Z1 shooting basketball outdoors

[dcdirector]

Hello all,

Thank you in advance for reading this. I am shooting basketball games outdoors with a sony z1u and wanted to see if anybody had any experience shooting productions like this (anything outdoors with bright lights and quick motion), and if the answer is yes -- any tips or worries that I should be concerned about.

Thanks,
Dave

 

[MattDavis]

any tips or worries that I should be concerned about

Here's an outdoor shoot filmed on a Z1. And here's what I learned:

• Use black-stretch to gain an extra stop of latitude
• Consider an extra ND or polarizing filter to keep the iris open
• For sports, you may also want a fast shutter speed, negating use of ND and polarizer - it certainly has 'the look'
• Slow motion needs 50i/60i (at least until the HVX hits the decks)
• Consider the final output format - if it's plasma, LCD or DLP projection, it's progressive. Deinterlacing will cut your resolution in half (best case by a quarter). I use 1280x720p from Z1 HDV, but the edit-downconvert/deinterlace-compress cycle is lengthy (too lengthy for some jobs)
• The Z1 is a great 'run and gun' camera, but a couple of afternoons playing with the picture profile setups, paying attention to cine gamma, black stretch, aperture, chroma gain, hue and sharpness will pay dividends (I didn't work at it long enough, some never venture there).
• Autofocus is good, but manual focus rewards with sharper shots.

And don't forget TETO - Test Early, Test Often.

Biggest impact, IMHO is with a fast shutter and a careful setup of Cine Tone and Black Stretch, with little bits of blg close-up hand-held slo-mo "bullet time" tricks. FCP has good time stretch, more so IMHO than raw AfterEffects, but you really want a good time blender plug-in check out retimer from RealViz.

 

[dcdirector]

thank you very much,

i'll try the black-stretch tip.
you're right about some never venture into spending a couple of afternoons playing with all the goodies.

dave