PMW 200 Picture Profiles

K

klfi

Active member
My new PMW 200 arrived. Where can i find some custom made Picture Profiles? The only one i found was Alister Chapman ASIA1.

I also tried to connect PMW 200 to Adobe On Location 5.1 to develope profiles, but it did not work. Does sombody have ideas how to manage this, which cabel connections and which settings in PM200 are required ?

Thanks for help.
klfi
 
Hallo Doug,
you DVD ... "handling PMW 200" arrived. Very good and helpful. It should be watched by every "new" PMW 200 user. Highly recommended.

What i miss ist a little MORE depht in creating a Picture Profile, maybe with help of a monitor or other. You explaine the necessary changes to get Vortex-N and Vortex-C.

What ist the proper workflow to create a PP, how to start with and what is important to look for. How can monitoring be proper set to wath and see the changings "online". Which pictures as reference should be used.

Autofokus funtions (y call them 4) are proper expained but for unexperianced users a little bit hard to understand becouse there ar not much "demos" and examples.

Exposure and white Blance ... well explained and very very intereisting how you did with CT 5800.

What i did not proper understand is yr explaination to histogamm and grey card (not warm card).

I am using F3 s-Log too and followed yr discussions (thread black and white man) about proper exposure-helpers.

Master exposeure i set in F-3 s-log using "center mark" to a greycard (18%) 38 IRE, check zebra highlights not abouve 70 IRE and have a eye on skin ton to maybe 42-45.
If is do so Histogtamm raises in general 1/4 left from right corner.

How could the similar workflow in PMW 200 be ?
Grey to 50 IRE ?
Skin to 65-70 IRE ?
White to 90-95 ?

Thanks for your response.
Congratuations to "DVD handling PMW 200".

Klaus, Austria
 
Hi Klaus,

Thank you for your feedback on my PMW-200 training DVD and I really appreciate your comments. It is always great to hear the thoughts of people who have watched one of my DVDs, and believe me, it does have influence on how I produce any future videos. Your points are perfectly valid and I won't argue with you that things could be done differently or that I could have gone into even more detail, but at three hours long I have to use my best judgement as to what to include. I'll address some of the points you brought up just to provide some clarification, but I'm not making excuses or saying your points don't have merit.

First of all, when it comes to picture profiles most people do not have the necessary monitors, scopes, and charts to create their own. I do ahve those things, and so I provide the exact settings that I use myself after a lot of time working on them. In fact, I keep a log book and all of my camcorder training DVDs take about 400 hours of work to research, write, shoot, edit, etc. And I am not a slow worker! :-)

With most cameras I only need one or two profiles. I do not subscribe to the notion that a cameraman needs a dozen profiles for every type of shooting scenario. I beleive that only one or two PP's are needed for everything, and so that is what I teach in my videos. It would be dishonest for me to go on and on about all the settings and act like they should all be changed and modified when I don't actually believe it. As I say in the DVD, only a half-dozen settings need to be changed and the rest will either make such a slight difference you won't be able to see it, or provide a worse picture.

There is no magical set of settings beyond the ones I provide that is suddenly going to improve the performance of the camera or provide a noticably better picture. It just isn't going to happen and I feel it's a waste of time to try. I could add another half-hour just on the picture profile settings and viewers wouldn't be any better equipped to change the settings on their own than they were before. You can't learn those kinds of advanced concepts in a training DVD. I takes hands-on experience and a lot of trial and error with proper monitors and scopes. In my opinion, spending more time on pciture profiles would just lead to viewer frustration -- with a topic that they don't even really need to dig into that deeply. You can be a great race car driver without knowing how everything works under the hood. I like to think I am training drivers, not mechanics.

Here's how I look at it: If I was teaching you how to design a brochure, I would show you how to select a font, but I wouldn't spend a lot time going through all the possible font choices. I would suggest you choose a certain type of font, and then leave you to choose the one that you like best and feel is most appropriate. That's how most of the picture profile settings are. There are very few right or wrong settings, most are just a matter of taste.

An important aspect of my training videos is to focus on the things I feel are important to get good results with a camera, and not waste too much time with stuff that I don't think deserve it. Of course, those determinations are MY opinion, but that's what a lot of people like about my DVDs. I'm not just paraphrasing the Sony manual, I am picking and choosing the important stuff to cover and offering plenty of advice. So I'm not going to waste 10 minutes telling you how to do something and then at the end say, but don't use it. If I know you shouldn't be using a feature of the camera because it doesn't work well or there are other ways of doing it better, then I'm going skip over those points pretty quickly. Auto-focus and Histogram fit that description perfectly. I don't think a professional cameraman should be using either of them, so I provide some basic information about them and move on. Not only that, but it is almost impossible to demonstrate how well or how poorly some functions work (such as auto-focus) on the video. You don't get a feel for what it is doing unless you try it yourself, and that's what I suggest in the video. I show you how to turn it on, why I like it or don't like it, and then suggest the viewer does his or here own experimenting. There's no short cut to trying things yourself.

I hope that provides some insight into my philosophy with the training video and I'm not arguing with you. Just explaining.

Thanks again for your support and feedback!

Doug
 
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