XDCAM-USER.com

Anyone up for a quick trip to Iceland to shoot the Volcano. Plan is to depart Saturday or Sunday, returning to the UK Monday or Tuesday morning (or whichever country you travel from). I am arranging Snow Mobile transport to the Volcano for the evening to catch it after dusk when it will be at it’s most spectacular.  I also have an option for Helicopter charter if 4 people come. email me urgently if interested: alister  at ingenioustv  dot com

UPDATE: You can download some frame grabs from the shoot-out by clicking here.

I just spent the day shooting the same scene with 6 different file based cameras. I am working with Visual Imapact to produce a series of DVD’s containing sample clips in their native format and file structure from a range of cameras. On the set today I had the following cameras: Sony PDW-700, Sony PMW-350, Sony EX3, Panasonic HPX3700, Panasonic HPX301 and a Panasonic HVX200. We also recorded the output from the PMW-350 on a NanoFlash and this footage will also be available within the DVD set. The idea is to provide people with a way to directly compare the image quality and workflow of all these cameras, in effect, side-by side.

In order to keep things fair each camera was set to it’s factory defaults. Now I know that with careful tweaking all the camera are capable of better pictures, but it was decided the fairest test was to present them in their default settings.

The scene used in the shoot comprised of a colorful Lego train on a small circle of track, some crumpled foil to give bright specular highlights, a chamois leather for natural texture along with a couple of rose blooms. A metal bodied torch and paint brush finished off the still life. In the background there is a sharpness chart and a color chart. All this was then placed on a chroma key green fabric covered table with a chroma key blue back drop.

The scene was shot at 3 different frame sizes in 1080P25, 1080i50 and where available 720P50 and SD. The scene was shot at 0db gain and also at +6db gain. It was exposed using a 50% grey card measured with a Hamlet Microflex scope to ensure matching exposures. A slate was used at the beginning of each shot to identify the camera, the frame rate, aperture and recording mode. The Panasonic P2 cameras were used in both AVC-I modes and DVCPROHD modes. All the 2/3″ cameras used the same Canon HJ14x4.3 lens but I did in addition use the kit lens on the PMW-350 for comparison as well as an SD lens on the PDW-700. The HPX301 and EX3 used their standard lenses.

I’ll be spending the next couple of days checking the footage and compiling the DVD’s, but hope to have the full set of disks available for purchase very soon.

Well we have just completed the first 3 days of shooting in London and so far all has gone very well. We have been at the mercy of the weather and the short daylight hours but so far everything has gone very well. The firsts days filming was around the City of London, primarily focussing on the buildings and overall cityscape. For this I used my usual side-by-side camera rig comprising of an EX3 on the left with the zoom handle and grip removed and then an EX1 on the right. The rig has a sliding rail for the EX3 to allow inter-axial (separation) adjustment and a convergence adjuster for the EX1.

Original EX side-by-side rig with NanoFlashes.

The minimum interaxial with this setup is about 4.5″ (140mm) which is OK for scenics and the kinds of wide cityscapes we need for this shoot. A rig with closer spacing would be needed for working with any subject matter closer than around 15ft (5m) from the camera. With EX’s this would mean a mirror rig and mirror rigs introduce a whole host of extra problems. Problems such as differences in polarization (and thus reflections), white balance and exposure introduced by shooting through a half silvered mirror with one camera and shooting the reflection in the mirror with the other. On top of this you have to work with one image that is upside down and back to front!

So why do I use an EX1 and an EX3 and not a pair of EX3′s I hear you ask? Well the viewfinder on the EX3 cannot be removed and it’s design means you can’t get two EX3′s close together, the viewfinder gets in the way. However you need Genlock to keep the cameras in sync and only the EX3 has this. As the picture quality from the EX1 and EX3 is identical you can use them together for 3D shooting. The EX3 is Genlocked to the EX1 by connecting the EX1′s  Y channel of the component output to the EX3′s Genlock in connector.

I am also using a pair of Convergent Design NanoFlashes. By using these I can record at a higher bit rate and in 4:2:2 as opposed to the EX’s 4:2:0 color space. Using the NanoFlashes brings several advantages, as well as improved picture quality.

The guys at CD made up a custom remote that triggers both NanoFlashes together and in sync. This makes editing the stereoscopic material much easier. By setting the left NanoFlash to use the embedded timecode from the EX3 and the feeding the EX3′s timecode out to the right NanoFlash both recorders have matching timecode. A single button put’s both NanoFlashes into record and the button flashes red to signal recording is taking place.

The second day of the shoot was an evening and night shoot around London’s West End. For much of this I shot using the EX’s slow shutter and timelapse to give those wonderful streams of lights and people as they move through the darkness. I can’t post any footage yet, but as soon as I can I will. During the night shoot I found my 3D rig a little awkward and cumbersome so I made some adaptations and had the Mk3 rig ready for the 3rd dat of shooting which took place at Canary Wharf.

XDCAM EX Stereoscopic rig Mk3 on Stedicam

For the much of this part of the shoot my new rig was used on a Stedicam operated by DP Dave Crute. Dave is new to 3D shooting so I acted as mentor and helped him with framing and understand what would and would not work in 3D. Dave is a very experienced Stedicam operator and I think between us we were able to get some really dramatic stereoscopic images of the modern buildings at Canary Wharf. The new modified 3D rig worked very well. The principle changes being to mount the two NanoFlashes in a tray under the rear of the two EX’s. A single V-Lock battery is mounted at the front of the rig under the camera lenses. The arrangement is more robust, easier to transport and the the center of gravity is right under the middle of the 2 cameras which makes it easier to use with the stedicam.

I shoot all my own material as Progressive. About the only time I shoot interlace is when shooting airshows where the client specifies interlace, even that looks like it will change to P next year.

Interlace really is a hangover from the past where there simply wasn’t the bandwidth to broadcast full resolution (SD) progressive frames, so the compromise that is interlace was developed to split the frame into 2 half’s, transmitting one after the other. This enabled broadcaster to fit SD pictures into narrower bandwidth than would have been possible for progressive  analogue broadcast. These days with most display technologies centering around progressive scanning I’m not convinced that interlace is the way to shoot. Obviously if your client insists on interlace then that’s what you must deliver.

I supply hundreds of hours of footage to broadcasters, museums and corporate production companies around the world. I have been shooting progressive since 2004. Often I deliver the material recorded as interlace, but containing progressive images. Not once has that caused me a problem. As I write this I am converting some 1920×1080 25P footage to 1920×1080 60i for delivery to NBC. If I had shot 50i that conversion would be very difficult to do and to make look good. Software standards conversion of interlace material is troublesome to say the least. It is so much easier to start of with one frame rate of P and convert to another frame rate P or I. If you start with I then you immediately have a resolution drop if you shoot with a video camera because the fields are created by using overlapping line pairs from the sensor to prevent twitter an aliasing. Converting that already resolution compromised footage to progressive will almost certainly result in a further resolution drop as you will need to do some form of de-interlace procedure. On a big screen that drop in resolution is very noticeable. Converting from P to I on the other hand has none of these issues and frame rate conversions from P to P are easy.

More and more video is ending up on the web or being delivered to computers, so for this progressive is essential. Interlace on computer screens usually looks terrible. In the future it seems likely that television broadcasting as we know it will be replaced with video served over the internet or some other data pipe such as direct to home fiber-optic, again this will almost certainly require progressive material.

More and more broadcasters are now insisting on progressive delivery of HD material, especially for documentary, drama and other high end productions. Often this is because international distribution of progressive is so much easier and the quality better. Sure 25P is not ideal, 50P would be better. But working with progressive material is so much easier than working with interlace.

Just got back from my first PDW 700 green screen shoot. We were in a tiny room and it was a hot day, so it was certainly warm! Everything went well although I have to say that I am really struggling with the CRT viewfinder. I have become so used to a full colour viewfinder on the EX3 that it really is horrid going back to a monchrome viewfinder. I shall be playing with the footage on Monday so I’ll let you know how well it keys then.

We were filming 9 replica first world war aircraft doing mock dog fights. The weather was near perfect. We had a couple of Sony PDW-700′s, 2x PMW-EX3′s and a couple of Sony’s mini-cams, the HXR-MC1P. It was a great day and we came away very pleased with the results, but we also came away with a smug feeling that with the camera kits that we now have (Me and DoP Dave Crute) that we could produce a programme about just about anything at top, no compromise quality. Ever since I picked up the prototype PDW-700 at IBC 2 years ago I new it was going to be a good camera. I am a big believer that when something looks and feels right then it generally is. The 700 is no exception to this. The balance is perfect, it sits on your shoulder like it belongs there. The camera controls are all where you would expect and the HDVF20 viewfinder is clear and sharp. One thing I would say is that having used the EX3 with its supurb colour viewfinder for some time it was a bit of a shock to go back to a black and white VF. Dave has a colour VF on his 700 and it is much nicer to use than the mono VF. We didn’t spend a lot of time setting up the paint settings on the 700′s yet the pictures they produced were superb. Back in the edit suite it was all but impossible to see the difference between the EX3 and 700, both cameras produce incredible, clear, sharp pictures. It has to be said that the EX3 represents incredible value for money and for some jobs the EX3 will be the better camera to have. Especially when portability is important such as on my current trip. On the flip side I do love the disc based workflow where you never have to delete your master clips as you do with the EX’s solid state workflow. The HXR-MC1P’s also produced amazing results and we have some really nice air to air shots of the dog fights. One shot was spoilt by a bug hitting the lens of the camera as the aircraft took off, but in terms of visual quality these little cameras are way better than anything that I have used before. These are for me exciting times. I have the tools available to produce top quality programmes. The whole workflow is smooth and easy. I can shoot, edit and output from my office at the bottom of my garden programmes to be proud of efficiently and quickly, without fuss or hassle. It’s taken a while to get here but file based workflows and NLE editing have finally come of age.