Sean Lambrecht

No need to delete your post, just change your user name. Sorry I can't comment on your reel, on my cell phone here at the moment... But I will check it out on a proper computer.

Do the filters have a tint if you look through them? If not, that's IR, and it's normal. Tungsten has a good deal of light in the IR portion of the spectrum, and ordinary NDs don't block it.

O'connor has been vert helpful in the past when I contacted them through their website about older equiptment. They reffered me to Transylvania Video for servicing, you could also try Visual Products (sponsor link should be on the right here). They deal with lots of older heads.

No, I just don't have regular internet access at the moment :) Karel, I have a very long reply to your previous question on my home computer. I'll get it up here eventually... I used a DVX100B with the Andromeda modification. Neat setup, the signal is grabbed directly from the A/D converters before any in camera processing or compression. The colors are there in the raw capture files, it looks washed out because of the linear to logarithmic LUT that I used for recording, so just think of it as being similar to an unprocessed grab from the RED (minus the redcode compression..) Give me a week or two and all questions will be answered! Peace, S-

Glad to help Frank!

Alright, I managed to reduce the size by 1%. Still looks awfully big in Firefox. Hrmmm...

Here are the grabs I promised... Middle grey @ 50ire after white balance was set, exposure set by adjusting shutter speed and tweaking the iris. CC90M WB setting was previously balanced with the filter in place under a 5000k light source (5k seems to be close to the sweet spot) and that picture is with the filter on. 32k + 56k used WB presets, no additional filters. Did a quickie auto white balance then in Photoshop off the middle grey swatch, didn't touch the highlights or blacks, histograms from the balanced pics. The CC90M cuts around 3 stops on your luminance (green) channel so a hot mirror isn't a bad idea. My hot mirror is crap so I didn't use it here. (A Redrock HM with the reflective coating on BOTH sides so you don't accidentally stick it in backwards with the reflective side facing the lens. So your only option is to have one of the two reflective sides facing your lens. Yes, you read that correctly...) These are quickie grabs, not tests. :) (Sorry for stretching the thread out, lemme see if I can fix that...)

It's 2048, you're thinking of the Kar Wai Wong film I think. ;) Throws me off sometimes...

If you had a nickel for every time that conversation took place you'd be Jim Jannard...

Thanks Karl :) I've been doing more geeking than gaffing lately. I use a Tiffen Series 9 CC90M filter (the only 90M filter anyone makes) when there's enough light to allow it. I guess I didn't clearly explain that you would do a manual white balance with the magenta filter on the camera, so the image through the filter looks correct. If you removed the filter, then that would make everything appear very green, which is similar to the uncompressed image that the Viper and Ikonoskop put out, and probably similar to any camera prior to the internal processing. The overly green image can be tricky to correct for in post, and as I said probably not an option on the HVX due to the compression, but leaving the filter on would work. There could be a happy medium with a lighter magenta filter that doesn't lose as much light or won't stress the codec too much when you go a little green. A Rosco Cinegel swatch book would be cheap, easy way to experiment with varying degrees of filtering. I'll try to get some comparison grabs of a MacBeth chart this week.

Probably not possible on the HVX due to its hardware limitations. The other snafu is that the recording media would need to support writing the large amount of additional data, or the extra data would need to be heavily compressed to accommodate the limitations of the recording media.

White balancing should totally go away with uncompressed recording but with the HVX you would need to trick the camera to drastically reduce the noise. You need remove all the gain from Red and Blue sensors. I suspect it's the same on the HVX, but on the DVX at least white balance only applies or reduces gain to the R+B sensors while the Green signal is constant. A CC90M filter very closely matches the inverse of the spectral sensitivity of the sensors and will physically pull the Green channel down very close to where the R+B channels would be without gain. You'll get an increase in dynamic range as well because the gain normally applied to the R+B signals for white balancing causes them to clip way before the Green would. You'll suffer a ton of light loss filtering like this, but I doubt the codec could sustain the amount of post correction required if you removed the magenta filter and recorded a very green image. So white balancing can be a good idea, just not in the conventional way.

The 1080 mode is standard on all the HVX models. It works the same way the trusty old DVX did with the pulldown. The 1080 mode doesn't have the option for slow motion frame rates, and the HVX isn't a great performer in the resolution department either, so people often just stick with 720.

Yeah, the amount of blur at any shutter speed depends how fast the motion is. For a scene with little to no movement you could open the shutter to 1/24 or even 1/12 or 1/6 on the HVX. But actual film cameras won't go past 1/37 at 24fps, and the farther you get from there the more your image can take on video characteristics in regards to motion. And the 1080 mode can be set to progressive, it's recording 24 progressive frames over 60 interlaced frames with pulldown. And it does in fact produce more detail than the 720 progressive mode will.

What if the green screen is behind the actor, and the "OLED" screen is a half-silvered mirror? Keeping in mind my green screen experience is next to non-existant... Just a thought.

Ah... Thank you David. I was sitting here with an Andromeda modified DVX in front of me, and kept scratching my head pondering why on earth Panasonic chose to neuter the normal DV output. And the obvious answer I overlooked was of course "because it's DV!"

I never quite understood this. When a camera shows more dynamic range in RAW still mode, what's the issue with retaining that in video mode? I understand you won't have the same precision throughout the range, and I can see how line skipping could cause an apparent loss in range, but even aside from the DSLRs, why do the manufacturers' curves in the video realm generally lop the top few stops off when the sensors are certainly capable of capturing them? Much of what we see ends up being 8-bit 4:2:0 anyways, and still represents a wider dynamic range than cameras seem to be willing to put out. Somebody enlighten me!

Nicely done! And what a treat to see something originating on film. And on a tripod, no less! :)

The Andromeda modification is a really odd bird- the Green CCD is offset in the DVX, and the Andromeda software takes that into account by using an algorithm based on a Bayer pattern to produce a pseudo-HD size of 1540x984 with an NTSC pixel aspect ratio. So it scales very nicely to 720, and 1080 isn't too shabby either. The really amazing thing about it is the considerable increase in dynamic range you get from bypassing the camera's normal processing.

Thanks- the jail bars were in two large sections made from wood dowels and I think 1x2s . You're actually seeing the same wall through that whole sequence, we "flipped" the set pieces for the reverse angle. The other side of the basement had a water heater and shelving units. The door in the background is fake- it was only about 5 feet tall. Lighting was minimal, 4 fixtures and the door had an LED light behind the window and the red bulb above it. I can whip up a diagram if you're interested... One other suggestion- per forum rules you need to change your user name to your real name. 'Cause someone's guaranteed to snap on ya if you don't! :) Sean-

That's exactly what we did here: http://www.vimeo.com/3091604 Jump ahead to 3:30, password is "reels".

I didn't know that was possible with Vimeo. The compression settings I mentioned above are definitely getting re-compressed after upload. Drat...

Well, we're getting towards the limits of my knowledge here... But what I do know from experience: For your web/Vimeo output I'd suggest going from your FCP master and exporting with Mpeg Streamclip again: Compression: H.264 Quality 100% Limit Data Rate: Checked- 7Mbps (not MB/sec) Sound: Mpeg-4 AAC - Stereo - Auto - 256 kbps (might be able to lower this to 128 and get good sound) 854x480 Better Downscaling: Checked (everything else unchecked) Adjustments- Saturation: Boost this to between 110%-120% because H264 will dull your colors somewhat If the tapes are matted/letterboxed, just stick with the anamorphic DVDs. They'll be sharper and you'll save yourself unnecessary pulldown and cropping steps. Back to those VOB files form MacTheRipper- I was trying a few tests here with the 2001 DVD, and every codec I tried up to ProRes 10bit caused increased noise. I didn't go as far as burning the test onto DVD-R to check color/gamma because I didn't know how you'd be doing it, and we're just about at my limits there. I'm also below the system requirements to install DVDStudio Pro on my Mac Mini, so my workflow could get a little wonky there... Remember too at the end of the day that it's near impossible to get your web and DVD versions to look 100% identical.

David- what is your work flow after your edit in FCP?

I think the problem is you can't judge what's actually happening due to the way Quicktime handles (frequently mishandles) gamma on the Mac. It could be making adjustments during playback so the colors and gamma you're seeing may or may not be accurate on the computer, or even inherent in the clip itself. You'd need to go through the whole workflow- try outputting the same clip with several codecs (don't make any color adjustments at this point), and put them all on a DVD-R to see which best matches the original DVD when played back on your TV.