Shoot coming up mixing HVX200 with Sony PD170

C

cre8tive

Well-known member
Two HVX200s with one PD 170, actually.

Head and shoulder man on the street interviews, mostly outdoor or mixed light interiors. I have LitePanels on the hot shoe for the HVX cameras, and the Sony will have a 32K Sun Gun.

All will be shot DV, edited and then transferred to Beta SP for playback at a corporate meeting.

I know I will have to dumb down the HVXs to match the PD, but does anyone have camera settings they could offer for matching the cameras?

If you provide settings, please let me know if you actually used them to match these two cameras.

Thanks in advance!

Cre8tive
 
Anyone have any suggestions for matching these cameras? Are there existing settings I should use as a basis to make adjustments from?

Thanks,

Cre8tive
 
Try to get a hold of a Gretag Macbeth ColorChecker, manually whitebalance both cameras under a consistent light source, and then develop an HVX scene file to match the PD170.

Pull the footage from the PD170 into an editor, and note the RGB values of the color patches, then do the same with the HVX and adjust the chroma level and chroma phase to try to sync up the results from the two cameras.

I found Serious Magic's DV Rack extremely helpful in this process, because you can monitor the video from the HVX in realtime and see the RGB values in DV Rack's Spectra 60 monitor -- any adjustments you make in the scene file menu have an immediate and objectively measurable effect. If you don't have DV Rack and have no other tool like this, you should download the free trial.

I've done this to match the HVX to a Panasonic SD DV camera and come very close, but the process takes time. Maybe someone who does this frequently can do it pretty quickly, but it took me a couple of hours.
 
Thanks, good idea. I will try and give this a go. Don't know if I can come up with the Macbeth chart in time for the shoot, but I will approach the comparison and adjustments in this way.

Regards,

Cre8tive
 
You should be able to find the Colorchecker at any well-stocked film or photography store, they run about $75 at retail.
 
One big thing to remember with the PD170 is that it only shoot 4:3 so you will need to shoot 4:3 on the HVX's and not 16:9(widescreen).
 
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