[Stephen De vere]

When working to high broadcast standards (eg. BBC) then it is vital to get exposure very accurate and no clipping of whites or blacks. When recording in 8-bit codecs like the EX1 onboard recorder is there is very little latitude to adjust it later in post without creating noise. The picture profile, particularly the gamma curve, can help with this enormously. For instance with the old 8-bit Varicam we generally used up to 3 picture profiles all the time on a sequence – different profiles for high, medium and low contrast lighting/scenes – in order to use the full range of the recording codec as much as possible. With the new Varicam it is a 10-bit codec so now we generally can use only one profile for nearly all scenes. This is a very dull boring-looking picture but maximises the camera’s dynamic range.

Like Rafael recommends – be very careful about making a strong look in the camera. It depends on the assigment of course but for all my shoots over the last 20 years (mostly wildlife TV series) I would have been fired for deliberately producing any type of ‘look’ in camera.

[Stephen De vere]

Chip,

How did it go ? (Canon EF IRIS control)

I see Birger.com have done it (and more) for Red and Panny AF100/101 – maybe all EX3 owners should lobby them ASAP.

My lens tests don’t give the standard Sony zoom a very good score and I’m desperate to find affordable alternatives like EF lenses. FD lenses other than the tele ‘L’ fluorite series aren’t good enough. I’m even having to use a Optex longitudinal colour corrector on my Canon 500/4.5L to make it clean on the EX3. I’d love to have the EF 70-300 constant f2.8 to use.

I don’t like using Nikon lenses due to the focus going the opposite way to Canon lenses (and I’m used to Canon for all my 2/3″ broadcast work).

[Stephen De vere]

Birger.com make an adaptor for the Red and Panny AF100/101 giving full control of all the Canon EF lens functions including IS, aperture and autofocus.
The EX3 is a bit long in the tooth now so I doubt they’ll bother making a version for it sadly.

[Stephen De vere]

Ah, yes just looking at the lens port I thought that might be the issue. Explains why I can’t find any references to folk using those nice primes.

Thanks for the response Michael.

[Stephen De vere]

Yes, just discovered BD is limited to 8-bit 4:2:0 – same as DVD – so any advantage is only in data rate which, like you say, assuming a good encode, will be very marginal.

[Stephen De vere]

If you want good quality video at that sort of average bitrate then an Avid is unlikely to be the encoder to do it. Something like CinemaCraft doing 6+ passes in the right hands should easily give a top result for two hours on a DVD-5.

[Stephen De vere]

I don’t want to invest in upscaling hardware (or software) when many BD players do it so well. Just hoping to maintain the SD quality of source material by avoiding the nasty bump down to DVD spec mpeg2.

So all that extra data rate (x4) can’t do a better SD job than a DVD ?
I’m stunned.

[Stephen De vere]

For a perfect result you need to cover the entire site with a tent to exclude natural light, and put in lights – a growing light set and a shooting (flash) light setup to take the frames.
That’s how they do outdoor insitu jobs where you can’t grow the thing in a studio against a blue screen.
Which is why it’s not done very often on something tall like a bamboo tree !

[Stephen De vere]

Peter,

I made the mistake of trusting my first chosen replicator to do a good job of the authoring and encoding – wasted nearly 3 months trying to get them to produce a useable result, and have ended up having to start again from scratch with another company while still facing a full invoice for the unuseable job done by the first company. Email if you want to know who they are.

Re. the first replicating house:
The authoring/encoding they always get done by a sub-contractor whose encoding was with something built in to an Avid suite – pretty good quality but the operator would not or could not produce a result that did not have some motion rendering ‘judder’ and also slight scaling of the whole picture.

The same authorer made many mistakes in the authoring – after the fifth approval disc was still wrong I had to give up. Basically he was an enthusiast/amateur startup getting away with it with mostly clearly un-discerning corporate type clients.

There seem to be a lot of small not very good outfits around. I am beginning to believe they are in fact the majority out there after having a similar disaster experience with getting professional help with the finishing/grading and laying off to digbeta (that time I re-graded myself and have postponed the mastering to tape).

SO don’t assume any one firm know all about replicating, authoring and encoding. These are 3 quite different skills. First I would get the replication firm that you believe should be good, to run you off a short test of their mpeg2 encoding. I have found this to be easily the most difficult stage to get a good result from. After my hellish experience with the first firm I got encoding tests done by 3 other companies for free (none refused to do a free test).

The best result was using Cinemacraft 8-pass software-only encode and only costing £250 for 50mins of SD from uncompressed Quicktime on a USB2 drive. Eyeframe.co.uk London (Soho). They have just won awards for authoring Son of Rambow (but check whether they actually did the encoding too). If I had had time to shop around for Cinemacraft SP encoding I might have got even cheaper. This software is so good (they said) that they almost never bother going to the max bitrate (when there’s space to do allow) because it doesn’t improve the result noticeably. Now I understand more why big hollywood release DVD bit rates are relatively low but still look so good.

The other two tests I had done were both from hardware encoder cards. One was a (now discintinued) Sony Vizaro realtime card and almost as good as the Cinemacraft but cost more than twice the price per minute of the Cinemacraft rate. The other was Matrox Axio LE hardware, assisting encoding via Prem Pro, and decidedly prosumer looking. My own results using Compressor rated about third in the bunch at best, if I could have fixed the bad problems it produced with one or two individual shots.

My authoring house is delivering master DDP with CSS on a DVD-R to the replicator.

[Stephen De vere]

I’m not much of a DSLR user – camcorders are my thing. I don’t know of a way to know exactly how much moisture is inside the kit. The rule of thumb on a paid assignment when there is reasonable doubt or worry is to bag everything up (taken apart as much as possible) with silica gel when not in use, as insurance. Working in hot humid places for long periods (weeks/months) this is pretty essential to prevent mould growth inside lenses etc.
The thing to realise is that it if you leave it until things go wrong it could take several days to get the moisture out again. Or in the case of lens glass plant/algae growth eating the coating it could easily be a write-off.
It’s mainly the parts that don’t have a lot of electric power supplied to them that are vulnerable in cold, like lenses and tripods. Cameras – especially camcorders – get hot when they’re on and any moisture driven out that way.