Just two questions for the EX1R owners.

1 - What about the quality of the DV PAL (anamorphic 16/9 and standard 4/3)?

2 - It is possible to shot in HD an than downconverter in PAL directly with the camera using the composite video output? If yes it is the video quality of the downconvertion as good as shooting directly in DV SD?

Danilo
Italy

1 - What about the quality of the DV PAL (anamorphic 16/9 and standard 4/3)?

As soon as I got mine, I compared EX1R SD with EX1 720p downconverted to SD, and used a Z1 in SD mode as a control.

The EX1R is much better than the Z1 in SD mode (of course, it should be!) but I still preferred the downconvert from 720p to DVCPro50 or ProRes. With a bit of twiddling of a picture profile, I hope to get an even better SD output.

2 - It is possible to shot in HD an than downconverter in PAL directly with the camera using the composite video output?

No, at least not that I've found. Based on Z1 experiences, would prefer to handle downconvert myself anyway.

FWIW, I've got two situations where the SD on the EX1R is preferable to doing my own downconvert: handing over rushes to a client (on hard disk) on an SD shoot, and recording conference content direct to hard disk (where there's a substantial demand for 4:3). That's 7-8 hours of material per day per camera. In the old days of 3 hour tapes, such quantity was easy to shoot, nightmare to ingest. SDHC makes this bearable, but shooting SD direct to disk is a dream.

Hey Matt,

Whats the quality like if you compare it to footage downconverted from HD?

I'll have to dig up the stuff I shot last month and see if I can post some stills but that will have to be in a couple of days as I am 'on a mission' with an edit for Monday/Tuesday.

But it boils down to the control of detail within an image. The EX1R SD stuff seemed to have a little less detail than the EX1 720p stuff I downsampled. The non-Picture Profile (default) seemed a little too sharpened for my taste.

Also, initial 'suck it and see' tests seem to show that what works for 720p doesn't necessarily work for SD - but I also managed to muck up the transfer of PPs on my EX1 to the EX1R, which leads me to suspect that all bets are off regarding last month's test.

So this is why I think the SD mode will need some Picture Profile tests, playing with the detail and sharpening to get the look I like for the kind of work I do - which is centred around a richly coloured image, not oversharpened yet high in detail, fairly flat with well controlled highlights. YMMV.

I'm absolutely confident that there's a Picture Profile that will get just the right balance of detail and sharpening 'out of the box'. My SD work will probably not have the benefit of much grading, so a PP needs to be cooked up sometime soon.

I did some work on picture profiles for SD on the EX1R. This profile was designed to match an older 2/3" SD cameras:

Matrix; cinema, level +8

SD Detail Level +25, Frequency -65, crispening +10, White limit +50, black limit +55

Knee 90, Gamma: Std 2 level +5, Black Gamma +10

This profile gives some very hard detail correction, but the idea is to mimic an older SD camera that would also have similar strong detail correction. If the detail level is too high for your tastes reduce it to +8. If you would like more colour raise the Matrix level to +20 to +30.

Great stuff, Alister - many thanks! Will use these as a base.