xh-a1 settings

jakatak

jakatak

Member
Can someone please help us get our settings correct.
We are getting very grainy footage on our shoot. Here is the setup:
We are shooting a sermon at a church. The room is very low light except for the pastor who is lit up with stage spots. We are shooting from the back of the church zooming into him almost all the way.
We are currently using automatic setting (because we haven't mastered doing it manually, yet.
We are at SD 1080i/60i .
We have the gain on automatic, which I just read on this site to turn off the automatic gain and set it to -3 if your footage is grainy.
Our footage looks like it was shot on a old camcorder.

Is our problem just the gain or are we screwing up somewhere else?
 
Hi jakatak,
If you were shooting with gain set to automatic, then I would say correct this first and then see what your results are. You don't have to go all the way to -3db to get good footage. Even 0db and +3sb looks pretty good to me but use as little gain as necessary for the situation.

If your pastor is illuminated with spots, also be careful not to overexpose his face. Overexposed video, particularly skintones, can look as bad as grainy footage. Be sure to use the zebra settings to avoid overexposure. If you don't know what I mean by zebras, you might try using the 'spotlight' mode that the camera has. Try this out before your next services.

> We are at SD 1080i/60i

BTW, this statement in contradictory. 1080i is a HD mode.

-Dan
 
jakatak, where are you located in OC? I would be willing to donate some time to the church to help get you set up.

Dan gives good advice, auto OFF, auto iris OFF as well. Put some hours in with the camera and you will be rewarded with extraordinary results.

I don't mean to assume too much here, but if you are having these kinds of problems during acquisition, it would seem you are in for a world of hurt come post production time.

What are you doing with the footage?

Let me know...
 
I was told that once before.
Why does the camera let us set it to SD then set it to 1080i????
could that be a major problem, also?
 
by the way, THANKS DAN!!! I hate being a newbie in anything, but it's worth it in the end when you have it all down.

Hey TODD, I am in Buena Park and I have filming at Knott Ave. Christian Church.

We want to start putting all his sermons on DVD. We are using two canon xh-a1 cameras and doing post production in FCP, soon to be FCP2.
 
Thanks again for everyone's help.
I turned off AGC (for good)
I turned off Auto white balance
I filmed in manual
I set low gain to -3, med gain to 6, and high gain to 12
I white balanced
I removed zebras
I filmed HD 1080i
and it came out perfect. I couldn't have done it without you guys!!! Thanks again.
 
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