Bill Ravens
Forum Replies Created
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Point made, Michael. However, if you want to take short cuts, regardless of the inconvenience, then you should be prepared for the consequences. I have no issues with using headphones with run and gun. And I would never rely on AGC, but, that’s just my opinion. I can, certainly, understand your point of view.
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My experience with AGC on any camera, is that it’s worthless. Recommendation no.1 is to ALWAYS monitor your audio with headphones. Recommendation 2 is never use AGC. Use of the in-camera limiter is advisable, unless you get pumping, as said earlier. For the best quality possible, I would use an offboard compressor/limiter. Nightclubs are particularly difficult venues for music recording due to the dynamic range encountered, especially with loud bands.
As a side note, -6dB of attenuation is fine if you’re talking about peak levels, however, -20dB is a recommended level of you’re speaking in terms of RMS levels. It’s important to know what kind of limiting your camera has.
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Hans,
I’ve never been able to successfully export the proper gamma from Avid into H.264. Personally, if you’re working on a PC, my workflow is to export the timeline as a Quicktime Reference, then use the QTref as input to MPEG_STREAMCLIP, which is freeware. Within MPEG_STREAMLIP you can setup a template as follows:
Limit Datarate: 8 Mbps
Check:Frameblending
Check: Better Downscaling
Check: Deinterlace Video (trust me on this one)I think you’ll find the output better than any other encoder.
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The PVC article is only part of the story, where the EX1 is concerned. In reality, for the EX1, there is no appreciable increase in noise at a setting -3dB of gain. However, having said that, it is also important to note that the high-lights are rolled off at a knee that prevents full range images above 90% IRE. In my mind, this is undesirable. My general rule is, if I am shooting an bright, even light, with no specular highlites I need to capture, I will use a gain of -3dB when I need to open the aperture, for whatever reason. Clearly, you’ll clip those hilights in any condition of -3dB.
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It’s a fairly well documented fact that when you turn “sharpening” on in the EX1, the default setting of “zero” is actuall introducing some level of sharpening. The recommended choice for no sharpening is to keep it off in the menu, or set the level to around -40.
As everyone has already said, using in-camera sharpening produces line twitter and increases the bandwidth needed for in camera compression, reducing overall image quality. IOW, I stay away from in cam sharpening. -
The audio contained in the mxf file is embedded in the mxf wrapper and needs to be disembedded to play back. There is a glitch in some of the earlier 3rd party disembedders that causes random white noise on one channel of the audio file. Avid MC had this problem, as well as Sony vegas, but the problem was resolved in the latest releases of this software.
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Your solution is to transcode to Cineform Intermediate with HDLINK. Always works for me.
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no…disable resample is the right thing to do. I wish there was a way to PERMANENTLY disable resample as it causes many problems when conforming frame rate
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Craig…
Frequency affects the “ringing” that occurs near the edges. Edge sharpening, as that influenced by the Detail setting has strange effects when applied to mpeg compression. My own preferences are for detail set to off. -
The EX1 applies some level of sharpening, even when the Detail setting is turned on and the level is set to zero. If you want the equivalent to turning Detail to ‘off’, you must set the Level to -40.
In other words, if you want more sharpening than “off’, but less than the default setting, turn the Detail to on, and set something like Level=-20. You can also play with thef requency setting. Try something like Detail =-15 and frequency=44