John Lenihan
1
COW Coin
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Very Resourceful. Thank you.
JOhn
John Lenihan
LeniCam Video Productions
https://www.lenicamvideoproductions.com -
Thanks for the update.
I am glad you like the ex1R. It is definitely a league higher than the NX5U.
I am glad you got rid of the hdv. That was a transition format and not something to buy now.
John
John Lenihan
LeniCam Video Productions
https://www.lenicamvideoproductions.com -
I think it is good you are doing your research.
There isn’t anything more I can help you with.
Refer to my first post. Buy what you think, buy three lights if you want and try them before the shoot, return the ones you don’t want.
john
John Lenihan
LeniCam Video Productions
https://www.lenicamvideoproductions.com -
The second one puts out more light, and is larger. The second one is smaller, puts out less light, but is compact light the small camera you are using.
The more light the better for weddings. They are always needing light.
john
John Lenihan
LeniCam Video Productions
https://www.lenicamvideoproductions.com -
I don’t have any familiarity with those products.
However, this is how I approach this type of thing and will pass it on to you.
Buy the candidate accessories from a place you can return them.
Buy them well before the event.
Set up test conditions most similar to the type of shooting you expect to do. For instance, low light or high speed, etc.
Record footage, bring in your editor and determine if it works for you.
John
John Lenihan
LeniCam Video Productions
https://www.lenicamvideoproductions.com -
I am glad that you were able to solve it from my experience.
John
John Lenihan
LeniCam Video Productions
https://www.lenicamvideoproductions.com -
My NX5U caught me twice with that trick.
On my camera, there are a bunch of physical buttons on top of the camera with things like menu, volume etc.
Well one of those buttons toggles whether the display in real time is showing time code OR user bits. And your user bits are probably 00.
Just press the button marked something like TC/UB once.
John
John Lenihan
LeniCam Video Productions
https://www.lenicamvideoproductions.com -
I have experienced the same problem and believe there is two things you can do based on what I believe are the two contributing factors.
Factor 1.
The camera subsamples the color. It records with a color sample of 4:2:0 which means is really saying that it only looks at the light intensity for every pixel and the color for every 4th pixel. The eye doesn’t notice it when there are many colors, but for pure colors such as those caused by LEDs and lasers, it makes a huge difference.To minimize this effect you could connect an hdsdi cable to the camera and add an external recorder. In this situation, the camera will produce 4:2:2 which means twice as many color samples.
Factor 2.
LEDs have narrow frequency range. If this is more detail than you want, ignore it. But the world of natural light and incandescent light produce many different colors of varying intensities. Remember that light is electromagnetic radiation the same as radio waves.If you graph the intensity vs. frequency of sunlight or incandescent light, it will look like a bell shaped curve. The middle of the bell shaped curve is what our eye perceives as the color.
The three sensors on the camera are designed to pick one single frequency out of this bell shaped curve. One we call Red, One we call Yellow, and one we call Green. Then it only records those three numbers.
When the three colors are combined, we perceive the combined color the same as the bell shaped curve. But it is really not, it is only three colors.
In comes LEDS LEDs put out a single frequency or color. If you have a red and yellow and green LED, your eye perceives it as white. But it is only three distinct colors.
The problem arises because the exact color red that the LED is putting out many be a slightly different color red than the camera sensor is looking for. In this case, it will not record that LED color red at all. Black, not there.
The options which are not reasonable, but would work:
1. Tell everyone to stop using LEDs and Lasers for lighting
2. Use an analog camera instead of digital.
3. Never shoot in that venue.The only way to minimize this effect is the following:
1. Be aware of this effect. And know that even though your eye in the venue sees the red, the camera doesn’t see single colors very well. This goes for Blue also. For important things, bring your own light or get the subject into a multicolored light, like white.2. Don’t use the automatic white balance. The camera tries to compensate based on the faulty recognition of colors, and ends up creating weird effects. I set mine to incandescent and just leave it there.
John
John Lenihan
LeniCam Video Productions
https://www.lenicamvideoproductions.com -
Thanks John,
I have tried the template thing in the past, and I must not do it right because I end up doing as much work as just starting over.
However, at your suggestion, I will try the template option.
John
John Lenihan
LeniCam Video Productions
https://www.lenicamvideoproductions.com -
Thanks for reaching out.
Sharpness, or lack thereoff, can be caused by a number of contributors. I will explain the NX5U regarding lack of sharpness.
In general, the EX1 is considered a better camera and has a better lens, so it should indeed be able to give better sharpness, all things being optimized on each camera.
I have actually had shooters give me footage from their ex3 that was worse than mine because they didn’t know how to optimize a given situation.
I cannot tell if you purchased a defective nx5u.
Causes of lack of sharpness on an NX5U
1. Its default recording mode is flat, and colors looked washed up and low contrast. What I did for a while was to shoot this way, then in the editor, apply an s log filter to the output which increased the contrast and made the sharpness pop. I use Sony Vegas Pro, and they call it a color curve. I created various color curves for various scenes, dark, bright, etc.2. Later, I started using the picture profile setting while shooting, then I did less correction in editing.
3. Now I have started using a custom picture profile from Michael Johnson in this forum. That saturates colors and increases the sharpness. I use just a hint of correction in editing now.
4. The second thing that causes lack of sharpness is out of focus. The camera uses vertical lines in your picture to set the auto focus. That means that it hates to focus on peoples faces, because there are no vertical lines. It would much rather focus on bricks in the background or trees or window frames, than faces. One must be vigilant during shooting to look for this and manually set focus.
5. The third thing is out of focus due to back focus adjustment. If you zoom in on the subject, then back out, it will be a tiny bit out of focus. It is better to use the view expanded to focus to avoid this.
6. The fourth thing is that the picture gets grainy at anything higher than 15 db gain.
7. The fifth thing is that there is chromatic aberration around f9 or f11. So, if you are shooting a soccer game and your aperture is at f11, you may see color fringing on the ball and players bodies. Simply solution is shoot at a higher speed and or ND filters.
In conclusion, it is possible that the previous owner of the ex1 had set the picture profile, and you are benefiting from his settings.
John
PS. EVERY camera I ever owned has been less than perfect, and it is more important to understand those shortcomings to get good shots.
John Lenihan
LeniCam Video Productions
https://www.lenicamvideoproductions.com