Hi Wes,

compliments, very compelling shots. I liked the dirty truck tire the most, so very true in light and color and detail!

To all, I also underexpose for many shots -- and there's a mathematical reason: RGB is not capable of rendering saturated colors at high luminocity (that's actually where xvYCC color comes in, but thats another story). Bright colored things like cats-in-the-sun or sunsets or other skies lose their color if you don't force the cam to close up a little more. If needed, I add a little gamma in post (at the cost of some noise in darker areas). This way the limited dynamic range isn't as destructive to the total image.

Thanks Wes,
Pieter

Pieter, good post. I've tried adjusting my underexposed shots in Shake and haven't had much success, too much noise in the darks. A curves adjustment in AE can do an okay job, I just need more experience. The resolution/PQ is there with these cams, hopefully they'll start working on the dynamic range more, they just need more... more more!

Anything close to white is just a no no. I've shot the white dog and white horse and there's no way out of blowing those types of things out and revealing how video-ish the camera really is.

Wes, don't feel badly, I see whites blown all the time on network HD feeds with megabuck HD cameras. It still is the nature of video. Yes, the megabuck cams will have greater dynamic range, but they still do blow whites out pretty easily.

Hi Wes&Ken,

theoretically, the underexpose trick should get you there as long as the noise isn't too bad. To be quite honest, I also use levels after the gamma to keep black levels where they were (studio RGB levels that is).
At the risk of going sesame street here: if black levels get too high, not only will the picture look pale, also the noise will be more visible. (I'm sorry, we may be going OT :)

Pieter, I agree, sometimes underexposing can give the overall feel of the video a richer look. As long as the overall scene isn't rendered 'too dark', you're fine.

with my HV10 I noticed that when in priority shutter mode if I manually take the exposure down the image noticably softens. Is this the case with the HV20?

Fergus, I haven't noticed this. I just did a test and didn't lose any detail when turning down exposure in shutter priority mode.

ok thanks Wes

I underexpose all my video, and I try not to go more than a half to a stop down...anything more is going to crush your shadows irrecoverably.

I like to do it by setting my zebras to 90 and dialing in the main subject to zebras, then one click down (iris)...I always shoot 30p with a 1/60th shutter if possible. I use ND and a Polarizer to control the amount of light coming in to keep the iris as wide as possible for DoF control.

I use the polarizer to rich up the areas that will tend to overexpose either through cutting stray light or by dialing out reflections and glings. I also get the added benefit of the color richness the C-Pol tends to provide. I generally try to get it so that I'm one click into the zebras on the highlights and light the subject to fit that exposure.

Hey Wes, incase you were wondering, it was me who just added you as a contact on Flickr. I'll hopefully be picking up my HV20 tomorrow and will make sure to grab a few shots to post up on Flickr also. Maybe you should start a HV20 group on there?

Wow Glenn, great shots! I haven't really used Flickr all that much yet. It would be interesting to have an HV20 group.

Thanks, yeah Flickr's quite good actually. They don't compress the photos anywhere near as much as most other photo websites.

I have the free account and the resolution is limited to 1024x1024 so I resize my shots to that in Photoshop and save to JPEG 100% and noticed that it doesn't appear Flickr re-compressed this file, the full resolution one. I downloaded the file from Flickr and the file size is exactly the same as the file I uploaded and I can't find any difference in the color channels. I thought that was pretty cool.

That's interesting. I never noticed that before.