I shot a lot of races last year, all in SD, this year it's HD and it looks very nice! I just got around to digitizing some of the race footage shot with our HD100 at the Muddy Creek motocross. We had track passes to roam free (nearly got nailed by a bike more than once, we for sure got our share of roostings), it was good to be in the middle of the action once again. Of course, we used Paolo's DSC scene file (with the Black set back to 0) and set the shutter to 250 to catch every particle of flying mud and dirt. As well as posting a few of the raw M2T files, I also added those files plus a couple more into a WMV-HD version. This is non-edited, simply cuts but at least they are all together. I did not get a chance to try nearly everything I intended to try at this race, including over-cranking in SD, (I just didn't want any "mode" issues to I stayed in 720/30p). It's a little shakey at times, but a fair amount is shot near the end of the telephoto and I was not about to drag our sticks all of that track.

The next race is a road series race, a lot different action than straight moto, I'll try and share some of that as well.

Let me know what you think.
http://www.danielpatton.com/jvc/

I shot a lot of races last year, all in SD, this year it's HD and it looks very nice!

Nice stuff! Were you pulling focus as the guys went by?

Have you seen any HDV artifacting? Sure seems like this type of shooting would be a good candidate if it was going to happen. I didn't notice it in these clips.

Nice colors and latitude (I'm on a constrasty monitor at the moment so it maybe have punched it up a bit). I like the black level around zero as opposed to -2 also. There seems to be a really big jump between -2 and -1.

I really like it! High action and exciting subject. It looks like you were right there up close and personal on the turn (where the dirt is flying). Overtly bright colors suit this type of action. Great work Daniel.

PS I could have a field day mixing the cycle's rumble in surround to some hard driving music.

Excellent, It makes me want to go buy one.

Mark

Excellent, It makes me want to go buy one.

Mark

Hehe, I hope you mean a camera and not a bike. Or do I need to post all of the crash footage from this race and last year combined? ;)


@ Joel,

I pulled focus when I could, but most of the time I would just zoom, set focus and follow them through to zooming wide. It worked well most of the time, but it could go soft real easy shooting with the JVC for this type of action. I still need more time on the track with this camera/lens combo.

As for HDV artifacting, I got far more from an easter egg hunt I shot recently than I did from the motocross. It was so odd in fact I'm tempted to post some here and see if anyone can figure out why I had so much HDV artifacting. Can tape stock effect this?

@ Stephen,

Thanks! And I have a lot of moto edited to hard driving music, Linkin Park works for me every time.

Quick question Daniel; were you using Sony tape stock? I've seen artifacting using the wet Sony stock when doing quick pans and/or tilts with cameras. I've not seen this happen with dry brands such as Panasonic. I've surmised that it's the "wet-lube" that causes the tape to shift on the heads but have have no scientific evidence to back this up, so take it with a grain of salt.

Tim

Hey Tim,

No, I was not using the Sony Tapes, in fact I was using the rather expensive Panasonic DVM63MQ Master Quality tapes. I have been using them since our first shoot with this camera, with no other tape brand mixing.

It's real strange in fact, the easter egg hunt footage looks super nice in regards to color and overall latitude, it's just noisy as hell with compression artifacts, like an army of small ants swarming the edges of everything, and in all of the fine detail areas it has an insane amount. Never before has it done this.

Hey Paolo! Have you seen any additional odd compression noise with those DSC settings? I'm wondering if maybe I was getting more artifacting due to pushing the color more, just a crazy thought.

It's real strange in fact, the video looks super nice in regards to color and overall latitude, it's just noisy as hell with compression artifacts, like an army of small ants swarming the edges of everything, and in all of the fine detail areas. Never before has it done this.

Has it been doing the same thing since? I once bumped up the gain accidentally and got more noise etc. Have your detail settings changed? I'm also assuming you weren't shooting at a high F-Stop like F8 through F16.

If you can replicate the problem it might help find the solution.

No, I'm sure I was not adding any gain, although you are right that it's easy to bump the switch. Added gain noise is very different than compression noise, and this is without a doubt compression noise.

Now it was very bright out that day and even with my ND on it would hit F8 - F11 at times. I was not aware that this would cause crazy noise on HDV. Does it?

I have not shot anything since last Sunday, so I'm not sure if the camera is still doing it or not. I do a majority of our editing as well, and with a full plate right now I have had little time to shoot anything.

Now it was very bright out that day and even with my ND on it would hit F8 - F11 at times. I was not aware that this would cause crazy noise on HDV. Does it?

I'm not clear on exactly why this is, but all of the little HD cameras have real problems shooting F8 and especially if you get higher. Even the HVX will give some scary results.

I bet raising your shutter speed at the motocross event got you down to F5.6 or F4.... but at 24FPS you probably got up to F11. Here is Phoenix you can hit F16 even with max ND on. That'll give bad results. We have to buy an ND9 just to walk outside. Sometimes I'd like a ND1.2.

You really want to live around F4 - F5.6 if you can. If you need that shallow DOF you can go wider, but CA is likely to increase.

Joel and Daniel:

When you get into the smaller f stops, a defraction of the image occurs where parts of the image are projected on the ccd that become larger than each individual pixel, thus blurring the image. This overwhelms the codec, and thus your compression artifacts. This phenominin is called the "Airy Disc". The smaller the f-stop, the greater the effect, and is further complicated by the different wavelengths of the different colors of light. You might Google it, and you'll come up with many scientific papers describing the effect.

In tests I've done, f4 is the ideal f stop, and while 5.6 is acceptable, although even there some degradation begins to occur. I always use f 4, and only occasionally kiss the lower end of 5.6. I use additional ND filters or faster shutter speeds to deal with the light level.

This also occurs on a 2/3 chip (HD) camera, but doesn't begin to show until around f-8. SD cameras have much bigger pixels on the ccd's, and the effect isn't as noticable. Unique to HD, and especially to 1/3 inch chips.

Hope this helps.

Gary Morris McBeath

I might add, I wish JVC had given us an additional built-in ND filter, or, perhaps even better, the ability to select a lower gain setting to achieve exposure without screwing on the additional ND. Depending on the type of scene, you can't always use shutter speed to get the lower exposure setting.

Third party ND filters are never the same color as the camera's built in ones, which are very color neutral I might add. The use of the additional ND therefore requires additional color correcting in poston the scenes where they are used.

Gary

Daniel,
Gary is probably right about this issue.

The JVC does seem to be noisier when closing down past F8.
I was wondering this same thing a while ago. Since then, I bought
an external Heliopan .9 ND filter and stay wider than F5.6.

I've noticed this same issue on other cameras, so Gary
is probably right why there appears to be more noise.

This is really a non issue as long as we understand it and
keep the f-stop wider than F8. I'm sure most of us are trying to stay
F2.8 - F4 anyways...

The HD100 is reasonable on noise levels. Actually it's better than a lot of other
cameras it competes with.

Thank you Gary, Joel and everyone.

Although I have always understood it best to shoot in the 4 - 5.6 range, I had never seen with my own eyes the reason for doing so in HDV. Now I have!

I was going to post a couple images to show my result of doing so, but I fear it will only give some jack-*** a poor excuse to trash the JVC unjustly. I was shooting outside of a safe range for HDV and received the results expected. I can live with that. Everything else we have shot with this camera looks so damn good!

Thanks again for the feedback.

I'd say more like f2.8 - f5.6

Well true, the moto was shot in that range and it's fair to say the results can vary. But when you start playing around 2.8 and lower the CA ruins it for me.

This is where better glass will make a difference.

For many of us staying wide open is beneficial as it decreases dof and reduces the HDV artifacting. The stock lens and most lenses for that matter would do much better above 5.6 with f8+ probably the sharpest part of the lens.

Good ol' catch 22.

Tim,

The defraction phenominin is related only to the f-stop or aperture and the size of the imaging chip and its pixel size. It has nothing to do with the quality of glass. Better glass will, of course, render a better picture across all stops, but the defraction still occurs at smaller openings relative to the pixel size of the ccd.

As I mentioned, the same thing occurs on the 2/3 inch cameras; my HDCAM with a 30K lens on it still had its sweet spot around f-5.6, and degraded with smaller aperture openings. Larger ccd's are slightly better than the 1/3 inch ccd's, and can be stoped down another f-stop or two, but still have the same problem.

This issue is true of all HD cameras, regardless of brand or glass used. Welcome to the world of HD.

Gary

Gary, yes I agree. I may have not worded it correctly but I follow what you are saying.

However, lenses sharpen up when stopped down. Regardless of the chip or medium (film) capturing the image even a fast lens will perform better at higher f stops. For example, I have a Canon 5D Digital SLR which as a full frame 35mm sized sensor (Super 35mm technically) and even with good Canon "L" glass I get much better images from the lens when I stop down.

My horribly executed point was that shooting wide open puts in a tough place because we need very good lenses to make up for it (i.e. they perform good at wide f stops).

I love everything about this clip. framing, angles, the in your face style. It felt as if it was done by a big professional movie crew. So many of those moments could have been in a feature film and I wouldn't have noticed. The image quality and color are far beyond a lot of the footage I've seen. I was really impressed when the motorcycles came with the bright sky in the frame and all the lighting stayed so nicely balanced. overall it had a nice film feel to it. I'd really like to see some of your other work. you're a pro.
thanks for sharing

Very nice Daniel, thank you sharing it and for mentioning TC.

Love those flying chunck of mud :)

Hey Paolo! Have you seen any additional odd compression noise with those DSC settings? I'm wondering if maybe I was getting more artifacting due to pushing the color more, just a crazy thought.

No, I didn't notice any more noise. I don't think the colors would affect the noise, I would expect that to be possibly an issue with the stretch or gamma settings. Of course the detail settings could do that too but, if you used the TC config, you're detail should be at MIN, isn't it?

Speaking of added noise, has anyone tested turnig the gamma all the way down as a way to reduce noise? To me the gamma level option is kind of like a mini-gain setting where increasing it makes things brighter at the expense of more noise. However, turning it down all the way (while darkening the image) seems to reduce the noise. After you adjust for proper exposure, I couldn't tell a difference other than it seemed slightly cleaner. Anyone else try this or am I way off here?

I love everything about this clip. framing, angles, the in your face style. It felt as if it was done by a big professional movie crew. So many of those moments could have been in a feature film and I wouldn't have noticed. The image quality and color are far beyond a lot of the footage I've seen. I was really impressed when the motorcycles came with the bright sky in the frame and all the lighting stayed so nicely balanced. overall it had a nice film feel to it. I'd really like to see some of your other work. you're a pro.
thanks for sharing

Thanks John, it's rewarding when someone likes what you shoot, but it's all very rough, as is motocross itself. I have a lot more footage, but only this year am I shooting HD, all the older clips are DV. Shoot me your email and I'll send you a couple links to the other quick edits.

Paolo, I found out my odd added noise from an Easter egg shoot was in fact a high f8.0 setting, I should have used more ND and kept it in the 5.6 - 4 range, it was my bad. And yes, I keep the Detail to min and more recently off. Too much detail looks too edgy to me, min is plenty.
p.s. I'm from your area, grew up in Santa Cruise, Los Altos and Sunnyvale. I miss that area. Santa Cruz is the shiz! Is 17 still a curvy motor speedway? ;)

Chad, I have not tried reducing the gamma, although it's an interesting observation. I might do a little testing of my own just to see what I get. That's part of the reason I keep the detail setting min - off, it's a lot cleaner. On a larger good monitor you can see the noise increase as you turn the detail up. Does anyone know if gamma is actually added at the default level or ??

Yes,
closing down to f8 or greater will show more noise.

The trouble with gamma is that it only affects midtones, not shadows or highlights. Since noise is mostly visible in the shadows, turning down either black gamma (I think it's called black stretch on this camera?) or master black would be more effective, at the cost of crushing your blacks.

The other problem is that you end up reducing the camera's latitude for highlights. I'm guessing it would end up looking like overzealous use of knee. I know some people like the look of softening up highlights with knee, so it would work for them, but I personally think it makes the highlights look way too unnatural, I just turn it off and let bright parts of the picture clip.

Paolo, I found out my odd added noise from an Easter egg shoot was in fact a high f8.0 setting, I should have used more ND and kept it in the 5.6 - 4 range, it was my bad. And yes, I keep the Detail to min and more recently off. Too much detail looks too edgy to me, min is plenty.
p.s. I'm from your area, grew up in Santa Cruise, Los Altos and Sunnyvale. I miss that area. Santa Cruz is the shiz! Is 17 still a curvy motor speedway? ;)


Good to know that you found the cause. I use ND filter almost every time I shoot outdoors (and indoor if there is enough light). Yes, Hwy 17 is the usual, really great if you ride it in the middle of the day with a motorcycle, lots of fun :)