OT - viewing area in viewfinder smaller than actual?
 

I found this with the DXV and my pana 852 - the viewing area in the view finder and LCD is smaller than the actual image being captured - it is almost like the viewfinder/lcd is cropping the SHOWN image, but the image being captured is much bigger! Here is what I discoverd tonigth while transferring some 8mm film. What looked like great cropping of the transferred 8mm film in my view finder, when transferred showed a remarkable difference - I could have zoomed in at least 15% more to avoid the black outside of the film area! Weird...I am going to hook up to a laptop next time to see where the actual crop is. I wonder if this is just pana?

My XL1 does this as well. It may or may not be 15% but it is noticable.

Sorry, but is this a joke? 584 posts. You should know what 'overscan' means by that, no?

No joke Kurt.

Transferring 8mm is when I first noticed this, too. I'm using an XL2... the difference wasn't quite 15%, but annoying to be certain. I could just start to see the shading of the edge of the projected frame when I got ir on the computer. It must be an almost universal issue... I'd wondered if other people had the problem as well.

Kurt, what do you mean by 'overscan'?

'Overscan' is the area in the edge of the frame that all TV sets 'crop'. This is why Premiere has a 'safe area' on its titler.

hehe, going back to my 'Amiga' days now

Yes safe area is usually designated with running ants or dots, sometimes two different areas. On a camera LCD, I have never heard of it intentionally cropping the image. Higher end cameras will show you the safe area, they won't crop it in the LCD only for you to find out later in the capturing process - that is why it was surprising to me.

Mandy,

Nearly all video cameras show you an underscanned image on the LCD. What you see on the LCD is roughly what you will see on TV when you play it back. If the LCD showed you everything, you wouldn't be able to accurately compose your shots for final delivery.

Josh

Interesting, that is news to me. Do all camcorders do this?

Ok, I did some research and found out stuff I already knew and some new stuff.
http://scanline.ca/overscan/
My question is this : if I am going to be putting these 8mm films on DVD, I guess I don't have to worry about it, my problem is that the viewing frame isn't exactly straight, so I have a little bit of a trapezoid (in other words not a 90 degree angle) going for the black frame around the image. Will this matter when I put it to DVD?

Mandy,

If you frame it up so it looks good in the LCD, it will probably look the same on your TV.

Josh

Thanks Josh, I will try that with some of the footage I have already shot and see what it looks like. I would have thought cameras would have the safe area white lines or dashes instead. That makes more sense to me...

Mandy,

Yep, would be a nice option, but few cameras off it. You need a production monitor for that. It does exactly what you are looking for.

Josh

One guy once suggested shinking 16:9 video so the entire video was inside the safe area. Maybe film transferrance could benefit from this also--if you frame the film projection inside the LCD screen like you did you'll be retaining the entire image when you play it back on a TV.

Not on a DVX100(A).

Bill,

What will you see on the DVX100? I didn't notice this aspect the two days I used one.

Josh

My question is with a current "festival potential" project, if the footage is projected on a bigger screen as upposed to a 21' or let's say a 52' TV, would the safe area still be the same in th frame, or would more be seen on the edges of the frame? that's my concern at the moment...

That will probably have a lot to do with the specific projection equipment and the method of connecting it to the playback device. I have used several different 10,000 lumen projectors from Barco, Digital Projection, Sanyo and Christie on 40+ foot wide screens. When connected to a computer via DVI or hard drive based Doremi deck via component video the entire frame was shown.

Now if you were using something more like a home theatre projector with an s-video interface it wouldn't surprise me if there was overscan, but I don't have any experience with that. I do know that my two LCD HD monitors and my plasma screen all overscan however.

Joseph,

As Boyd says, projection will vary from projector to projector. Now, if you want to do a film out and project the film, they will want to use as much of the digital frame as possible, for best quality. Usually the whole frame.

When I edit, if there is something undesirable in the overscan, I sometimes crop an equal amount from both sides of the frame, say 8, 16, or 24 pixels.

Josh

Just that a little of the unsafe area that's not shown on the DVX's LCD, does show up on a TV screen. Maybe you were shooting in one of the 16:9 modes so it was less evident, or maybe you didn't have anything obtrusive in the shot in that overscan area. But, I have had some nasty surprises with mine! :)

This is why the XL2 or the HVX200 with their letterboxed, yet true 16:9 viewing is superior in letting you at least see the precise top and bottom of your frame. The left and the right leaves you ignorant of some pixels in both directions, but the only real solution would be for the camera to include an overscan option.

If you want overscan, it appears that the Sony Z1 is one of the few in town.

http://tinyurl.com/arz3j

I don't know of any others in the prosumer space.

Other than that, time to bring a monitor along that supports overscan. Good luck finding something portable.

The "all scan" feature on the Z1 is a bit of a mixed blessing. I didn't really understand what that meant until recently. There's a menu option for displaying the safe areas in the VF/LCD so I turned that on and shot a bunch of stuff happily thinking I saw the full frame. Well I really messed up one shoot, and learned that the "safe areas" are very conservative and even when they are turned on the VF still overscans significantly. This seems really wrong to me.

The only way to see the full frame on the Z1 is to enable ALL SCAN, and it only works when the camera is in HDV mode (a disappointment since I shoot a lot of regular DV). When you turn it on it puts a fat black border around the image and shows the full frame in the middle. This would be useful for checking things, but not a mode I'd want to actually shoot in since you waste too much of the LCD's active area with that black border and it's hard enough to focus even when the image fills the screen.

So it's a nice little feature, but not as useful as I'd hoped it would be.

Hmm, damn, bummer.

I think it's time for Bill Porter to come up with a TFT w/overscan solution! Heh heh ;)

I think the big issue, as I'm deducing here is coming back after a shoot and discovering you have vignetting in your image. To that I recommend, establishing your zoom and focus settings in advance by looking at it via FCP (or your choice of NLE) via FireWire so you can see reality. Make note, then never forget. :)

There could be other instances where you have a small amount of unforeseen detail in your framing compositionaly that is less than desired, but I've never been too concerned. My number one concern that I think is more aesthetically critical is top/bottom composition, way more than left/right. The XL2 (my former camera) and the HVX200 let you see the top/bottom exactly.

The other thought is to crop in post, which is exactly what I had to do with my XL2/16x manual lens/U35A. I always had a vignette that I had to crop. I just lumped it into the "gotta do in post" category along with image flipping. Haha.

I have used BTV Pro a lot for this. You can connect via firewire (although DV only) and view fullscreen video. Not full resolution unfortunately, and the colorspace won't be like an NTSC monitor, but very useful nonetheless:

http://www.bensoftware.com/btvpro.html