I think we should have a tread where we can ask settings questions of the V1 collective. With this resource we can define not only what settings do but how they can be used.

No my cam is better than your cam comparisons please.

Here's a picture profile a video engineer talked me into, with my V1 shooting a chart and displayed on his scopes and reference monitor:

Color Level: +3
Color Phase: +1
Sharpness: 2
Skintone Detail: Off (factory setting)
Skintone Level: 6 (factory setting)
White Balance Shift: 0
Knee Point: Low
Black Compensation: Off
Cinematone Gamma: Off
Cinematone Color: On

I also have another profile set up with Black Comp: On, for low light situations. That will always require color correction in post.

I've had good experiences with these two profiles so far, mostly shooting interviews, both in natural light and with my hot lights.

For natural light indoors, I'm shooting quite a bit with +6db gain, which appears to be grainless and quite acceptable without further processing in post. I've not had to go higher in gain (I always travel with lights), but if I did, I'd want to check out Neat Video (neatvideo.com), the sample noise reduction images I've seen have been stunning.

Also, check out this thread:
http://www.dvinfo.net/conf/showthread.php?t=82810

PS. My V1 might be different than your V1, certainly what I like to look at is probably different than what you like!

Have you been happy with your results with the sharpness set to 2?
It seems too soft to me.

I shot a wedding with 3 and it looked out of focus when downresed to standard def. It did look ok in HD. I applied 50% sharpen filter and it was acceptable in SD. I have moved my sharpness back up to 7.

Can we talk audio settings as well as video settings? :)

Anyone here use a Rode NT3 with their V1U yet? I took Steve's advice and set my Input Trim to -16db to obtain the best match in sensitivity since the NT3 is -39db.

But I didn't get the best results. Plus this method seems to requires work in post to bring the volumes back up. Anyone have any experiences to share with their V1U or any other microphone with a similar sensitivity?

Yes, by all means let’s talk about audio. I have a Audio-Technica mic and a Sennheiser wireless if that is comparable.

I found the audio a little soft and hard to monitor at first until I read the manual and found out how to turn up the volume on the headphones.

Now I just monitor the readout and everything seams cool. I have come home more that once with soft audio.

This setting business started me wondering, so, I took a couple of days and tried all different settings for the 6 profiles. I looked at each one, made notes, rendered into mpeg2 to see how it would look, my conclusion is for the most part the defaulted settings, I switched back to the defaults on the the four settings, are pretty much right on, depending on whether its indoor, outdoor, etc.

Hugh, I think you are probably right for most situations the presets are probably right.

So it seems we should define the different situations that these settings can be used.

I have been told that the portrait setting is good for shooting weddings. So should you use that setting for the whole wedding or just the interviews?

Drawing from everyones’ experiences with this cam will help make us all better.

I found that the default portrait setting is good for just that, indoor or outdoor, but for scenery, trees, etc. I am going to us the Cinema setting, it is more saturated and just looks alot better. I did over 12 gigs of 20-30 sec clips with a green screen and outdoors, each clip being a different setting, and trying all 4 presets and the custom ones. some settings were no good at all, but the ones closest to the factory default, or the factory defaults, seemed to be the best generally. I did render each bunch of clips into mpegs to see difference. The only problem might be is the time of day, overcast or sunny, morning or afternoon, seems you can't really win for losing.

Now, that is interesting! You sparked more questions than I can pose in one post. So, I will start with one.

How did the green screen stuff turn out?
Was it outside or inside?
Did it key well?
What program are you using?
What camera settings did you use?

I know that is more that one question but it is all about one thing.

I had cam on full auto, and the settings were varied. I did keep notes on all of this, but after looking at all these clips one tends to see double. If you scroll thru the portrait settings you can see the changes each one has thru the lcd screen, it may be darker, light, whatever. I like a saturated look when I am outdoors, but inside I like what is closest to the real skin tone as I can get. I just sat in front of my green screen and did a clip, changed the setting and did another clip, and so on. There will be noticeable differences between the portrait, cinema, sunset and monotone. Right now I am back to the factory defaults for all of them, #6 I have the cinema setting with a sharpness of 10 instead of the default of 5, and #5 I have the portrait setting with higher sharpness, 10 i think, don't have cam with me this morning. I did not chroma key out the green screen.

10!
Now I have to try Cinema with a sharpness of 10.

How did you monitor the clips after capture? (Computer or HD TV)

no, just on computer

Have you been happy with your results with the sharpness set to 2?
It seems too soft to me.

I shot a wedding with 3 and it looked out of focus when downresed to standard def. It did look ok in HD. I applied 50% sharpen filter and it was acceptable in SD. I have moved my sharpness back up to 7.

I agree with you -- Sony's choice of 5 and 7 are perfect. (I like 8 as well -- and YES I've used 10 and it looks fine.) BUT, I've calibrated my monitors to near zero Sharpness.

Someone who's using a typical 50% Sharpness on their monitor will naturally set the camera lower. Someone who wants an extreme Film Look may also feel the need to squeeze all the fine detail out.

But, using anything below 5 is, IMHO, loosing the fine details that make HD.

PS: I'm also judging based on a complete production thru to HD DVD.

I applied 50% sharpen filter and it was acceptable in SD. I have moved my sharpness back up to 7.
I've read that sharpening in post can amplify compression artifacts. So using 7 to 9 is smart.

In all the sample clips I did I did quite a few with the sharpness cranked up to 12, 14 even 15, and down to 0, Frankly didn't see a real big difference from 6,7 or 8, the differences are so subtle that most people viewing it wouldn't see a difference or couldn't. I know I have to look at the clips over and over to find one that stands out, and that one is usually closer to defaulted settings. There are so many setting combinations available with this cam I really keep thinking about a documentary class I took, Its not the camera as much as the content!

PS: I'm also judging based on a complete production thru to HD DVD.[/QUOTE]

Steve,
How are you burning your HD-DVDs? What program? What burner?
Work flow Please.

Ron,

I don't know about Steve, but I just upgraded to FCS2 and I can burn HDDVDs using DVDSP4 to a red laser DVD! Only about 20 minutes fits, but it works great. Plays fine on my Toshiba HDA1 with the latest firmware. You edit in HDV, output to HDV, open DVDSP, select HD-DVD not SD-DVD, and then import the HDV and select burn. Pop in a regular 'ol DVD and it works great. I haven't tried to make any menus yet, I just upgraded a few days ago.

Interested to know...

Were you using a normal DVD Burner or a HD-DVD one?

Kin

Just the superdrive that came with my MAC tower 2 years ago! Sorry to the OP for going off topic. But the day I made my first HD-DVD was as exciting as when I made my first SD-DVD....I was grinning from ear to ear!

Shot a wedding in and old historic church this last weekend used three cams two V1s and a HC1. To try and match the cams I set the V1s to a custom setting that is called Church in my cam. I got the settings from Piotr Wozniacki and they seemed to work pretty good. In the original settings the skin detail was turned off I read in another tread I should be using them so I am experimenting with them now. Any knowledge on the use of skin detail and LVL could be helpful. Is there a preferred setting for blacks or whites. Any help on this will be very useful.

Church Profile
Color Level ------------ +3
Color Phase ------------ 0
Sharpness --------------7
Skintone DTL Type ----- 2
Skintone LVL -----------4
WB Shift ---------------0
Cinematone Gama -----Off
Cinematone Color -----Off

I have a question about the frame rates. I suppose this is the thread to do it in.

I just tested out the V1 and I have a few questions:

1. What is the 24A mode and how does that differ from the 24p?

2. I'm trying to shoot a video 1080/30i and I don't think this camera is giving me that option. I set the mode to what I think was 30p, and when I played back and captured to FCP it read it as 60i. Am I doing something wrong?

Plan and simple, how do I set the camera to capture at the correct HD setting? I'm also trying to capture to FCP in standard def, NOT HD. Its just the way we have to do it.

3. When we tried capturing right to the FCP without a tape, the image was squished, and even when I set it off of squish to "letter box" it still was squished on the computer. What can I do so I can capture in letter box?

4. Any settings that I should know about with the ilink so all of my footage isn't ruined or wasted that we shot HD and not just on SD?

Thanks for the input guys

Hi Justin

I don't have FCP but using Vegas 7 not a problem. My is PAL at 50i correct capture in both DV, SD and HDV

Justin, 24 and 24a are both 24p. The “a” designation has something to do with the way the “I” frames and time code are written to the tape. From what it understand the 24a is easier to pull down the original 24 frames.

Anyone who understands this better than me jump in at anytime and straiten this out.

When you set your cam to 30p the cam records the progressive frames to a 60i stream. De-interlace it after capture and you have 30p. Do not De-interlace it and you have 60i with repeated frames. If you want 60 interlaced frames turn off the progressive feature.

I don’t know about Final Cut but in Premiere Pro you can set the interpret footage feature to adjust the image properly for editing.

If you shot in hd and you can play it back on your cam and it looks fine on the cam then you have not lost it you just need to work out your capture settings.

I'd love to know how "interpret footage" works in Premiere Pro. Because 30p conversion is relatively simple, but I'd love to be able to edit HDV natively in Premiere Pro CS3 in 24P because I don't need Cineform until they've accelerated support for multi-cam (which they've been promising for a while actually, seems to be low on their list of priorities).

However when I ingest my 60i signal, I'm suspicious that if I set the frame rate to 23.976fps that I'm not getting the true 24P that I would if I ingested it with Vegas.

Anyone know?

And since Vegas does pulldown the material correctly, what codec could I export in Vegas that would import well in Premiere Pro? I tried experimenting with codecs once but I think the pixel aspect ratio kept screwing up because my 16:9 video was always squeezed.

This should shed light on how Vegas treats 24p

www.david-jimerson.com/Vegas24pBasics.zip

The clip is great at explaining how intelligent Vegas is at removing pulldown, and that it doesn't matter what your capture method is, etc. Which is why I'm frustrated that other NLEs do a poor job detecting the proper cadence of the pulldown. I'd love Adobe to specify in detail how their "Interpret Footage" option works, because I don't trust it yet.

And in the meantime, I'd like to take full advantage of Vegas understanding pulldown by possibly exporting it to another codec at 24P (pulldown removed) that could easily be imported into Premiere Pro.

Which is why I'm wondering which file formats are compatible with Adobe Premiere Pro CS3 at a native frame rate of 24P.

Okay I found some info on Adobe's site about Interpret Footage

http://livedocs.adobe.com/en_US/AfterEffects/8.0/help.html?content=WS3878526689cb91655866c1103906c6dea-7f82.html

It seems you can create your own rules for interpreting footage by editing the "Interpreting Rules.txt" file
Which is great news, in theory, as long as we know the proper cadence of 24A and script it in this file.

It seems as though we're just having a hard time pulling down the 24A mode because it's an atypical implementation of 3:2 pulldown. So I guess my question is, why should we sway to 24A and not just use the regular 3:2 pulldown, since NLEs like Adobe already have settings to remove the 3:2 cadence. I assume Avid and such can also pulldown the regular 3:2.

Would anyone agree, or am I overlooking something here?

You might look into Cineform Neo hdv. I use it and it makes capturing faster and cineform puts it into the right intermediate.

Yeah I love Cineform and all, and Aspect HDV is great for Adobe users... but I can't really afford it right now, and I'd prefer to edit HDV natively in Premiere Pro until I decide to buy a $500 plugin when Adobe SHOULD have added proper support for the V1U in CS3.

They had plenty of time.

Now I can only hope that they'll put out scripts/plugins, similar to what they did when they added support for Canon's HDV products. I'm not holding my breath though.

Craig, are you using CS3 now? And are you saying that CS3 can’t do the pull down?

Hugh, when you use NEO, does it play in real time or does it have to be rendered? The reason I ask is I tried the trial version and it had to be rendered.

It will not properly understand the V1Us 24A mode when you import it. I haven't tried regular 24P mode though.

You can right click on the clip and choose "Interpret Footage" to specify the frame rate, but I'm really not confident that it is converting it properly. Cause well, you can set any frame rate you want really.

I capture using cineform into an avi and use it to edit, it previews ok unless I use filters and such, then it acts like any other clip, and the size of the preview window.

24p and 24pa is the same, 24pa has a slight pause between clips. I use 24pa for the pause.

Just read some more from David Jimerson, says 24pa is different,

Thank you guys for your input. Much appreciated.

Hugh,

I'm pretty sure the cadence is difference.
24pA is not 2323, or 2332, it's something else entirely.

The "Search" feature is your friend.
24pa writes a start cadence every time, assuring that a clip starts with the correct pulldown information in it. This is done for various NLE's that can't support the standard 24p mode.

On the Sony mini site it says that the cadence is 2323. I haven’t tried it yet but I will as soon as I get a chance.