Still with the varicam

Man, if the DVCPRoHD 720P is a 100megabit consumer HD codec, then I never want to touch HDV (25 megabit HD codec). Its a fucking awful codec and I'm having serious colour-space issues trying to downconvert it in software to uncompressed SD. Its honeslty painful, and an insult to the excellent skills of the lighting + art departments.

But props to Apple + Panasonic for making the workflow decent.

Update on varicam footage

Perhaps I was being overly harsh. While I'm still not impressed with the way its artifacting the shadowtones, they'll be crushed anyways... and I think it might have been user error. We should have set out dynamic compression to 300% rather than 500%. This compression determines where on the exposure curve the most bits are kept... we gave em all to the highlights. should've given some to the blacks, given how much i like my black.

Its still noisy, but comparing it to SDX-900 fotoage... I say its only a touch noiser.

Still from 'IF'

This is a jpg taken from a screen cap from the footage from the film clip. Actually looks better than I was giving it credit for:

Varicam footage

Having a nice look at some footage on the 20" Cinema Display... ERGH! The artifacting is *horrible* in the anything remotely dark. I'm *NOT* impressed. I like my darkness, and I like my fall off into darkness, and this is super-unimpressive. The SDX-900 *IS* better, Ah well, Super-16mm or 2-Perf 35mm it will be. I'd consider the Cinealta if I didn't need to do any over/undercranking, just because its images are super clean.

I haven't seen artifacting this bad since a clip I shot on DVCPro25 was analogue transferred to DV (and thus reencoding). It's pretty awful.

WTF were you think Panasonic?

First Impressions of the Varicam

Directed a music video over the weekend for Gabriel's Day. Alexis and his posse of ultimate lighting badasses did a wonderful job of lighting the whole thing.

We shot it on a Panasonic Varicam... (long story as to how we got there).

First impressions during the shoot were mostly positive. I got given a whole lot of technical requirements for the post-path from Gerry at Rexel. For some reasons we (apparently) have to the camera in the 'system sequence' of 59.97, not 60FPS... so we had to flip over the system settings. On the wonderful Sony HD Split we had, the footage looked beautiful. Really crisp, holding its highlights well, with little noise. It also picked up a very film-like graduation on light-wraps (we lit with lots of kinos).

Now that I'm bringing the footage into the editing suite to have a look... well... I'm less impressed. I heard that the varicam was noisy - but gosh, I didn't really appreciate how noisy people meant. Its got a very strong 'noise' look - like the whole thing has been run through sharpening. Which is weird, cause Kim should have turned off the detail settings (as we discussed) when he set up the camera on the Saturday morning.

The gradients are also more blocky than I expected - closer to DV than DV50 is! Probably because its packing more resolution into effectively the same bandwidth. Sure, its 100megabits per second - but its also shooting 60 pictures a second... while DV50 is shooting 50megabits a second, but only 30 pics a second (if you're shooting 480P). So effectively yo uhave to be throwing away something. My feelin gis they're throwing away chroma sampling...

I can't push the footge around much either - it handles MUCH more like DV than DV50 does. You certainly can't fuck it around like uncompressed 10bit captured from digibeta. Sigh. If only there was a progressive scan digibeta.

Sigh, so effectively the varicam is a slightly shittier version of the SDX - with, perhaps, better highlight handling - BUT only, I suspect, because of its cool cine-gamma circuitry. At least the slow mo looks fucking cool.

This whole bitch about the varicam is also ignoring the weird-ass issues I'm having capturing from the AJ-HD 1200A deck. The only way I can get consistent timecode is to capture my cliips one by one. If I do a batch capture it freaks out and breaks time consistently...

I'm looking forward to when the capture hits the framerate changes. Apparently, if you've got pre-roll on a DIFFERENT speed section of footage, it picks up on that footages flagged framerate and fux it all up. I'm capturing everything at 60FPS, so I'm oping its just not going to bother being intelligent and I can force it all in post... but jesus.

It honestly feels like the early days of capturing DV: totally buggy.

I'll blog about this a bit later, once I've had more of a play around. The clip will be online within a fortnight, so its not like you won't get to see it.

BTW, thanks to all teh CHAMPIONS who came to the shoot on the weekend. you know who you are.