I was asked to look at creating a picture profile for the EX1R in SD mode to make it look more like an older 2/3″ SD camera. I spent a couple of hours trying various settings and I came up with the ones below.
Matrix; cinema, level +8
SD Detail Level +25, Frequency -65, crispening +10, White limit +50, black limit +55
Knee 90, Gamma: Std 2 level +5, Black Gamma +10
This profile gives some very hard detail correction, but the idea is to mimic an older SD camera that would also have similar strong detail correction. If the detail level is too high for your tastes reduce it to +8. If you would like more colour raise the Matrix level to +20 to +30.
I was reminded of this by Perrone Ford on DVINFO.net. With HD cameras compared to SD cameras the depth of field appears shallower. Why is this and why is it important?
Visually depth of field is the loss of focus as you move away from the object that you have focussed on. If you have two cameras, one HD and one SD and they both have the same lens at the same aperture along with sensors of the same size then the change in focus with distance for both cameras will be exactly the same. However with the HD camera, because the image is sharper to start with, any small changes in focus will be more apparent than with the softer picture from the SD camera. So visually the HD camera will have a shallower depth of field. Now if you take that HD image and convert it to SD then the depth of field appears to increase again. This can be calculated and measured and is defined by the “circle of confusion”
So why is this important? Well lets look at what happens when you shoot an interview or face. The human brain is very good at looking at faces, we “read” faces day in and day out, taking in expressions, skin tone and subtle changes. We use these tiny visual cues to gauge emotion and see how someone is responding to the things that we do. Because of this any imperfection in the look of a face in a video tends to stand out (thats also why you normally expose for faces). With HD it’s quite possible to have a shot of a face where the tip of the persons nose or their ears are in sharp focus while the eyes are slightly soft. With an SD image we would be unlikely to notice this because of the greater depth of field, but HD with it’s visually shallower DoF can show up this small difference in focus and our brain flags it up. Very often you see the HD face and it looks OK, but something in your brain tells you it’s not quite right as the eyes are not quite as sharp as the nose or ears. So this apparently shallower DoF means that you can’t just focus on a face with HD but you must focus on the eyes, as that’s where we normally look when engaged in a conversation with someone.
Ever since the release of the XDCAM EX cameras users have been having problems getting good looking SD pictures out of downconverted HD.
Why is this and what can be done about it? This is an issue that effects all high resolution HD cameras and is not unique to the EX’s. There are two key issues. The first is the way basic software converters handle fields in interlace material and the second is the amount of information in an HD image that must in effect be discarded to get a SD image.
At first glance you would think that starting off with lots of picture detail would be a good thing, but in this case it’s not. Let’s see if I can explain.
Imagine that you have something in you HD picture that over 4 pixels goes from light to dark, in Hd you get a gradual transition from light to dark and all looks good. Now what happens when you take those 4 pixels and convert them to SD. The 4 pixels become just 2 and instead of a stepped change from light to dark the picture now goes instantly from a light pixel to a dark pixel. If these pixels were the edge of a moving object, as it moved the pixels would be switching instantly from on to off and unless the object moved at exactly one pixel per frame you will get a flickering effect. Clearly our nice gradual transition from light to dark has been lost and if there is any motion we may now be seeing flickering edges. Niether of these look good.
Take a look at these images:
The original frame with a box showing the area of interest.
Original HD image
Image down converted to SD then resized same size as original
As you can see the down converted SD is very blocky and there is some strange patterning (aliasing) going on amongst the bricks of the houses in the background. This does not look good and if there was motion the brickwork would shimmer and flicker.
So what can be done?
Well the best way to improve the SD down conversion is to soften the HD image before it is down converted to prevent this single pixel light to dark switch from happening. You need to end up with an SD image where you go from full light to full dark over at least 3 pixels to prevent flicker (Twitter).
How much you will need to soften you HD by will depend on how sharp it is to start with. Simply turning down the cameras detail settings can be a big help, but even then the best results are often obtained by applying some kind of blur filter in post production. In FCP I find the flicker filter works quite well. As you can see from the frame grab below the difference in the quality of the downconvert is quite striking.
SD downconvert with blur added to HD before conversion
I have also found that another problem is that the detail settings on an HD camera are not optimised for SD. The detail correction edges created in HD are very thin and when these are down converted to SD they all but disappear and can cause further aliasing. The solution is to make the detail correction edges thicker (on an EX turn detail frequency down to -60 to -99) but this then looks ugly in HD. The bottom line is that a camera optimised for HD works best in HD and SD will be a compromise.
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