Another wish list

[Jan Crittenden livingston]

Carlos,

Thank you for taking the time for writing out the comments of your crew. I am forwarding them to the factory to see if any can be implemented. There are some areas that are still a little flexible, but not sure if those are tied to areas that are not, so I put it in the hopper.

Again, thanks for the time.

Best,

Jan

Jan Crittenden Livingston
Product Manager, DVCPRO, DVCPRO50, AG-DVX100
Panasonic Broadcast & TV Systems

[Luis Caffesse]

[Carlos] Friction on the F-Stop knob: I can

[Carlos]

You welcome Jan,
I am quite impressed with the fact a big company like Panasonic is actually listening to their consumer base and acting on their expectations. As rational as this practice might be, is not as common as one should think at the pro-sumer level. Good for you, bad for Sony. We are very lucky to have you.
Cheers,
Carlos

[Carlos]

Hi Luis,
My experience with -3DB is with the SDX900, the Varicam and the F900.
Mi familiarity with the Panasonic cameras is that when I choose -3DB I decrease the dynamic range but increase the tonal range of the camera, which is useful for green screen, compositing plates and product shots.
Traditional analog video only uses the lower 20% of the dynamic range of each pixel. At this point, 100% white is reached, and any signal above this level is simply clipped and discarded. However, with the introduction of High Definition and Cine Gamma controls, we can now utilize more of the inherent capacity of each pixel on the CCD array. In fact, the dynamic level setting on the Varicam allows for the use of two to five times the traditional range for each and every pixel (so 200% to 500% more). In order to get increased dynamic range in terms of wider exposure latitude (i.e. as the Dynamic Level setting moves towards 500%), the system achieves this at the expense of tonal reproduction.
By shooting -3DB I decrease the Dynamic Level to 300 (from 500) which is fine for green screen or product shots as I don

[Luis Caffesse]

[Carlos] “My experience with -3DB is with the SDX900, the Varicam and the F900.

Boy is my face red!
I’ve used the F900 and the Varicam on numerous shoots, and had no idea they had a -3db setting. For the record though, on those shoots I was just the director, never the camera op or cinematographer, so I didn’t get into the detailed settings nearly as much as I do when shooting SD. I guess that’s the great thing about surrounding yourself with talented people, if they know what they’re doing then you don’t have to.
🙂

Of course I don

[Toke]

[Carlos] “Optional adjustable Kelvin Color Temperature: Like the SDX900 or many other cameras, we would like to uses Kelvin degrees as a reference for warm & cold temperature, is more reliable.”

I second to that!
Dial in white balance and display for automatic/taken from sample.
Even green-magenta axel would be nice!

[Carlos]

If we had to have a limited choice of Kelvin for white balance I would choose:

2.9K for incandescent bulbs/interiors
3.2K for tungsten
4.3K for mixed lighting environment
5.6K for HMI

[Toke]

One thing which is usually forgotten that when you do electronic in-camera CC, you loose a lot of color info.
This is why eg digibeta cams with optical cto-filter can deliver 10bit colors with 12b dsp.

So having electronic WB might not be problem to hvx delivering 8bit colors and having 14b dsp.
So when there is a lot of room in color space to adjust, it would be very wise to be able to do those adjustments.