I had to resort to a pretty fast shutter speed, maybe 1/1000? I can't remember exactly. Having shot with the DVX for so long, I'm still getting used to the fact that I can't shut the iris down on the Canon as much.

There's an interesting lens flaring that happens with the 20x lens in that it produces a thick line that is perfectly vertical from top to bottom of the frame. I haven't experienced that with the DVX so I'll be avoiding shooting directly at the sun with the XLH1, which is kind of a bummer because I like those kinds of shots.

Hey Steve,

In the "pebble" still grab, that is actually not a lens flare but a CCD artifact. Not sure if camera engineers have a more sophisticated name for it, but it has been discussed on DVi every so often as "vertical smear." Bigger and better chips are less prone to get it, but it can happen even to the big dollar broadcast cameras and I've seen it happen on network broadcasts.

If you key word vertical smear, you'll find several threads about it on various cameras. But you've already found the solution: avoid shooting objects so bright compared to their surroundings that they exceed the CCD's capacity to handle them. Here's one of several threads:

http://www.dvinfo.net/conf/showthread.php?t=60850&highlight=vertical+smear

Great to know, Pete. Thanks.

Took the kids and cam to the zoo today:

Good work!
Steven, are they deinterlaced frame grabs from interlaced video?

I use cineform Aspect HD for capturing and it strips the pulldown making it 24p native. I took these stills from the 24p end file.

How much res do you loose when doing that Steven?

How much res do you loose when doing that Steven?

None...it's just extracting information that's already there and stripping away extraneous info. The 24p frames are not actually "processed" in any way so they remain clean.

http://www.realm.cc/upload/Elton/AhhhCute.m2t
http://www.realm.cc/upload/Elton/Buds2.m2t
http://www.realm.cc/upload/Elton/Buds6.m2t
http://www.realm.cc/upload/Elton/Buds7.m2t
http://www.realm.cc/upload/Elton/BudsSwing.mov

The last one is is slow motion clip in PhotoJPEG 720p QT format. It's a large file, but the quality is good and seems to be reasonably cross-platform compatible.

Rec'd from Martin Costa:

"I've got a couple of uncompressed stills from my XLH1. One is 8bit and the other 10 bit of the same subject, the difference in colour surprised me. They are 5mb in size."

8bit image, 5.6mb: http://media.dvinfo.net/xlh1/mcwinch418bit.pctx
10bit image, 5.6mb: http://media.dvinfo.net/xlh1/mcwinch4110bitnew.pctx
10bit image, 5.8mb: http://media.dvinfo.net/xlh1/mcgreen10bit.pctx

To view these images, download them to your local drive and re-name the file extensions from ".pctx" to ".pct" and open them with an image browser that supports the Macintosh PICT file format. Most photo apps such as PhotoShop and Paint Shop Pro will do fine.

Here are a couple of half-size .jpg's which show the color difference Martin is talking about. The 8-bit version is on the left (or top, depending on your browser) and the 10-bit version is on the right (or bottom).

Cineform it is then!

Chris, can you take this post down? Need to conserve Shane's bandwidth.

Sorry guys, I took the clips down.

Barlow,

Since we're on the topic of filters... are you using a matte box or threaded 72mm on the front end? If a matte box, which one?

Thanks,

Ken

That 1/8 pro mist is a nice subtle effect BTW.

I downloaded ahhcute before it was pulled.

Barlow, my apologies... I didn't even look at this thread until now. Sorry about that.

Just a reminder -- I'm happy to host video clips here for anybody. Plenty of server space and bandwidth available.

Barlow,

Since we're on the topic of filters... are you using a matte box or threaded 72mm on the front end? If a matte box, which one?

Thanks,

Ken

That 1/8 pro mist is a nice subtle effect BTW.

I downloaded ahhcute before it was pulled.

Simple 72mm front end.

I reposted this. Thanks to Chris Hurd for hosting my file. It has been raining all week so I haven't been able to do much with the camera so I said to myself "Self, why not shoot the rain?" :)

http://media.dvinfo.net/xlh1/rainfinal.m2t

It's a big file (357mb) Right click and save as...

I don't seem to have editing privileges for the first post but I made a few changes. Disregard the link in post #1 and use this:

http://media.dvinfo.net/xlh1/rainfinal1.m2t

Thanks for the update Steven... the post editing privs expire after 24 hours I think, so a corrected follow-up is always the best way to go. Much appreciated,

Very nice. Never figured rain could be that amusing. I noticed some artifacts but I figure that has to do with the compression of the file? And how did you do that with the clouds? Is that the feature called "interval timer"? I am looking to do that and I want to know how.

Thanks Fredrik,

The artifacts are as a result of multiple compression passes, they are not in the original. Cineform and Premiere Pro combo is still very buggy but it looks like there will be a fix very soon.

The new timelapse at the end was done in real time and then sped up in post. There is not an intervalometer on the camera. Even though the DVX100a (my other camera) has this, I rarely used it, preferring to do it in real time.

oh, that's odd since the XL2 has it. But I am going to give it a try and see what happens.

I was watching "21 Grams", a great film by the way, and was inspired to do some lighting tests and added a little Magic Bullet Bleach Bypass. I think it looks pretty good.

500w softbox for keylight, 250w Lowel pro light for fill and another 250w Lowel for a backlight (need to better position that one) for the first closeup.

Does anyone know where I can find any city night footage shot with the XLH1? I've found one shot, but it was too dark to be a good example.

Thanks,
Paul

Shot last night, with kind of an oddball set-up: XL H1 plus 1.6x extender plus EF adapter plus Sigma 70-300mm telephoto zoom. Maximum available aperture about f/5.6, so exposure is controlled by shutter speed. Basically I just dialed the shutter up until the zebra went away. No access to EXIF data from my laptop here, unfortunately, but if someone wants that info, I can get it from home. No presets, just the default H1 image. Somewhat soft all the way around, and some significant chromatic abberation, both induced by the price tag of this Sigma lens (it was not expensive, and it shows)!

Nice shots, is that the lunar rover... Maybe they should send your setup to Mars.

I did a little test yesterday shooting live SDI straight into my G5/Kona and captured with the Sheer "lossless" codec. Here are a few grabs:

http://media.dvinfo.net/xlh1/Cousins24FSDI-1.jpgx
http://media.dvinfo.net/xlh1/Cousins1080jpeg.jpgx
http://media.dvinfo.net/xlh1/LilBuds1.jpgx

Right click/download/save and remove the "x" for a 1080 jpeg pic.

The H1 is ridiculous. :-)

Excellent colours and textures, you live in a nice place man!

I agree.

What's the DOF like Barlow? Can you throw the background out of focus quite easily?

James.

The DOF of the 20x really surprises me. Hard to say why, but it definitely feels like there's more ability to throw out backgrounds with less hassle than with any previous 1/3" camera, and that's at equivalent focal lengths, say, to the XL1, not just the extra 4X of the stock lens. (which stops down anyway)

Yasser--that's actually my folks place up against the Wasatch range. (Utah Rocky Mountains).

My yard has a long ways to go. :-P

My guess is that the high resolution of 1080 makes out-of-focus areas more obvious as compared to a subject that is in razor sharp focus; in other words, at lower resolutions such as DV, the apparent depth of field is widened a bit just because the smaller number of pixels in the image hides the difference between the in-focus subject and something that's just slightly out focus optically speaking. Otherwise, cameras shooting with the same sensor size, f-stop, and focal length ought to have about the same depth of field.

Chris has been asking me to do some XL H1 in 24F versus XL2 in 24p comparisons, which I haven't had time to do. But a little experiment about this DOF might be a small project I could handle this next week when I'll hopefully be a little less busy than I am this week.

I think your hypothesis is spot on. Makes sense.

btw, that'd be a cool experiment.

Two new things for your viewing pleasure:

First up is a work in progress. This is the time of the year when cottonwood trees lose their cotton and it's a pretty cool site, it looks like it's snowing. There's a cottonwood in our yard and it was shedding its skin the other day and I couldn't pass up the opportunity to shoot.

I will probably include this in a more ambitious piece in the future because I really didn't have enough footage to work with even for this short edit. Anyway, it's pretty spectacular so I wanted to share it.

This is a fairly low bitrate 24p WMV so the blocking in the water IS NOT IN THE ORIGINAL. Sorry for shouting but I don't want the focus to be on something that's a result of post process compression and not the camera's ability.

There are a couple of shots in there that I took in the middle of the night of the moon. I cranked the gain up for those shots so they are riddled with noise but that's intentional. The next time I do something like that I think I'll experiment with NR1 and NR2 to see their effects...

So here goes:

http://media.dvinfo.net/xlh1/cottonwood_tree.wmv

Second up is some footage from a recent Little League game my son was in. Nothing unusual here, just some random shots.

http://media.dvinfo.net/xlh1/baseball.wmv

Enjoy...

Steven,

Well done on both, I find the music adds so much to your visuals. Not that they need it but it does add that extra sense of drama.

I assume you're using your 'Panalook' preset in 24f for most of your stuff lately?

Ken.

Yes Ken, I am using that preset exclusively now in conjunction with the incremental white balance button for warm or cool looks. I find this preset to be almost identical to what I had my DVX set to and, when lit well, I can manipulate the image very well in post if I choose.

I have a musical background (played in various rock bands for 12 years) and that plays as important a role to me as the visual image. I tend to "see" music when I hear it and it dictates all kinds of imagery in my head that inspires what I shoot.

I am a drummer .......10 years

nice to meet u ....man !

rock ....metal....jazz....fusion......

now I own a show band club........


and thinking about to make movie

Hay everyone, I uploaded footage of the water fall clip that Steven Dempsey posted earlier.
I took the clip and tried to look at as if I were the Producer of an upcoming movie.
"You know, that's a great shot of a water fall, but, can you give me more"?
"And that building by the water, can you move it closer to the center of the frame"?
"And the hotel, I'd like to have a more rooms so our actor has to go into a seperate section of the hotel. Can you do that with HDV?
I think the answer is YES.
Please give me some feed back.
The link http://media.dvinfo.net/xlh1/fallsfx.mov

Here is a picture of the orginal footage in case anyone can't play Quicktime movies http://media.dvinfo.net/xlh1/falls orginal frame.jpg

Here is a picture of the finished VFX shot. http://media.dvinfo.net/xlh1/fallsfx.jpg

Darrell
FIRST CINEMA PICTURES

Perpetual Motion. Shot at Snoqualmie and the Montlake Fill here in Seattle.

http://media.dvinfo.net/xlh1/disjecta/perpetual_motion.wmv

Love watching your sequences. Do the first couple of pans use OIS enabled? There appears to be some OIS twitching. Could be my playback.

Best,
Christopher

No, I think I may have captured the footage with the wrong settings. I'm aware of the problem but it's not in the original footage. I'm going to check it later.

Fair Dinkum Steven, if Canon wants to start moving this camera like hotcakes, they should pick you up. Good work, really loved the Cottonwood Tree piece, I know when eventually I pick up my JVC at the end of the year that I'll be doing a lot of nature work. I always check dvinfo and dvxuser every day in hope of new footage, and know if I see your name on some footage that it's worth the download!
Cheers

Steven,

Your images look great, as usual.
Is it straigth from the camcorder, or color corrected ?

Ok Steven, great footage. So good in fact, next time I take a vacation, I may just swing by and see the falls for myself.
I showed the falls footage to another filmmaker friend of mine, (Scott Cooper) and he said "I know that place, my daughter had her resception there". Small world.
Keep up the good work.
Darrell
FIRST CINEMA PICTURES

I shot this with my LetusXL35 just before I went out on one of my hits.

I have resorted to being a hitman to make some money to support my filmmaking habit. You know how it is...

http://media.dvinfo.net/xlh1/disjecta/letuslight.wmv

I don't know you. But God! Do I hope you're joking!

Okay, I'm just kidding.

Here's a taste of the fun I had on monday with the XL-H1. It was downconverted to 720p @ 24fps for bandwidth purposes, as well as some cropping and stabilization with After Effects. It has been color corrected and post processed, and it was originally shot using the modified terra preset. I did the lighting setup with the help of a very talented gaffer and I think it came out very nice so I wanted to share it.

Link below.

Now available through DV Info Net (thanks Luis!)

The link is http://media.dvinfo.net/xlh1/gc.wmvx

Download that file and rename the extension from .wmvx to .wmv

WOW Looks good!