Ursa trouncing the competition!

What a hoot! I owned an Ikegami ITC-350 (immediate predecessor of the 730) from about 1982 - 1988 or so.

To be fair, the Ike in that video was way out of whack in registration, and it was running with 30-year-old tubes. It looked much better than that when new.

- Greg
 
steve phillipps said:
It was probably about $50,000 dollars at the time wasn't it?!
Steve
Click to expand...

No, the ITC (Industrial Television Camera) series cameras were much cheaper, a little under $10,000 ready to shoot (in early '80s dollars). The HL (Handie Lookie -- really!) shoulder mount broadcast cameras were in the $40,000 range. There wasn't nearly as big a difference in image quality as the prices might imply, though. The HL's were heavier and sturdier and were designed to be easier to maintain and more tweakable -- but both lines made good pictures (for the time).

I still have two HL-79D's sitting on a table about six feet away from me right now. I use them as props in the video production classes I teach for my high school. Neither one makes a usable picture anymore, but they're easy to get inside of to look at the prisms, tubes and other components, so they're useful for helping explain how a camera works.

- Greg
 
We used to pop the lens on the old Iki's, stretch a piece of black panty hose over the mount then put the lens on to give it a soft edge film like look.
 
BrianMurphy said:
We used to pop the lens on the old Iki's, stretch a piece of black panty hose over the mount then put the lens on to give it a soft edge film like look.
Click to expand...

Guilty! I did it to all my SD cameras before I went full HD.
The film guys have been using that trick for years. I don't know if they still do, with digital projection and all.
 
vanvideo said:
Guilty! I did it to all my SD cameras before I went full HD.
The film guys have been using that trick for years. I don't know if they still do, with digital projection and all.
Click to expand...

Nah, I'm pretty sure everyone just uses glass diffusion filters like Black Satin.
 
BrianMurphy said:
We used to pop the lens on the old Iki's, stretch a piece of black panty hose over the mount then put the lens on to give it a soft edge film like look.
Click to expand...


Yeah, since the resolution of analog 525/60i video was so razor sharp that you needed to take the edge off a bit. :)

(I used to do it too, and had a full set of diffusion and fog filters in my camera case.)

- Greg
 
BrianMurphy said:
We used to pop the lens on the old Iki's, stretch a piece of black panty hose over the mount then put the lens on to give it a soft edge film like look.
Click to expand...
Well, I remember the generation of camera that came before the HL79...... (Honest!) We used them racked, so much of the camera processing controls were back in a CCU and accessible during shooting. The director had specified he didn't want the oversharpened look, and was intending to do just as you say above. He was talked into an alternative approach, namely not using filtration, but taking down the level of aperture control on a shot by shot basis, and the general consensus was that it worked out much better.

The production then moved into studio and he tried to get them to do the same thing, but no luck. Probably for good reason the cameras all got given the same (fixed) line up, so it was back to black nets behind the lens. I'll still maintain the end result wasn't as good. Much better to have an image as naturally sharp as possible with little artificial "correction" than make it soft and then add electronic correction - and in principle that still holds true today. And don't get me started on the "coring" control........ :)

But great spoof video. I don't think I'll be able to watch a real test along those lines with a straight face again!
 
harddrive said:
Much better to have an image as naturally sharp as possible with little artificial "correction"
Click to expand...

True, that!

harddrive said:
And don't get me started on the "coring" control
Click to expand...

I had to look up coring. Google's second search result was an answer on DVXUser by former Panasonic representative Jan Crittenden:

Jan_Crittenden said:
Detail Coring is a noise reduction methodology. If you add detail you can add noise. Adding the coring can negate some of the noise created by adding detail.

It is an interesting web we weave, yes?

Best,

Jan
Click to expand...

Yes, how times have changed.
 
Last edited:
The trouble is that coring will remove some of the noise but also remove the subtle detail as well. The principle is that an edge between levels of (say) 10 and 90% will give rise to a big detail signal, an edge between levels of (say) 45 and 55% will give rise to a much smaller one. What coring does is allow big detail signals through but blocks small signals. The idea is that the small signals will just be noise - in practice it's the subtle real signals as well.

Slight coring is one thing, unfortunately it was too often used far too much. It gave the picture a sort of "cartoon" appearance, sharp - oversharp - edges round big contrasty edges, and a sort of pasty uniform look to the areas in between, lacking in detail. Which typically might be faces.

What tended to happen was a vicious circle, certainly in the days when cameras weren't that sharp anyway. Add detail to make it look sharper - but now it's a bit noisy - so increase coring - but now it looks a bit soggy, so a bit more detail - which made it noisier - so we must use more coring!!! And so on. And to me, this is the very worse form of "video look".

Trick was to do the opposite. Take all coring virtually out - so it looked to have too much detail enhancement - so reduce that, and the noise comes down as well.

Unfortunately, coring was far too often (and depressingly) just thought of as a noise reduction tool to be used alongside detail correction - with no appreciation of what other effect it was having.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top