Shooting a stage 1080p locked down? Mud?

Ian Slessor

Ian Slessor

Well-known member
Hey all,

Please bear with me as I ask the following.

I shoot a lot of family events as a biz on the side. Dance recitals, figure skating, etc.

I'm looking to go HD and was thinking of doing the following. Price being the reason.

Pick up a pair of Canon HFS10/100/11 and a GH1. With some minor cc tweaking the cams could be similar in appearance. I would shoot all of my close-ups with the pair of Canon's and keep the GH1 for the wide shots only.

My question? Would the GH1 in 1080p have mud if it's locked down and doing only the wide shot of the action? At times there'd be lots of movement when there are a ton of dancers on stage but you are talking about a fixed cam that wouldn't, itself, be moving.

Any ideas?

Thanks for listening.

sincerely,


ian
 
Mud isn't so much of a problem when the camera is static.

Regardless, between 'good' and 'mud' there are different levels of compression, because the GH1's AVCHD mode is variable.

The more MOVING detail your scene has, and the more VARIATION in that detail, the less detail you will get. There is only so much the GH1's crappy codec can pack into one frame in AVCHD mode, because half the time it has to guess at what frames between keyframes look like - that's something like 19 frames in 20... which is how AVCHD compression saves so much disk space.

After challenging the camera much more over the past few weeks, I have to say I am becoming more and more disappointed with the AVCHD mode and the rather 'meh' implementation of the 720p 30p MJPEG mode as time goes on.

It's only the great 'potential', great lenses, great usability, nice kit lens and some kind of vain hope for a firmware fix that stops me wanting to jump ship to the 7D. Like I said in the other thread, there is no need to dump the GH1 for the 7D just because of a crap codec... but sometimes, it bugs me to hell.

Yet STILL I'd rather have a flawed implementation of AVCHD than 12 minute 4GB files, no AF or AF tracking, a flat screen which cannot rotate and a huge bulky camera with a mirror box between the lens and the sensor.
 
I think the 720 AVHCD mode holds up pretty well. Im using only 720 nowadays, 1080 is a no go for the type of stuff I do.

But a static wide shot of stage it should handle no problem!
 
I'd do the reverse, use the video cams for the wide shots where you don't want a shallow focus anyway and do the close-ups with the GH1 for some nice object-background separation.
 
Whats the point of doing wide shots only with the Gh1, I usually would think the reason to get one is to get shallower dof in a tighter shot.
 
Totally agree, an HF S10 should work perfectly for wide shots (maybe the lens is not so wide if you are gonna be tight spaces, don´t know if it has filter threads to add a wideangle adapter as I do with my HV30) but image quality for high detail wide shots should be similar to the GH1 image, without risking the codec issues.
GH1 would be great for close ups with shallow DOF, as stated by others.
 
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