Roderick A. Santiano

Thank you, Mitch. I kinda wish I read your e-mail about half an hour ago. I just found out before checking in on this forum, like you said, that the F350 is one stop slower than the F900. Shooting at -3db adds the extra stop loss, therefore giving me a rating of 80 ISO. Mystery solved, thank you for your help!

I just wrapped a 7 day shoot today with the F350. I'd have to say I was VERY pleased with it's performance and image quality. The project was an episode of a children's musical series on DVD. The style of shooting is completely narrative but the sets and subject matter are very much like a stage production. If you've seen or heard about the recent production of ONCE UPON A MATTRESS, it's very much in the same genre. Considering it's straight-to-DVD, I was extremely impressed with the images I was able to get without any filtration. I set the gain to -3db and used the CINE3 gamma setting. Video noise was virtually untraceable and compared to the Varicam, I'd shoot on this camera without a second thought. This is the 7th episode we've shot in the series (all previous episodes were shot on the Varicam) and I had a number of comments from the crew about the great images we were getting on this one. The camera was extremely easy to use, once you got used to the slightly different layout of menu settings and buttons. I wouldn't use this camera for blow up to film as the compression is probably too high for that purpose, but for projects most likely limited to television, this camera is pretty impressive and I'm glad to have used it on this project. Once Apple and Sony finally get their plug in to import the 35Mbs footage ready, we'll be able to edit this thing. Kind of a leap of faith shooting on a format that isn't supported yet by FCP, but we're sure it will work out well. Highly recommended for smaller budget productions that demand the highest quality available for this price range.

Tomorrow is day 7 of our 7 day shoot with two XDCAM HD F350s. We had almost no time to prep and experiment with the cameras so I've been trying to figure out an interesting ISO rating situation but haven't been able to crack it. I've been shooting with the gain settings at -3db as I've always done with the Varicam. But I've come up with an ISO rating of 80. Kinda low for HD shoot don't you think? There is virtually zero noise in the shadows compared to the same settings when shooting with Varicam. I'm very pleased with the images I've been getting so I'm not necessarily complaining here since I've been able to get enough light going in the studio for this shoot. I'm just wondering why this camera has such a low rating compared to other HD cameras. Does anyone know anything about this? I haven't once had the luxury of having a DIT on any shoot so I don't really know for sure if there's something I'm missing/doing wrong or what not. Any information will help. Oh, another thing: I've also been using the "CINE3" gamma setting. I love the look, although I'm completely in the dark as to the actual specs of this setting--I just know it looked the best. Does anyone have any information on the gamma settings for the F350? (STD, CINE1, CINE2, CINE3 and CINE4)