Alister Chapman
Forum Replies Created
-
Cinegammas have progressive highlight compression which in my opinion looks nicer and more film like than a conventional knee. The only very slight issue is that to get this gentle roll-off the compression starts quite low down the exposure range, around the 70% point depending on which cinegamma (same for hypergammas). As a result you need to be careful with skin tone exposure as if you compress skin tones it is noticeable. So keep an eye on your exposure levels and keep faces below 70% for the best looking images.
see: https://www.xdcam-user.com/2013/05/choosing-the-right-gamma-curve/Alister Chapman
http://www.xdcam-user.com -
While you can adjust the slope (gain), black gamma and knee of the standard gammas these are still very different to the way the cinegammas work. The key difference is that the highlight compression applied by the cinegammas starts very gently around 50% and the progressively increases as you go up the exposure range. If you try to use the knee to get a similar amount of highlight compression you have to use either a very low knee point or a steep slope or maybe even both. The problem with the knee is that it is either on or off, your highlights are either compressed or not, there is no middle ground. The more compression you add to any part of an image, the less well it tends to grade.
Where you have controlled lighting or a restricted dynamic range then standard gammas with minimal knee work very well and would be my recommendation. But where you have less control over the lighting or are dealing with a high dynamic range scene then the cinegammas tend to deal with overexposure in a much more natural way than the knee. A typical knee artefact would be an ugly highlight on a face that suddenly overexposes and looks wrong because you go from normal exposure below the knee to compressed range for the overexposure almost instantly. A cinegamma will handle the overexposure in a more progressive manner.
If your worried about loss of shadow detail with the cinegammas you can use black gamma with the cinegammas, just as you would with a standard gamma, so by using a cinegamma combined with black gamma you gain the benefits of progressive overexposure control with adjustable shadow and mid range control.
Middle grey with the Cinegammas should be around 42-44%. Exposure with cinegammas should be alittle lower than with 709 as you want to avoid putting faces etc too high up the exposure range to keep them in the more linear part of the curve. It should be remembered that if your using a monitor or TV with Rec-709 or similar then whenever you use a camera gamma that doesn’t match that display gamma you will have a miss-match so you are moving away from the optimum settings for 1:1 reproduction of the scene. The further away you go from the display gamma the bigger the discrepancy. Sometimes this is desirable and helps create a “look”, but sometimes as with a cinegamma or any other gamma that captures a greater range than the display gamma was designed to show it will result in a flat looking image that may then need grading. Cinegammas were designed to maximise dynamic range to offer maximum flexibility in post, they are not really optimum for “direct to air” type productions.
Alister Chapman
http://www.xdcam-user.com -
The grey door is standard fitting on the PMW-200. The PMW-150 has a darker grey door. It is I believe to make it easier to differentiate between these two otherwise extremely similar looking cameras.
There is very little difference between Hypergammas and Cinegammas, in fact Hypergamma 2 is the same as cinegamma 2 and Hypergamma 4 is the same as cinegamma 1.
Alister Chapman
http://www.xdcam-user.com -
Ihave some picture profiles that you might find useful: https://www.xdcam-user.com/forum3/viewtopic.php?f=41&t=195
Alister Chapman
http://www.xdcam-user.com -
The root folder is the card itself. Not inside any other folder, just on the card itself.
Alister Chapman
http://www.xdcam-user.com -
The lens has a new zoom servo, so slow zooms are improved. Still not up to $30K pro lens standards, but much better all the same.
Alister Chapman
http://www.xdcam-user.com -
Is the knee set to Auto? You have to set the knee to manual before any of the other settings become available.
Alister Chapman
http://www.xdcam-user.com -
You can either turn detail off altogether or reduce the level a little to say -10 and then take the crispening down to -60 to increase sharpening in the low contrast parts of the image, which the EX cameras tend to blur a little by default. Too much detail level and hair and other fine detail becomes hard to key as it is surrounded by detail correction edges.
The problem with picture profiles is that there is no one size fits all set of settings and every shoot will have different requirements. If your shooting beauty shots or people for Chroma key one great trick is to turn the camera on it’s side so that the person fills the frame in portrait. This effectively increases the relative resolution of the person compared to the normal landscape frame. Using tricks like this will have more of an impact than picture profile tweaks alone.
Alister Chapman
http://www.xdcam-user.com -
Sadly FCP will not call log and transfer or XDCAM transfer tool when re-linking files. FCP\’s media management is pretty basic. If the clips it is linking back to are of diffent length it will flag up a warning, but provided the clip has time code it should find the correct part of the clip. I would avoid sub clips if you think you may need to re-link in the future. If you must create sub clips, name them so that you can find the original full clip in the BPAV folder. When re-linking use the transfer tool as a stand alone application to convert all your media to .mov then simply point FCP at the .mov that the sub clip was created from and it will use the clips timecode to use the correct segment. You could consider having one of your backups as BPAV and the second as a set of .mov files. You have 2 copies should you loose a backup, but there could be extra work if you loose the BPAV backup and need to convert the movs back to a BPAV folder.
You
OneAlister Chapman
http://www.xdcam-user.com -
You are using a monitor with a component input and not just a composite input? For Composite you use the A/V output.
Alister Chapman
http://www.xdcam-user.com