[Steve Crow]

I don’t envy you your assignment but here are my thoughts:

All of the Canon rebel series are good for video including the T2i and moving up the line. With their relatively larger APS-C sensors you should be able to get more than enough light in unless the speaker turns the lights completely off in the lecture hall which would make it difficult.

At your price range, you are probably going to be looking at used to get all that you want. Does your budget have to cover the lavs and external recorder too? If so, one option would be to buy those and then simply rent your camera as needed, that way you can afford to get access to some very good options for you including the 5D or take a look at Panasonic which has some very interesting models and capabilities (yes Bill Bruner that’s a shout out to you! 🙂

…..and the Sony A7S which can shoot in a dark underground cave and still capture an image.

There’s an interesting low cost wireless lav alternative from Rode which is a simple lav mic that plugs into an iphone or android – you just put the cell phone in the speaker’s pocket and let it record away. The disadvantage is that you can’t monitor the sound live which makes me nervous. Would make a very interesting backup to use it along with another wireless lav – just occurred to me. As an aside, I always have something like a rode videomic pro plugged directly into the camera to improve the sound the camera itself is recording. In case of a failure of your lav solution – you may have to rely on it.

For an external recorder I usually recommend the Zoom H4N but there are less expensive options out there too, particularly if all you need to do is record one incoming source.

You will have to build a simple rig for yourself to hold everything.

Having said that, shooting classroom lectures with a HD DSLR is challenging. You will run into the file size / time limit which means you will loose a couple of seconds stopping a clip and then starting a new one. That shouldn’t be an issue if you time it so that the focus is on the powerpoint screen when you do that – the separate audio recorder will continue to run in the background which is going to really save you.

I recommend during post production that you get the instructor to give you a copy of the Powerpoint slide so that you can edit them into the video versus just going with what the camera records

Steve Crow

[Steve Crow]

If I understand your desires what you want is actually more of a DV “video” look versus a more cinematic and “softer” look to the image. So if you want a “sharper” look you could set up a custom picture style or profile and move the sharpness up or you could modify one of the standard ones for that matter and increase it’s sharpness as well. (see page 126 of your manual) I think the built in standard picture style is meant to be the sharpest at is default settings

Actually the first thing that struck me about your sample clip was the color balance, it was very “warm” to my eye. You might try working with your white balance.

Another thing worth trying is switching to All-I mode which produces larger files so more data.

Steve Crow

[Steve Crow]

In my Final Cut Pro 6 days there was a free plugin called Shadow Highlight which could lift some detail out of the shadows – don’t know if it is still around or available for your NLE. Check out Lyric.com

Steve Crow

[Steve Crow]

Have you checked to see if the freecMagic Lantern firmware addition can enable this?

Steve Crow

[Steve Crow]

If using a very high shutter speed, try instead sticking to the 180 degree rule and selecting a shutter speed as close as you can get to 1 over twice the frame rate, so if filming at 24fps then you would want the closest shutter speed to 1/48 which is usually 1/50th of a second.

I think the flickering of the welding torch is interacting with your shutter speed and frame rate in some fashion….perhaps something similar to the rolling bars effect you can get when filming under fluorescent lights….just my thoughts but I’d experiment to find the answer – it’s the only way to know for sure

Steve Crow

[Steve Crow]

Canon 6D, still full frame but less expensive

Steve Crow

[Steve Crow]

Hey David, first a caution. I think what you are really after is a “cinematic” look to your footage. And yes, shallow depth of field is one very often cited aspect of the “cinematic look” but it’s only one and a lot of other things go into a movie-like shot versus the “video” look that so many of us want to avoid.

But since you asked about shallow depth of field specifically here are the general things you want to look for:

* Think about getting as much light into the sensor as you can, so cameras with a larger sensor – like APS-C, Super 35, and “full frame” – Shallow depth of field is possible with the Micro 4/3rds cameras too that have slightly smaller sensor, the camera and operator just has to work a bit harder. Larger sensor cameras tend to be the more expensive one’s unfortunately.

* Now here’s the real key: the “faster” the lens on the camera the better – faster meaning it has a very “low” aperture number, like 1.8, or 1.4 or 2.0 versus say an aperture of 8.0 which isn’t considered fast at all but “slow.”

So when you look at the aperture on the lens I’d say go for anything 2.8 or lower with 1.8 or 1.4 being a very nice sweet spot. Keep in mind too that focus is more difficult to achieve and maintain when shooting very very shallow. In fact, it’s possible to focus on the nose of an actor and have their eyes be out of focus if you are filming with extremely shallow depth of field. Imagine if they are moving – how much harder that gets.

There are some great examples of entry level lenses that are relatively inexpensive and still have aperture values that are way down there (I mention one or two from Canon down below)

Speaking of apertures ideally you want a lens that has a constant aperture. If you look at a lot of zoom lenses for instances, particularly those that come as “kit” lenses, they will have a RANGE of apertures, in other words as you zoom in and out the aperture actually changes. So you zoom in on a subject and the picture darkens, this throws many shooters for a loop the first time they see that.

For this reason, “prime lenses” that have only one focal length and one aperture are ideal, like the Canon 50mm 1.4 or their 50mm 1.8 just to give a quick example.

* If you plan on filming outside and want to maintain that shallow depth of field, then you can easily find yourself in a situation with TOO much light hitting the sensor – to the point where adjusting the ISO won’t solve the problem, even lowering the ISO and in addition bumping up the aperture to a higher number isn’t enough to solve it.

In those situations technically you could adjust the camera’s shutter speed to some very high value and while that technically will cut down the light the resulting video will probably have a very non-cinematic look that you won’t like at all.

So what do you do??? You either film in a shadier spot, get the actors under some diffusion material or you do like I do and get yourself some ND filters that knock down the light hitting the sensor, allowing you to keep a wide open aperture, low ISO, a 1/50 shutter speed AND get that shallow depth of field look. Easy Breezy right???

Steve Crow

[Steve Crow]

Hmmm quite a mystery. I don’t have a concrete answer for you but some thoughts do occur:

What this pattern first reminds me of is the curtain style shutter found on some models, not sure if the A7S has one. The Sony web site says the camera has a “vertical-traverse, focal-plane shutter.” Here’s a picture of what one of those could look like:

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/5/57/1_500_Sec_Focal_P_Shut.jpg

Of course this would be far from normal…but could the intensity of the light and the directionality of them have somehow created a pattern of the shutter curtains on the image sensor????

Steve Crow

[Steve Crow]

I see what you are going for….I am wondering if the when the subject repeats the movement for the still photos, unless they do it EXACTLY the same it won’t match exactly anyway and those differences in position would be very difficult to make match with the video frames taken earlier.

The second thing is, and I admit I am not sure about this at all, once the still image has been incorporated into the editing timeline and then the video is exported, it will essentially be down rezed to the same quality as the rest of the video. I can see that you would be STARTING off with a higher quality source – that much is clear – but at the end of the process I am not sure you could tell the difference or, if so, how large a perceptible difference that would be.

Good luck with your project! Sounds interesting.

Steve Crow

[Steve Crow]

According to a forum posting I found at:

https://www.instapaper.com/text?u=http%3A%2F%2Fnikonrumors.com%2Fforum%2Ftopic.php%3Fid%3D5744 the Nikon is only using a portion of the full sensor when it switches over to video which can account for the different look:

“Video only uses a central 32.8 x 18.4mm section of the sensor, at most.” So it sounds like this Nikon model is one of those that is “cropping in” for video but not for stills.

As a workaround why not simply export a still image from the video clip when you need it….then it will match perfectly.

Steve Crow