Hi guys! This is my first post here so hey everyone :)
Recently purchased the Canon XH A1 mostly to try and get some decent Aurora Borealis footage. Admittedly I have not yet read around the forums yet but hope there are some people here with previous experience with the lights

I'll be going over to Canada in March to try and see the lights. I'm a little worried that I'll go over to canada and mess something up coz i have the settings wrong.

If I could I'd like to brief on my current settings and if you could give your opinion I would appreciate it

Aperture - 1.6
Shutter Speed - 1/30 (1/15 seems too slow, footage seems stuttered, but 1/45 is too dark, but Im not the expert so opinions appreciated)
White Balance - I set this manually using a white sheet of paper
Gain - +12db (higher seems to get very noisy :S)

With these settings I can see some stars if I take the camera outside, but it doesnt seem to pick up much.

Do you know of any essential settings that I would need?

Your time is very much appreciated

Hope to receive a reply

Thanks!!!

Don't use +12db gain. Reason being is that with a pure black or blue background, the noise artefacts will be prevalent. Use +6db if need be and a shutter of 1/24 in NTSC land. This should offer smoother motion but enough light to pick up what is needed. Set the camera up to TV mode and go into your menu and adjust the AE to +2. I would recommend frame mode, but this is not essential. If you want to timelapse the Aurora, the progressive is recommended.

Forgot to mention, turn sky detail ON so as to alleviate any macroblocking in gradiated areas.

Personally, I rather decrease the shutter speed than add gain, though you might need to do both.

The last time I shot aurora was with my vx1000. I think it goes down to a 4 second exposure. I don't think it was gained all the way up but probably close. This was the 'common green' kind and was not very bright. Depending on where you are going, you may have colors and may be quite bright the farther north you go.

Most of the still photographs you see are long exposures. That's how you get that streaky effect. Having a long exposure on yer video camera kinda simulates that effect.

Hope this helps!

thanks alot guys :)

Will give those settings a go and report back with results :)

ok guys well here i am :) in Yellowknife NWT Canada :)

I didn't have much luck on my first night. Theaurora was fairly bright, nothing out of the ordinary but bright nonetheless

i used following settings

Aperture : 1.6
shutter speed 1/4
gain: varied between +6 and +18
frame mode : 60i

I wasonly able to get a faint glow on the footage. I havea few questions about a few of the settings that im not sure about.
The frame mode setting, its set to 60i but Im not sure if this is the best in terms of low light footage, any ideas? Theres 24f and 30f options

I tried TV mode but wasn't about to get as much light out of the footage as in Manual mode.

The aurora is supposedly active this weekend so id like to get the best settings I can for this :)

Hi Natalia and welcome to DVinfo. I'm quite jealous of your travel; would love to do what you're doing this week!

I've never tried to shoot the aurora so all I can give are best guesses; not sure if the camera has that much sensitivity or not. I think I'd agree with the others that you want to keep gain down as much as possible since the background will be the black night sky.

For a given shutter speed and aperture combination, the mode (60i, 30F, 24F) doesn't matter as the exposure is actually the same, HOWEVER going to 24F will allow you to go to 1/3 second exposure which is at least a little help. Of course, keep the aperture wide open at 1.6.

Another thing to try is the custom preset to Black Stretch. DON'T use the CINE settings for gamma and color matrix as they reduce exposure a little...appears to me they work by gaining down portions of the signal during processing (very useful for "film look" when there is adequate light, but a liability for what you're doing). Conversely, it might help to keep custom presets for color gain in the positive range to bring up any hint of color the CCDs are barely catching. Not sure if one of the Noise Reduction settings might be paired with gaining up the color. Again, I've never tried all that for extreme low light shooting like you're trying.

Please do post some frame grabs of your efforts (with settings!) this weekend as it would be a good learning experience for the rest of us.

Saturday night is supposed to be a good viewing night according to:
http://www.gedds.alaska.edu/AuroraForecast/

Unfortunately, it will be cloudy in Fairbanks this weekend. Get some good aurora.

Try these custom preset settings. It is a mod of Wolfgang Winne's "3 +12 dB". You may want to tweak some settings to taste, especially the color settings. You may be able to get a little more blue or red from the aurora if by increasing the RGN and/or BGN. The results will be smoother using 24F with 1/12 shutter speed instead of 60i with 1/8 shutter speed.

GAM-N
KNE-H
BLK-S
PED-4
SET-2
SHP-0
HDF-L
DHV-6
COR-9
NR1-M
NR2-H
CMX-N
CGN-34
CPH-2
RGN-5
GGN-0
BGN-9
RGM-42
RBM-0
GRM-0
GBM-10
BGM--1

24F mode
1/12 shutter
12dB Gain (or more)
Manual focus
Manual white balance (adjust to taste)

Good luck. I'm getting a little sunshine today in Fairbanks. Maybe I'll get to shoot aurora tonight, too.

Natalia-

How did it go Saturday night shooting aurora? It was a very active night. There was too much cloud cover in Fairbanks for clear aurora even though I could see a green glow from behind the clouds. It was clear for the few moments I went to pick up my daughter after she had finished ushering for a Turtle Island String Quartet performance, which was 10:15 AKST (12:15 MST or 1:15 MDT). Of course, the aurora was at its best.

Did you have a chance to use the preset? The added noise reduction should give a smoother image with higher gain. I wouldn't use this much noise reduction under normal conditions. The ghosting or light trails usually associated with excessive noise reduction doesn't seem to detract from the aurora. Still photographs are often exposed 10-40 seconds depending on the desired look.

Good luck!

Hi Doug,

Thanks very much for the informative reply:) Unfortunately I did not read it in time, I did however get to see Saturdays nights fantastic display!

I was at Grace Lake in Yellowknife. Activity died down at about midnight, started early though at 8pm.

I managed to getsome video footage, I have a feeling however it would have been alot better with your preset!! hehe

my footage is grainy :(

Oh well, today is supposedly better than last night interms of auroral activity so I will try your preset :)

Thanks very much Doug

I didn't mention to also follow the earlier suggestion of setting the sky detail to "soft". If the aurora isn't too intense, you will need to increase the gain and/or decrease the shutter speed.

In March, Yellowknife is a better location for aurora than Fairbanks. It has something to do with the tilting of the earth towards the sun, magnetic north and night.

Are you using a wide angle lens adapter?

Heeey Im back home :)

Managed to get some 'decent' aurora footage after all with some pretty nice activity.

I've got a little problem though :(

Im using Nero Vision to capture the video straight from the camera via mini firewire cable, with the other 2 tapes I have not had any problems (normal video footage in the daytime), however as soon as I try to capture aurora footage, for some reason the playback on thempg file has white square blocks.

Any idea what this could be? Im a little concerned, however these blocks do NOT appear when I play the footage directly on the camera.

Perhaps im using the wrong software to capture?

Any advice appreciated

Natalia,

I was going to say you've got dropouts, until you said when you play it back on the camera you don't see the same thing. So I think your footage is fine. I don't know much about Nero.

So what other software do you have?

I tried Adobe Premiere Pro but for some reason it wouldn't detect the camera and so I couldn't capture, perhaps im doing osmething stupid as I've never used Adobe Premire before but just couldnt get it to work :S

will be trying Ulead Video Studio later on today...hope that helps :(

Ok i know this is waaayyyyyy overdue but I've been busy with RL unfortunately :P

I finally managed to get around to sorting the aurora vids.
Used alive hd converter to convert to avi.

Im no expert in this area so im still pretty confused as to what sort of efect bitrate is having on the vids (apart from lowering file size)

trying to strike a balance but its proving a pain in the ass :/

any recommendations?

Natalia, your best bet is to capture using Premiere or MPEGstreamclip. I don't remember reading that you shot in HD, so you shouldn't need the Canon Preset for PP, but you might as well go download it from the Adobe site.

As far as your camera being recognized by PP. Just try a few different things and I'm sure it would come up. ALWAYS BE SURE YOUR CAMERA IS OFF WHEN PLUGING IN OR REMOVING FIREWIRE CABLE.

1) Plug up the cam, then boot Premiere
2) Start Premiere, then plug in the cam
3) Plug in the cam, then reboot the computer (with camera off) and start Premiere
4) reinstall Premiere, and try the above

And remember to always give the comp a few seconds to recognize the camera.
Hope this works, would love to see the footage.


OH and as far as bitrate, a higher bitrate is just higher quality. It's really no science to it until you start creating DVD's etc...For online stuff, you would be safe around 1200. Higher bitrate = Higher quality = Bigger file size

JS

HI John,

Thanks very much for that reply. I think that you might have read my penultimate post tho :)
I have actually managed to capture the videos now.

Please read my previous post.
Thanks!

Natalia

EDIT - oops never mind just read the last part of your post haha, I'll lower the size to 1200 and place them on my FTP and post either today or tomorrow morning!

Ok here it is :)

http://www.natalia-robba.com/blachfordaurora09.avi

File is about 50mb and I tried to put the peaks of the display in there.

Natalia

Wow Natalia,
That's really impressive! Were you using manual focus or did you have the camera set to auto focus? It looks like the focus was a bit soft sometimes & if you were in auto focus i can understand that the auto focus would have had trouble getting it right with so little light. It may well have been the compression too. Does the footage look sharper in its original form?
How much is the footage sped up from its original, i could see someone walk in front of the camera at one stage, & it was only when i saw that person that i realised that the footage was in fact sped up in post.
I haven't yet witnessed an aurora at all, but would love to see it one day. What settings did you end up using to film these shots? I would love to be able to film it too if i ever got the chance.
With the compression of your footage, have you tried compressing to any other formats? I'm not sure that you will get as nice a footage compressing to .avi as you would with another format for the given file size. Maybe you could try a quicktime file or mpeg4. These formats seem to give a much better picture when you are compressing to such relatively small file sizes.
Thanks for sharing
Bryce

Hi Bryce,

Thanks for the compliment! I'm pretty happy with the footage :)
I actually used Manual focus set to infinity most of the time.
The times when the footage loses focuses is to blame on the gloves I was wearing haha!

It was really cold and I didn't have the best gloves for the job, every now and then I'd accidently touch the focus ring and then had to readjust....not the best job in terms of focus and stability but I was so excited!!

The video was actually sped up x10 as the original display was over 2 hours long!
To be honest, the actual display at real time was very active and fast, but I thought it better to speed it up to see the movement better.

I will give it a go with regards to compressing to quicktime or mpeg, although to be honest the video in its original format is pretty grainy due to the low light. But will give it a shot and see!

I don't actually have the camera that I used to film this footage anymore but it was a Canon XH A1, I used a shutter speed of 1/15, aperture of 1.6, focus was set to infinity and I played around with the color settings a little on the cam so it would pick up the greens/purples a little better.

I also used a gain of about +6db? my memory is a little off but I definately used a + gain setting.

The Aurora is amazing :) I travel as much as I can just to get a chance to see them, seen then in Norway and Canada so far, off to Tromso again this year to try my luck again :)