[Dale Mccready]

I’ve done extensive colour correction and post compositing with the Varicam native 720P and converted 1080i. Both have held up well. Your original lenses will work but the format really sings with digiprimes or a specifically designed HD lens, as the tolerances become finer with the extra resolution HD allows.

It’s a great format, and an enjoyable camera to use with nice images. Variable frame rates and shutter just keep getting more useful, I”m shooting a 35mm greenscreen shoot tomorrow that is going to to be SD transferred and then post-produced. Sadly all the resolution gained in 35mm will be lost, shooting with the Varicam and posting in HD would make more sense to me these days, oh well, it’s hard to convice some people.

[Dale Mccready]

Having shot a whole music video at 60FPS without the shutter on, I was expecting really smooth motion blurred slo mo, but interestingly it was a more disappointing look than I expected. When the footage is slowed down I think that there is a need to see more detail, and enjoy the extra resolution of motion that the slow motion provides. I always thought the open shutter trick was great but most people that watched it complained that it was too motion blurred. Technically it is a smoother image, but interestingly not as satisfying psychologically. I’d go with 180 degrees.

[Dale Mccready]

I’ve done a lot of keys using DVCproHD through firewire and while the uncompressed (or recompressed) versions are better, I’ve had no trouble with Keylight, Ultimate and DVmattePro. As a DP I would now always expose the image brighter than the normal if using Film Rec, and had great results with low noise putting the green and mid point at 50% luminance (as opposed to the spec’d 30.5%). Green easily better than blue.

If your eventual output from your composite is SD then even compressed I’ve found DVCproHD better than DigiBeta.

[Dale Mccready]

that vegas casino show is shot on numerous Varicams, but it’s a reality series and so is not the best showcase for the image quality of the camera, or for filmic functions like shutter and frame rate. We need to see a few more dramas shot with it.

[Dale Mccready]

What you could do from FCP if you haven’t touched it much in there is recompress the sequence media using the media manager to a 10bit codec and project (uncompressed ideally) then output the file/s from this new sequence (will not play real time now on a laptop system) to hard drive. Take this as a quicktime or image sequence to your post house for grade and film out.

[Dale Mccready]

You will not have throughput fast enough to deal with uncompressed HD. If the footage is captured via Firewire in the DVCproHD codec then it should be fine.

[Dale Mccready]

Acccording to the very useful Mike Curtis of hdforindies.com, recompressing to a 10bit format and outputting to a system such as D5 is preferable for colour correcting. I’ve done some grading through After Effects to DVCproHD and had reasonable results, but have also done a whole series with a 2K suite and DVCproHD footage upconverted to 1080i and then colour corrected. I think the amount of flexibility we’ve had in this system has been preferable and I’m sure I would have ‘broken’ the footage had I tried some of the grading things we’ve done this way in AE.

I’ve heard said that the recompress from the native camera format DVCproHD (if captured via firewire) unlocks the 10bit and allows better grading. Anyone else able to chime in and confirm this?

But I would guess that recapturing via HDSDI to 10bit would give you a better result. Can you do a test?

One note of interest I’ve found when grading my footage that was shot using the Film Rec settings. If exposed as rated the midtone ends up being at 30.5%IRE. So the division between each control, ie shadows, mids, and highlights can be misplaced to deal with the low con image. Using a curves control tends to have better results, unless these thresholds between each control can be adjusted.
Otherwise lifting the mids just overexposes the shots as it lifts the highlight area as shot (between 40% and 80%)

Just something to think about when grading with someone who is more used to grading footage thats skintone/midtone sits more around 60%IRE.

[Dale Mccready]

Leo you are a master off the dark arts!

[Dale Mccready]

Ah, I think I cracked it.

try putting :

# Varicam exported from FCP is 960×720
1280, 720, *, *, * = 100/100/”Varicam”, *, *, *

at the bottom of the interpretation rules.txt file (mac, there is a similar file for PC in the app folder)

This forces the square interpretation which would save some time.

thanks to Stu Maschwitz for this, orphanage AE guru and creator of eLin. https://prolost.blogspot.com/

[Dale Mccready]

HI there,

I’ve found the easiest thing to do is to set the interpretation in AE to see the footage as square 1280×720 and go from there. I’ve tried to modify the interpretation txt file to do this but mostly have to tweak the CMD-F footage interpretation within AE and work square from then on.

I find this particular pixel aspect system unusual. It’s 960×720 with a 1.33 ratio out of FCP, but no matter what AE seems to recognise that it is 1280×720. If the interpretation rules looked at it and called it 960×720 with 1.33 aspect then it would fit straight into a square 1280 comp.

The real thing in AE I guess is consistency. If you are not combining graphics then AE’s native interpretation would be fine, but I think working square is a lot easier. I’ve asked around and am waiting fro some feedback as to whether there are any issues with using square pixels.