Greetings, all. I hope this is the correct part of the forum to post this. If not, I apologize.

I've been using the XH-A1 for about two years now, and I still don't know what I'm doing wrong. I see these beautiful clips posted here and on vimeo.com shot with the A1, but mine seem to all look... well... bad compared to these.

I normally shoot at 30p, and normally in either shutter speed priority or aperture priority, with no presets. I use a Steadicam Merlin to get moving shots. I capture with HDV Split to capture and Premiere Pro CS3 to edit with. The only effect I really use is Magic Bullet Looks. I export to vimeo.com using the settings recommended on their site.

But everything I put up just looks bad. It looks noisy (even when the scene is well-lit), it looks jumpy, and just generally not sharp and poor.

I have tried lots of different settings, framerates, shutter speeds, export settings, and everything else I can think of. Does anyone have any idea what is going wrong?

Here are a couple of recent clips where it's obvious to me.

Wagner Game for KDT on Vimeo (http://vimeo.com/6565528)

919 Myrta Street on Vimeo (http://vimeo.com/4464486)

Thanks to anyone who has any tips or advice.

You have to use presets with the XH A1 to make it look good. The most important thing I noticed that cleans up the image is to "press" the blacks and put the NR2 on medium. Do both of these things in presets and the image will be cleaner and more contrasty.

Always shoot in -3 gain, even in dark situations. Stay away from positive gain settings. The A1 is a camera, not military night-vision goggles. If you don't have enough light, open the iris wide open and lower the shutter – don't pump up the gain. I wouldn't go below 1/24th shutter in 24p mode or below 1/30th in 30p mode, or you risk bad motion blur.

Also, always shoot in full manual mode. Don't use aperture priority or anything like that. If you like to shoot in any of the auto modes, might as well own a palm-corder instead of a nice camera with manual controls, like the A1.

And I can't stress this enough: Make sure you are shooting with the correct exposure, shutter and white balance. A poor white balance will be hard to correct in post, if you can correct it at all. White balances can be anywhere from 1900k to 8000k, depending on the lighting. Set your zebras to about 80 or 85 and expose to that. Some people like really flat exposures, some people like crispy, blown-out highlights. This is all dependent on the project and the subject matter – it's an artistic choice. But unintentionally over-exposed footage looks bad and is pretty much useless, so be careful.

Play around with shutter speeds. A slow shutter gives the surreal, blurry, slow-mo look. A fast shutter gives the crisp, jittery motion with no motion blur. A strong project may use various shutter speeds based on the scene. Standard shutter speed is 1/48th in 24p and 1/60th in 30p.

Play with selective focus. Zoom in and focus on one object/subject, then rack to something in the foreground or background. Staying on the wide end of the lens gives you the flat, video look (everything is in focus).

Turn your sharpness setting in the presets to zero or perhaps -3. The positive settings add too much artificial sharpening to the image and make it look too video, unless the super-sharp look is what you want. Again, this is all dependent on the artistic choice. You can always add sharpening in post, so I tend to sway towards unsharpened footage.

If you're using FCP, capture with Apple Pro Res 422 (HQ) 1920x1080. This converts the HDV footage to a less-compressed 10 bit codec. You can do more in post if you capture at this setting.

Keep at it and you will pick up more tricks along the road. These are just some of the things that I can draw off the top of my head.

All of the above is true.

I thought your videos looked pretty good. You need to remember you're shooting in natural light, so the "pop" you see in some videos here and elsewhere is often the result of considerable preparation in the lighting category. Also overcast days can be lackluster at best in creating a beautiful looking image.

I'd just like to say that the thing that stuck out the most to me was the blurring in the videos. I'm fairly sure that this blurring of movement is caused by your noise reduction settings within the custom preset (NR1 and NR2). It doesn't quite look like motion blur caused by a slow shutter speed.

Custom presets can be a scary thing if you're new to them, but they make all the difference in tweaking the XH's image to something more aesthetically pleasing. Here's a good place to start.
http://www.dvinfo.net/forum/canon-xh-series-hdv-camcorders/126811-xh-custom-presets-download-library-copy.html

You can download presets from other users without having to make them yourself. A nice looking preset (in my opinion) for everyday use that's not too stylized is the Panalook preset made by Steven Dempsey. It also does not use any noise reduction, so those weird blurs should disappear. A few of my other favorites are the Panafilm and Vision presets, which you can find on this site and elsewhere with a little searching. More dramatic for film use and such. If you have any trouble, message me and I'll send you a whole bunch that you can try out.

That's true, Nate. You have to be careful with NR1 and NR2. I personally never use NR1 and will not go above medium on NR2. I haven't had any issues yet. But I'm also not shooting sports and fast motion too often. Probably better to not risk it if you're going to be shooting fast-moving objects....

Gabe and Nate,

Thanks so much for your thorough responses. I'm new to presets, but I'm going to give them a try right away. Thanks a lot for the recommendations -- they all make a lot of sense. I have a new list of skills to brush up on and a checklist of things to remember! The main problem that's been driving me nuts is the blur. Hopefully the NP options will help that.

Hi Aaron,

I thought the clips looked OK too - the colours are nice, quite flat and 'un-poppy' true, but personally I prefer that. Excessively rich colours look good at first but seem unrealistic and sickly after a while. The greens did look a bit too flat perhaps. I did notice the motion blur and confess to having problems with this myself. One thing to try is to run the footage back to tape to see if it is still there because is could be caused by interlacing though if shot at 30p obviously not. I have had great problems with motion blur when viewing my HD footage (shot on the XH-A1) on any kind of computer screen or linked to an LCD but found that as soon as I printed it back to tape (from FCP) it looked fine on the same LCD.

All the advice above is excellent.

I'd like to ask Gabe though about Prores - does it really 'uncompress' HDV footage? Can't see how that is possible, but then again I'm pretty ignorant! Also doesn't using the HQ setting create huge files?

Thanks for all the positive reinforcement. It really means a lot when people from this forum think things look pretty good!

One thought I just had as I've been playing around in my apartment with the Merlin and trying out your advice... Could the jittery movement have anything to do with the Image Stabilization feature in the A1?

I don't know if it's been on or off for some of the films I asked you guys to look at because I use two A1s and my two helpers also change some settings depending on the purpose.

Could the stabilizer cause such poor looking results with the Merlin?

Hi

Another thing I thought of when I saw the football game video was the contrast. It's a real nightmare to film bright white objects beside darker objects. You either end up with overexposed whites to get the background normal, or underexposed background to get the white players normally exposed. The dynamic range of the camcorder is to small to acheive a good exposuer in those situations. What you can do is, again, use presets and play around with different gamma curves, knee, pedestal and so on, or download presets and see what they can do. As I know, two presets that are frequently used are VIVIDRGB and PANALOOK2. I myself mostly use a modified VIVIDRGB which I like a lot and which give me a result I like without having to do so much color correction in post.

As I can see you have some kind of jib and a cam stabilizer which give you a lot of nice shots!

Regards,

/Bo

Hi

That's exactly what I thought when looking at the footage of the house interior ie that maybe the image stabiliser was kicking in. It should be off, of course. I suppose that autofocus was on, which is understandable as you are using something like a Merlin. The combination of the two might cause the focusing problem.

But the picture generally was a bit soft, noisy and fuzzy. I don't know what's causing this. There seems to be quite a bit of light in the rooms so I wouldn't have thought you would need to have the aperture wide open. I don't know what combination of shutter speed and aperture you were using. The XH A1 seems to like an aperture of around something like 5 ideally. An extreme aperture might degrade the image like this I suppose

The football looked fine I thought.

ps I wasn't paying attention. I looked at the video again. It's all on auto isn't it. The aperture can be seen to change. If it's any help you can look at my showreel via the link below. At around 54" there are two XH A1 shots on a Merlin, on full auto in similar lighting conditions to your house interior I think, which look much cleaner.
Are your experiments without AIS turned on producing better results?

Hi again

Also make shure that you're not using a preset unintentionally. If you think youre not using any presets, or have chosen the wrong one, but accidently have chosen one you're not knowing the settings for, you might have unpredictable results.


/Bo

Always shoot in -3 gain, even in dark situations. Stay away from positive gain settings.


What do you find wrong with 0 gain??

I looked at the video again. It's all on auto isn't it. The aperture can be seen to change. If it's any help you can look at my showreel via the link below. At around 54" there are two XH A1 shots on a Merlin, on full auto in similar lighting conditions to your house interior I think, which look much cleaner.
Are your experiments without AIS turned on producing better results?


Richard,
I use two other shooters besides myself for football, and I've been putting their A1's on Shutter Priority. But yeah, the aperture opens and closes too much. They're just volunteers so they're not good with full manual controls, and I don't want to have a bunch of blown out highlights from their footage.

My Merlin stuff is looking better now that I have the AIS off, full-manual controls, and the PANALOOK2 preset. I hadn't realized how much difference the presets can make! You learn something new every day....

I'm going to keep experimenting with the presets and the Merlin, and maybe soon I'll have a good preset for use specifically with the Merlin.

Thanks!

Geoffrey,

Pro Res doesn't "uncompress" footage. If I gave that impression, I am sorry. From what I've read, it converts the 8 bit HDV footage to 10 bit. Since I've started using it, I've noticed I can do more with color in FCP.

If you're shooting in HDV and editing in FCP, it's the way to go, in my opinion. File sizes are pretty big, though. 1080-24p footage is about 1.3 gigs per minute of footage, so a 60 minute tape is about 75 gigabytes. You need a lot of storage to use it.

Thanks Gabe, that's very clear. Would like to try using it more but just don't have the memory! Some say it's also easier / smoother for editing than HDV - do you find this?

I never had a problem with either, but then again I have a Mac Pro....

Geoffrey,

Pro Res doesn't "uncompress" footage. If I gave that impression, I am sorry. From what I've read, it converts the 8 bit HDV footage to 10 bit. Since I've started using it, I've noticed I can do more with color in FCP.

If you're shooting in HDV and editing in FCP, it's the way to go, in my opinion. File sizes are pretty big, though. 1080-24p footage is about 1.3 gigs per minute of footage, so a 60 minute tape is about 75 gigabytes. You need a lot of storage to use it.

I just got the Matrox MX02 Mini and I wondered about the 8-bit 10-bit choice and thought it didn't matter with HDV. So, you're not really uncompressing or improving the video quality of the HDV, just putting it in a better format for editing? What is the PC counterpart to Apple's ProRes?

Exactly, Alex. It doesn't "improve" the footage, per se – it's a great editing format.

I am not sure about the PC equivalent to Pro Res. Can't help you there....

Hi Aaron, one of the most important things you can do is to keep the aperture at its sweet spot which is about F4 to F5.6 by using ND filters, gain or even shutter speed.
Shooting 25p I have often dropped the shutter to 1/25 in low light to keep the aperture 'in the groove' as long as there is not going to be any fast motion to show up the slow shutter.
Magic bullet can often give your footage a softer look if you use the presets and I never use camera presets any more as I prefer the default settings which seem to give better light sensitivity and cleaner footage for correcting in post.
Any gain above -3 will show up, just capture a frame and look at it full size and it becomes obvious, well to me anyway.
Sometimes though gain has to be used, there is no choice and you just have to live with it.
If you are outputting to SD DVD then the gain is slightly less noticable though.
hope this helps John

Hi Aaron, one of the most important things you can do is to keep the aperture at its sweet spot which is about F4 to F5.6 by using ND filters, gain or even shutter speed.
Shooting 25p I have often dropped the shutter to 1/25 in low light to keep the aperture 'in the groove' as long as there is not going to be any fast motion to show up the slow shutter.
Magic bullet can often give your footage a softer look if you use the presets and I never use camera presets any more as I prefer the default settings which seem to give better light sensitivity and cleaner footage for correcting in post.
Any gain above -3 will show up, just capture a frame and look at it full size and it becomes obvious, well to me anyway.
Sometimes though gain has to be used, there is no choice and you just have to live with it.
If you are outputting to SD DVD then the gain is slightly less noticable though.
hope this helps John

I don't know how anyone can be happy with that answer after spending thousands of dollars on a camera. The whole point of HD is a better picture. Are you saying the camera sucks? I share the same problem with Aaron about not being totally happy with my pictures. It just seems like the slightest thing out of place will yield a crappy picture and the camera is not forgiving.

And then, after studying this thread about custom presets, you come along and say not to use them. Please explain. Make me feel better...

All cameras and lenses have their sweetspots. So it's best to use them if you can.
Some people like to use presets. Some people prefer to do it in post. It's a personal preference.
If there isn't enough light you either have to get more light or use gain.

Alex, no offense to John, but I've found using the default settings gives me a noisier image. The blacks have to be pressed in camera and other settings tweaked, like coring, to come up with a more pleasing image than the default.

As far as your quote: "It just seems like the slightest thing out of place will yield a crappy picture and the camera is not forgiving." – This is true of $3,000 cameras and $200,000 cameras alike. No camera exists that will simply give you an awesome image all the time, especially in auto modes. That is why cinematography is a serious, technical art that not just anyone can up and do. It requires a lot of knowledge and experience before people will recognize you for your work.

Most of us have been shooting for many years with various types of cameras to get where we're at. Give it a few years and things will come around. Don't crucify a camera because you can't make it do what you want yet. I did the same thing with my first camera and I realize now there was nothing wrong with that camera.

Here's a little thing I learned very early on. It's not so much the camera that gives you great results. Yes, you have to be good with a camera and have a decent camera. But things like lighting, composition, camera angles, camera movement, wardrobe, props, set dressing, etc. that make a pleasing image. The camera is simply a tool to capture a pleasing image. The camera cannot create the pleasing image for you. That is up to you.

Hi Alex,

I think that one of the issues that we all need to be aware of is the depth of knowledge that someone has about, for example, light, the camera and the editing process when they give an answer to a question. I say that because those things will almost certainly be reflected in the advice they give.

Very, very, simply put, and there are many variations on the process I describe below, I would like to suggest that it works something like this.

Those of us with little or no knowledge of any of these issues (and I include myself in this group) will go out and shoot a scene and wonder why it is not as great as some of the stuff we see in the sample clips section. We don't realise that what we are shooting has high contrast light and shadow or is a little to dark overall, etc. and we don't have the knowledge to take steps (by the use of various pieces of equipment, changing the time of day we shoot or where we shoot from, etc.) to alleviate some or all of these challenges. So we find out about a preset and try it out and it makes a bit of difference and we are hooked on presets. Any answers we give will stem from that. Remember, this is just about the issue of light. How much more complicated is it when you include dolly shots, pans, tilts, sound, etc

The next stage is that some of us know how to control light and perhaps have some extra equipment to do that more effectively and we also know more about the camera internal settings and the flexibility those two items (controlling the light and camera settings) give us and we find that with this knowledge we no longer totally rely on presets, and so the answers we give will take that extra knowledge and skill into account.

Others know about light, camera settings, and what can be done in post to change the images we see on the screen. That again changes the options available to us for solving challenges. So the answers we give are different again.

Then of course you factor in the amount of experience and depth of knowledge and skill we have in each of these issues and suddenly you realise how many different answers there are to one "simple" question, and we haven't even considered other lenses, variations on editing software, plug ins, and all the rest of the things that are available to us, or the level of skill we have in using them!

I know this answer didn't solve the technical question that was originally asked on this thread, but I hope it helps when people are wondering why answers from different members about the same question sometimes seem contradictory.

Please bear in mind that what I have described above is not meant to be a reflection on any individual on this forum. It is just the description of a process that could as easily be applied to the advice you get about driving a car, piloting an aircraft, baking a cake or any one of the thousands of things that ordinary people do each day.

Regards

Colin

I don't mean to butt in, but I recently got my A1. All my other cameras have been consumer cameras. The best ones have been my pair of HV-30s. Everything I've learned as a hobbiest for the past 18 or so years has been on consumer gear. I didn't have time or money to turn pro. I learned to get the best results I could get with what I had to use. Some techniques apply to all cameras, for instance, avoid backlighting by shooting with the sun to your back. Wear headphones to monitor your audio. ETC.

Now, I finally have an XH-A1. IMHO it is a really nice camera. It will be a while before I'm fully up to speed. The first thing I found out, is that the A1 is pretty good on automatic. Not perfect by any means, but the images are reasonably pleasing.

I have step by step been learning the features on the A1. For instance, I learned long ago on the consumer cams to do a manual white balance. So, I learned how to manually white balance the A1. Mind you, it's not necessary all the time. The auto settings are pretty good.

Coming from the HV-30, I tried the zebras and peaking. They help immensely for judging exposure and getting good focus. They work a lot like the HV-30, but are much more convenient to set up. Likewise all the other features. Audio levels, shutter speed, frame rates etc.

Yesterday I was trying the gain settings. Some of the shots came out bad. It wasn't the camera's fault. I wasn't used to the camera yet. I'll be using automatic some for a while yet, until I'm really comfortable with all the settings. Just take time to learn the camera.

I haven't even thought about downloading presets yet. I wan't to get used to the personality of the camera first.

I don't know how anyone can be happy with that answer after spending thousands of dollars on a camera. The whole point of HD is a better picture. Are you saying the camera sucks? I share the same problem with Aaron about not being totally happy with my pictures. It just seems like the slightest thing out of place will yield a crappy picture and the camera is not forgiving.

And then, after studying this thread about custom presets, you come along and say not to use them. Please explain. Make me feel better...

Alex, I think your first line in bold is a miss quote as I was refering to the gain setting rather than anthing else when I said you just have to live with it.

Every camera produces noise when you use gain but sometimes thats all you can do but 'live with it'
I know how much gain I will accept in my footage but other people have diffferent opinions.
There's been loads of discussion about the pros and cons of presets and lots of very experienced camera operators have different views.
All these people ( far more experienced than I) produce stunning footage but its from experience as has just been discussed above.
Gabe is correct in what he says and 'no offence taken' when he has a different work flow.
Its a different point of view and I respect his opinion.

I didnt say dont use the presets(miss quote 2) I said I dont use them so if you were not happy with the reply and my thoughts please feel free to ignore them go and practice with the camera and come to your own conclusions.
cheers

About the sweet spots (or are they sweat spots?) and the need for experience with the camera. I have a film degree and have been doing videos for some time. I don't hear much of that from Sony and Panasonic owners. A camera should look at least very good straight out of the box, and then made even better with presets, etc. I have never heard of a product that requires you to be an expert just to get a decent picture. My XL1s gave me a great picture. The thing I like about the Canon is the iris ring and manual controls. But right out of the box, the picture is pretty much bland and lifeless. Even with some of the presets, I don't see much difference. For example, the LowLight preset gave me lots of noise and didn't seem to compensate for low light. Now, someone is going to tell me that I need to tweak this or that. There proves my point.

Thanks for letting me rant

I found the link on here that is a couple of years old. Which is the latest list available? Is it an official listing or just something this furom put together?