Simon Wyndham
Forum Replies Created
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You guys are getting the exchange rate conversions wrong. Adobe is an American company (ie they make their money in US Dollars), so lets look at what they are actually making on this price differences.
Lets take a made up example. If they price a download product at $600 in the US and
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You guys are getting the exchange rate conversions wrong. Adobe is an American company (ie they make their money in US Dollars), so lets look at what they are actually making on this price differences.
Lets take a made up example. If they price a download product at $600 in the US and
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Yep, Vegas doesn’t get enough recognition. Mind you, it is one of the best kept ‘secrets’ of the NLE world. I am often quite amazed at how many people I come across have never heard of it, or if they have they have never seen it or used it.
Actually, the fact that some have never heard of it, or turn their noses up at it is quite funny really. If they don’t want an NLE that is every bit as professional and capable (actually more so) than the likes of Avid Xpress which costs more than four times as much, then the joke is on them!
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On the spec sheet yes. But Alan Roberts tests (and he has tested pretty much every single high end high def camera out there, as well as being used as an advisor in some instances in early development) seem to suggest that they are not actually capable of resolving that amount of detail, as he describes from his zone chart tests.
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Okay Mike. That as maybe. But since by far the vast majority of high def being shot in the world is HDCAM, DVCpro100, and HDV, that doesn’t really leave very many, if any, options for people who aren’t on multi-million dollar/pound budgets!
In any case, are any of the cameras around today actually capable of really resolving a full 1920×1080 resolution? I refer to Alan Roberts posting here;
https://forums.dvdoctor.net/showthread.php?p=269032&highlight=viper#post269032 -
I’ve done a quick XDCAM workflow overview with V7;
https://www.simonwyndham.co.uk/vegas7.htm -
115 should be the original release version AFAIK.
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John, turning the detail off is essential for filmlook. Remember, turning the detail off does not actually reduce the detail in the picture. It just gets rid of artificial edge enhancement. And yes, you can add it back in post since the sharpening tools in an NLE are basically just doing what the edge enhancement in the camera would have been doing.
But you don’t want to do this for a filmlook. Just leave the detail off (actually I shoot with the detail off no matter what I am doing. I’d much have a natural, smooth image, than a digital looking one which having the detail turned on gives at all amplitudes). Modern cameras are plenty sharp enough not to need extra digital enhancement IMHO. Especially high def ones.
Anothe reason I abhore detail enhancement in the camera is because of modern television sets. This is the factor many people never take into account. A grade one production monitor is free from any fancy electronic jiggery pokery to interfere with the image, so that it can display it as purely as possible. The average home television set is a different matter however. Most televisions come factory set with silly amounts of digital edge enhancement, AI enhancement, and all the rest of it. Most viewers never adjust their sets after they buy them. Some sets don’t allow these functions to be turned off.
Now imagine, you have your digital enhancement turned on in the camera, and then your final footage is viewed on a modern set. What happens? The digital edge enhancement that was applied in-camera, is now extra digitally edge enhanced by the television set that it is finally viewed on!
This is one reason British Digital Television can look so bad. Watch the BBC News on a normal modern TV set. You can see white edge ringing around the black edge ringing and vice versa!
Lastly, with the lower bitrate codecs at least, having the detail turned on gives the compression scheme a really hard time. Turning the detail off allows the compression to deal with the important real detail rather than having all its bandwidth taken away by all those cartoon outlines. 🙂
Untold, as a very basic way of bringing back the picture in post to look more dynamic I would recommend either a Levels filter or Curves. Levels is the simplest way, but Curves give you more control. Let the waveform display be your guide. The trick is to bring it back without crushing any of the detail in either the highlights or the lowlights. More than I can describe in a simple forum post.
As for underexposing, I don’t think there is any hard and fast rule. You have to be careful with the Cine 2 gamma curve because it already darkens the picture somewhat as a result of its very shallow curve. Cine 2 only ever reaches 100%, even with the knee turned off. In fact there is no point using the knee with Cine 2 AFAIAC. DCC is also made rather redundant from what I can tell because it has 100% output for around 450% input, which AFAIK is the limit of DCC in Fix mode on this camera anyway.
So the best thing would be to use a damn good monitor, and if you can, a waveform display for critical evaluation. I would err on the side of saying to be careful of underexposing with Cine 2.
Something else I would say to be careful of is banding. Cine 2 captures a huge contrast range. But it does so at the expense of tonal range. I have found that I can push it a decent degree in post. But all the same, be careful with the grading.
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Cine 2 has the widest contrast range but a very flat picture as a result.
You need to clarify what you mean by a ‘filmlook’. Do you mean a filmlook similar to graded film, or do you mean a filmlook in terms of a film neg that needs grading etc?
If the latter, turn the detail OFF and use Cine 2. You will need to grade though. As the others mentioned, the detail setting is important and I would thoroughly recommend turning it off completely. There isn’t a negative detail setting to my knowledge on the 350 and 330 that there is on the 750 etc.
Back to lurk mode.