT conference that was being held simultaneously in Chicago/Paris/India, each site had a pro crew, we shot in the morning, immediately edited best takes, exported files in PAL (ugh) and had to upload them via the Westin's internet to Paris, the French edited them, transfered them BACK TO NTASC (ugh again), sent them to the 3 locations and were put on hallway plasmas screens. So you can see the quality was going to be ruined anyway. By the way, we crashed the hotel's server because we hogged too much bandwidth and all hell broke loose, being an IT convention after all.

As to Vivid, mine is not too warm, think my chroma is +2, clients love it, BUT...I also use a 1/2 warming card for white balancing.
 
Sounds like that was the workflow from Hell.

Vivid is fine in HD on mine, it just looked too much in DV. Haven't tried it in DVCPro50 mode yet.

I also use the warm cards (1/2 mostly too,) but bought mine before they came out with the 1/4 Warm so need to grab just that one if I can still find someone selling the singles. Guess I just need to ask Doug on B-Roll.
 
You could do what I used to do before Warm Cards were invented: look for a crew member with the most faded blue jeans. Save $50!
 
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