What settings to pump up detail for projection?

nedcam

nedcam

Well-known member
Hi Guys,

Most of my AF100 work ends up on the web, sometimes on large plasma screens, TV once in a blue moon. I am shooting a job coming up this Tuesday which will be a montage of talking heads and it will end up being projected large, at least 15' wide, then onto the client's website. Thus far I have felt the AF100 is on the soft side even when using primes, my usual settings in 1080/30 involving sharpness are:

Detail Level -3
V Detail -4
Detail Coring -3
Matrix Norm 1
Gamma Cine Like D
Shutter at 1/60th
ISO for interiors either 400 or 640
Usually in -3db
Shoot one or two stops down from the lens being wide open.

I arrived at these settings over time collecting tid bits from Barry's book and experts active on this forum when I first got my AF100. PLUS I AM SHOOTING THROUGH MY TELEPROMPTER MIRROR which will have the interviewer's face on it, it may be my imagination but I feel it can slightly degrade like a glass filter can. I am afraid that since projection always seems to soften the image I should crank up my sharpness and perhaps dumb it down when I export for the web version? I don't think the crowd would be aware of noise. Probably on two drinks by the time the video rolls.

Any suggestions? Do people make two separate outputs, one cranked up in detail for projection the other normal for the web?

Thanks
 
Sorry, I meant to elaborate further but my wifi went down after my first sentence. To my eye, black press w/ detail level set to 0 gives the most perceived resolution the camera can offer. I can't find it now but there was another thread recently that discussed black press and sharpness wi the af100. When I switched from cine d to black press, I saw a marked increase in sharpness from the images. You will loose some dr, but you can adjust the master ped to you liking to compensate.
 
Black Press doesn't actually resolve any more information; rather it just makes the image contrastier, and contrast is one way we perceive sharpness (perception of sharpness is a combination of contrast and resolution). Black Press does "up" the detail level as compared to cine-D, but then again all gammas other than cine gammas have increased detail in them; the cine gammas have about half as much detail/edge enhancement as cine gammas do.

As for big-screen projection -- don't sweat it. You're likely going to love it. People who saw HVX footage on the big screen thought it looked incredible. Remember that with a big-screen projection you're not sitting a foot away from the screen, so you're not going to be hyper-analyzing pixels and detail. I'm sure it'll look plenty fine.

If you want to make a separate, edge-enhanced version for bigscreen presentation you can, but I usually advise against it because on a magnified display that's where you're more likely to make out and discern the edge-enhancement effects...
 
I'm either on Cine D or B.Press. They are very different but B.Press seems to pop very clean to me due to the added contrast . Try it out with a test. Either setting will be great projected. Use the one that suits the look you want.

You know, that "softness" I perceive as a smoothness and I am often very grateful for it in the AF100. I wouldn't worry about projecting it one bit. Our own Bgunda has his beautiful "Siddarth" screening at Toronto and that was shot on... that's right, an AF100! http://www.dvxuser.com/V6/showthrea...l-be-premiering-at-Venice!&highlight=Siddarth
 
I used these settings for the last film I was DP on;

http://www.dvxuser.com/V6/showthread.php?312298-I-Still-Love-My-AF100-0)

Detail -2, V/Detail -2, Coring -2, Chroma -4, Cine-V, and Norm 1

we did test this on a 1080 DLP projector at around 3 meters wide as our only bench mark testing for festivals. I do a lot of local live corporate jobs (multiple screens around an event to see the main person on stage) and I usually tweak my above settings (mostly the chroma and detail) for the screens (80 inch plasmas via SDI). I've always been more impressed with the AF100 on a larger canvas
 
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