News Gamma

ullanta

ullanta

Veteran
Ok...

Everyone who hangs on every word I've ever posted (you know who you are - or aren't...) know that shortly before we had HVX specs I was asking if anyone knew of ANY camera that had an AE setting that aimed to prevent ANY blowouts at all, rather than worrying about overall exposure. For some activities (mainly 2nd unmanned camera for theatrical super-high contrast / rapidly changing lighting) I'd find this very useful).

Has anyone played with the HVX;s News Gamma mode to see if it's indeed something that would aid in such a situation? It sounds like it may be from the description, but without a camera it's hard to tell... so please, any News Gamma experiences to share would be extremely welcome!
 
Can someone list all the modes that News Gamma works in?




ullanta said:
Ok...

Everyone who hangs on every word I've ever posted (you know who you are - or aren't...) know that shortly before we had HVX specs I was asking if anyone knew of ANY camera that had an AE setting that aimed to prevent ANY blowouts at all, rather than worrying about overall exposure. For some activities (mainly 2nd unmanned camera for theatrical super-high contrast / rapidly changing lighting) I'd find this very useful).

Has anyone played with the HVX;s News Gamma mode to see if it's indeed something that would aid in such a situation? It sounds like it may be from the description, but without a camera it's hard to tell... so please, any News Gamma experiences to share would be extremely welcome!
Click to expand...
 
News Gamma works in 60i or 60p, in videocam mode.

From my experimentation with it, it seems like NEWS GAMMA is designed to deliver a fairly flat curve in the highlights, which results in an overall brighter picture with more attention allocated to the mid and high range. This also leads to a slightly lower picture contrast. News Gamma can preserve a wider range of highlights than some of the other gamma curves, but News Gamma is a little bit noisier than HD Norm.

Not a night-and-day difference from any of the others though.
 
Brighter? Really? I imagined it would be overall darker, with highlights expanded downwards and mid-to-dark areas compressed lower down...

Ah well...
 
You can use the AE shift in the scene files to accomplish this by setting -4 or so. You will get a dark picture but your highs should hold, mostly.
 
Sadly, this hasn't worked for me (on the DVX, at least). In high-contrast theatrical lighting, the bright stuff always blows out (if the composition has below some threshold percentage of "bright" area).

In anticipatory response to the obvious solution of not composing that way :), please understand that in university productions, it's generally not acceptable to have anyone's speaking/singing moments be off-screen; and productions often have people simultaneously talking/singing up to 50' apart. Throw in spotlights and a black background... and that's the main camera. The unmanned backup camera (in case one screws up on that last point with the main camera, or needs to cover an edit between 2 shows), must cover the maximum stage width all the time.

Did I say all this already?

Anyway, I always use -4 in these situations, but get a lot of white blobs anyway. And I have an ancient DVX100 (non-A), so its knees are pretty weak.
 
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