Richard Ladkani
Forum Replies Created
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To Steve Connor
I just watched your clip of a car moving by. It has the same problems. The car remains sharp whereas the grass and the trees loose all detail as soon as you start moving. This is not simple motion blur. It is compression kicking in. Now imagine this on a big screen without the car moving but just the pan if you want to establish the scenery. It would be completely blurred…even if you would pan much slower than that. Just try again and post the result please. If you would compare that same pan with a the HDV Z7 it would be much better in terms of detail.
Best
Richard -
Sounds interesting but let’s get the focus back to the EX1.
I am looking for solutions to the problem without having to buy extra equipment. The EX1 is the most hyped camera these days. I would like to find out why nobody has talked about the LongGop Problem yet. It is so obvious others must see it too. If not then I would like to know why and how do they get around it…
Best
Richard Ladkani -
Hi Michael
Looked at this Compact Falsh Recorder. It looks interesting but I am not sure if it will solve the problem.
The question is when the LongGop Problem is generated? If it happens before the image is output over SDI then it’s not a solution. If it indeed only happens when it’s written to the SxS Card (which I doubt) then there is still two issues that are unpractical.1. You are generating huge amounts of Data: 2,4 hours need 192gb of storage. An EX1 needs approx. 1/4 of that.
2. You need to feed Audio directly into the flash card which can become a cable nightmare when wanting to shoot “run’n gun” stuff.
3. It costs an additional 5000$
It might become interesting down the road but in the end it doesn’t really help me with the issues described.
Best
Richard -
Hi there
The shutter was set to 1/50 of a second. It was identical on all other cameras.
By the way I was looking for a little brother for my main camera. I also tested a F900R an HDX900 and S16mm with the new Kodak Vision 3. The only camera with the LongGop Issue I described was the EX1. All other cameras performed well on pans and movement. The F900R won as the best camera for the main shoot. The little brother should have been the EX1 but with this LongGop blurry issues it will most likely have to be the Sony HVR-Z7. The HVX201 is also good but it only records 16min HD on a 16gb card which is too little. We have 80 shooting days.Regarding the shoot with planes starting and landing… I cam not surprised you didn’t have a problem as you moved the camera with the planes. If something moves with the camera it remains sharp. But if you pan across a landscape with alot of detail or something doesn’t move with the camera but against it it becomes very visible.
Any more comments are welcome.
Thanx
Richard -
Hi Noah
I just posted this as a new thread but I would like to get your feedback especially. Thanks…
Hi
I recently tested the Ex1 to the Sony HVR Z7 to the Panasonic HVX201AE and found some very interesting problems regarding the EX1. We shot all kinds of scenes incl. Indoors, Outdoors, Sunset, Dusk all in 25p…and watched all the results on a Baselight System projected in 2k on a big cinema screen. The tests were done for an upcoming cinema documentary.
At first we all loved the EX1 for sharpness, latitude, color rendition and especially for its low-light capabilities. But all this love went away when we looked at shots were the camera moved. On slow pans across f.e. a green grass in the foreground and a city in the background the image suddenly went totally blury. At first we thought the camera was out of focus but as soon as the camera stopped the stellar sharpness was back. On the next telephoto pan across the city skyline all detail was lost as long as the camera moved. It was just a big blur. But it wasn’t motion blurr due to the 25p it was a compression issue. On a shot watching cars drive through the frame the cars looked like ghost images. Totally unsharp but when I started panning with the cars the were totally sharp again. What was the worst though was panning across a field of grass. All detail was gone as long as the camera moved and it was back when the camera stopped. But the killer was when shooting handheld on a second day of tests. The person was walking and as log as he moved with the camera everyting wa fine but as soon as the camera would move out of sync with the person he went blurry.Again it did not look like motion blur. When looking at it in single frames we noticed that only every 8th frame was totally sharp everything else was blurred. We compared all this to identical shots with a Sony HVR Z7 on HDV and the problem was negligible. You could see some motion blurs but nothing that would feel unnatural. The images on the Z7 remained sharp throughout much of the shots even though both cameras use LongGop encoding. When contemplating about this problems my conclusion is that the EX1 due to its higher resolution also has a stronger compression. When the camera starts moving the compression suddenly kicks in and makes it highly visible. Even minor, very slow movements cause this problem. We watched the footage on a 25foot screen which made it highly visible but even on a 42″ Plasma a home it was very noticeable. I am deeply disappointed about this as this LongGop Issue makes the EX1 unusable for big screen projects. The HDV performed much better even though it didn’t have the latitude. But compared on a splitscreen with the EX1 it seems to be the better choice.
Has anybody seen this problem or any thoughts about it? I would have preferred the EX1 because it also offer 60p slowmo and is very good in low light. But I can’t live with these blurr issues unless some solution is found.
Best wishes
Richard Ladkani
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Yes I captured from the camera at 50p.
I didn’t use the framerate converter as it doesn’t allow a conversion to 25p. As Shane Ross wrote:“In this video tutorial, Creative Cow Leader Shane Ross discusses taking 60p footage shot with DVC PRO HD and slowing it down to 23.98 so that it’s slow motion. Please note that this only works if you are working in a 23.98 or 29.97 timeline.”
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Just on another note
I hate promist filters in general. They make everything look very 70’s. But that’s personal taste I guess.
Regarding HD and Promist. Using a Promist kills the advatages of HD. You mush your image forever. If I were you I would shoot everything clean and then degrade the image during a professional colour correction with real HD monitors or a projected image just to a degree that you like. With a promist you have changed your image for good without a chance to really tweak it to where you want it anymore.
Re. sharpness. I see that HD looks extremely sharp and don’t like it mayself. Of course you should always shoot 24p and not interlaced. That’s one thing. The second is that when you do an extreme close up of a person you will see so much detail that it will actually not be very flattering. That’s when you degrade in post to clean up those pimpels a bit:)
That’s the extreme sharpness people talk about. You see too much detail especially on a cineam screen. Detail that’s more than reallity sometimes. That’s when things start looking elcetronic and unreal.Filters in general:
I only us ND’s ND grads and the occasional POLE Filter. That’s it. I only use them to control contrast. Everything else happens in post when you tweak your image. Most impoartant is that you have all your info in the “negative” so you can then play nicely.Best of luck
Richard -
Just for your information
The Sony Camera you mention does not record in Slowmotion. It can only do 24p in 1080×1920
The Varicam can record slowmotion (60p) but the resolution is not as good as it is 720p and not 1080p like the sony.If you have the budget I would rent a 35mm camera for your slowmotion stuff. Then you can record in 120-150p (or frames per second) and it will look really great. 60p from the Varicam is not really that slow. It’s only about half the speed of real life and half the resolution of real HD like the Sony Cine Alta.
Hope that helped.
Richard -
Thanks, Devil’s Miner is one of my best films for sure. No I am prepping the next one…
Anyway your option also sounds quite complex and not too practical for me.
I have just attended a HD Symposium in Munich and none of the experts had a good solution for the problem. In the end the only option ist to take P2 cards plus firestore drives and when they are full find time to dump your footage to additional external drives. The risk of total loss of footage in case of disk failure is a reality and everybody has to evaluate if he wants to take this risk or go HDV and Canon or Z1 with tapes.
I am not sure yet what to do.
Richard -
Hi again
The FCP option doesn’t work as you can’t capture in real time as you are recording. FCP only allows you to capture already recorded footage. You can’t just loop it through and record at the same time. At least that’s the experience I have. Any comments on that?