Great stuff !

It's so nice to see those small guys play. Compared to those 2 meter giants in the real competition world these kids are doing great though.

Just wait until they can make the jump and hang on the ring.
Funny to see them in slow motion too.

I have two girls. One is six years old and our youngest is almost three years.
Her third birthday is on March 11th.

In eight hours I hope to have my own brand new Canon XH-A1 and make the same stuff. Girls stuff, I guess.

Keep up the good work!

Oh, one question. Did you need an extra codec to make the WMV in Premiere ?

Thanks for the kudos, Gert. And have fun with YOUR new A1. It's a freakishly cool camera.

As for Premiere, you can encode to WMV right from the timeline via Adobe Media Encoder. The settings are fairly basic, however. If you need more options, you can download Microsoft's Windows Media Encoder for free and feed it a minimally-compressed file (I like the HuffyUV for intermediates until I break down and buy Cineform).

I haven't tried QT yet (it's a bit overwhelming with its options), but have seen some very nice encodes with that codec... and the Mac folks like 'em better.

There's also the DIVX encoder that I've been playing with today. I'm going to try to upload vids to their Stage6 site. But the site is still in beta, so it's a little quirky... at least it was for me today.

Let me know if you need some advice shooting sports with the A1. Most of it is "on the job training", but I've learned a few things so far that might be helpful. Focusing is by far the trickiest thing for me.

Take care,
Brian

Thanks for viewing and comments

Please take another look for Taiwan traditional old house footage.

Rough cut of one song from live music show 2x A1
 

Ive done my rough cut, still some tweeks to make. Two cam set up. Was a tiny space. A cam was full wide couldnt fit everything, b cam had 30 cms of space to work in (well not really but almost).

Was a CD launch, just official types present.

http://www.scarlet-films.com/INVAGO_Takemeforaride.mov

Is that a multirig for camera b? I found that using a camera on such rigs for live concerts is not very convenient, because you can't adjust much since you must keep both hands on the rig.

As to camera a, maybe the operator could have zoomed in from time to time for some close-ups. Of course, this needs that both operators know each other very well and decide what they will film beforehand, but it allows a more lively cut.

(Just my 2 cents...)

Nice stuff...I liked the band. Did you take an audio feed from the mixer?

Hi Stephen. Glad you liked it. Sound was recorded on an 8 track mixer plus an additional ambient track from A cam using a premixer. When you hear the applause at the end, thats almost entirely inaudible on from the 8 track recording.

Yeah jerome I dont entirely disagree with your opinion. But have found in my two cam shoots, you often get caught mid zoom on one cam and then are stuck with a half zoom in edit. This coming from a person who doesnt like straight on zooms (in or out) from a static cam. Youll notice I dont have any problem with the handheld pulling out or in on pans. But I find this a more pro look, as it takes a lot of practice to master doing it for the right composition and knowing what you will end up doing in edit. And happier clients.

I recently directed a four cam shoot. We had right and left rear tripod mounted cams, with the explicit order if one is in zoom the other isnt to be (they could both be zoomed in - but not actually going through zoom at the same time. One cam was handheld similar to this set up other was on a dolly in front of the stage.

Problem with venues in Tokyo, unless your doing 10,000 people is they are all dinky little places with no room to move and needless to say all big gigs are taken up by the big Japanese production companies. Im doing a lot of the smaller foreign stuff, because they dont like the two static cam shoots they usually get when they hire the smaller Japanese production companies.

Available light corporate clip in SD
 

OK, I`ll shine some light on my first duty assignment with A1 for a subsidiary company of ours.
It was back in December 2006. I`ve had my hands on my A1 for only three hours, for just as much time as it takes to read and almost understand the manual.

1 minute corporate clip in SD, not yet CCd (sorry for the softening compression)

This isn`t a creative clip by any means but shows the lowest end of the A1 capabilities when used as a tool in corporate environment. It was mostly filmed with out of the box settings and with available office lights, AGC off and gain at "0". In about half the shots I used a polarizer to get rid of screen glares etc.

Cheers,
T

Thanks for posting this "worst-case scenario" footage. I appreciate seeing how this camera holds up (or doesn't, I'm still downloading) in the ugliest of conditions.

Any comments, maybe on content?

T

I enjoyed the video. It definitely was not boring and your shots were nicely done. If that's the worse this camera can do...wow!

Really useful to see this to see what the A1 can do in SD in an office environment. It gives a good benchmark - particularly knowing it was used with "out of the box" settings. I guess this was actually shot in SD rather than down-converted in camera / in editing?

I did a bit of video level tweaking and subtle sharpening just out of interest, and I can see that the video is going to look really vibrant. I appreciate deeply having some footage to play with before deciding to purchase this camera. A lot of footage posted on this site has had a considerable degree of post-production or is shot in unusual conditions (because you'd want to see the absolute best it can do) so it's great to see what the camera might do in a "typical" situation with available light, and in SD (I've got a pretty good idea what its HD performance is like!).

The only thing I'd at all fault is nothing to do with the pictures or sound: it's the commentary, which uses passive language throughout - putting a bit of a downer on the whole thing. It took me a few minutes to work this out. I know it's nothing to do with sound and pictures, but funnily enough, it does affect the overall impact of the thing. Hope that's useful feedback to give to whoever wrote the narration. Great to see all the technology in the business, by the way - and it would have been fun to see samples of the complete game creation process rather than just bits of it (but appreciate you're confined to what's actually happening in the duration of that shoot, and I thought you presented a great sequence).

Very Nice video especially the first shots

Basketball sequence with rotoscoping
 

I've been shooting hours of footage for my kids' basketball league with my new A1. I'm presenting a short video for the awards ceremony next week, and presently trying to come up with a way to cull all of that footage down to 5 minutes of screen time.

Today I played around with rotoscoping some A1 footage. I first down-rezzed to 1280x720, and worked with the square pixels in After Effects to roto a few dozen frames. Details on the process (and low-rez Flash version) are on my blog site here: http://www.brownland.org/blog/2007/0...after-effects/

Here's the 720p WMV file (22 seconds, 15MB): http://www.brownland.org/video/roto1.wmv

Enjoy,
Brian Brown
BrownCow Productions

Yellowstone.
 

My first footage with the A1. Shot in 1080 60i, most with factory defaults. Boosted contrast a bit in post.

http://www.ftcvideo.com/VIDEOSAMPLES/HD.wmv

Looks a lot nicer than my footage from my Digital 8 taken just after 9/11...

How did the A1 hold up in the middle of no where? Any issues in the field? I have been really impressed with the battery life so far... Any things you learned that do work or don't work? Was it as rural as the footage looked? Very nice footage btw...

Well, from my perspective Yellowstone is not "the middle of no where". I've had my VX-2000s on the top of 16K' mountains with no way out but an airplane! :-)

The shoot was really very tame. The hot springs were shot right from a tourist walkway (although I did drop the durn lens cap there!). We did a couple hikes on snow and pulled the camera gear in a mountaineering sled. I like that a lot better than a backpack. Less load on my back and typically easier/quicker access to the gear. The temps were mild with lows in the mornings around 20F and highs during the day in the mid 40s.

What did I learn? Not much really because I've done so much shooting with other cameras in similar, or worse, environments. The A1 didn't have a single issue the entire trip. We reviewed the footage at night on a portable DVD player and my laptop (once it was captured).

Ah, there was one thing . . . I can't reliably hand-hold the A1 at full zoom without ending up with too much motion (at least for my eye). I can hand-hold my VX-2000s at full zoom. There are probably several reasons for this:

1) Longer zoom on the A1.
2) HD vs. SD
3) It seems to me that the OIS on the Sonys is better than the A1.

I'm really impressed with the quality of footage you were able to get of the fast action with HDV. May I ask what camera settings you had? Interlaced or Progressive, etc? Would love to hear? Great example of rotoscoping.. I'll have to experiment on my own! Thanks.

Thanks!

I shot in 30f mode for the footage, default preset, and 0db gain. Progressive frames are really the only way to go for roto work. Fast-moving subjects will blur, of course, which is why I used a healthy dose of feathering on my masks. Plus, I could be a little sloppier with my masks with more feathering. I might try to dial the feathering down a bit on the next render and see how it looks with cleaner edges.

Hope this helps,
Brian Brown

Boy that's great. Thanks for the info and tips. Do you happen to remember what shutter speed you were set on? I am just really impressed with how the HDV handled the action. When I see sports shots like this it really eases my fears that I will see artifacting. Thanks for the help!

You're quite welcome for the info. The shutter was 1/60th. Anything less would strobe badly with the action. I would have loved to shoot higher, but kept bumping up against low apertures. The zoom on the A1 loses light as it goes into telephoto and can start under-exposing pretty quick.

Indoor sports like b-ball and volleyball are perhaps the worst to try to shoot smooth action with, because gyms are usually lit horribly. I also found that 6db of gain to be too noisy for my taste, but some users don't mind it.

I learned a LOT by shooting several hours of tape this way. I'm sure that the A1 is not the ideal camera for this type of action (steeping zoom mentioned above, tough to focus with EVF and LCD, and you can't zoom and focus at the same time). But, all in all, I'm very pleased with the various footage I shot.

HTH,
Brian

"Remember" clip
 

720P clip from my short film. Compression really degraded the quality but oh well, you get the idea.

http://www.citizencine.com/films/cel...member_web.mov

Marlon, once again you guys are great. I love it just the way it looks. Your editing skills are super. I love the way you take a simple shot an turn it into a fascinating image. WOW.

Very nice! Great to see what this camera can do with the right person behind it.

Stills of the day - April 6
 

Two today...shot at dawn in Kirkland, WA

It looks so calm out there.
 

Early in the morning, no body is moving. the nature is simply out there.
So carm.... Very nice.

Those are cool shots Steve! Very nice! I did not realize that Kirkland looked like that...

Thanks for posting them!
~Gabriel

Clip Hosting?
 

Hello everyone! I'm looking to share my clips with everyone on these boards but I don't have the hosting available to me. I remember reading sometime back about hosting clips on DVinfo's server (media.dvinfo.net) but my email was never responded to.

Thanks!

I do not think it's available at the momene, write an email to Chris. Here is link,
http://www.guitarsmagazine.ru/read.php?girls-list

Oleg you are very naughty.

Coasting for Kids Documentary
 

Hello everyone! This is my first (and so far, only) project I've done with my A1. It came on a Tuesday, and we had to shoot the next day so I didn't really have time to get used to the camera just yet.

Everything was shot on the A1 except for the on-ride footage. This was a class assignment for my Documentary Filmmaking class. There are still some things that need to be cleaned up (like fix some music cues, and re-record the voiceovers)

I'm interested in what you guys think!

http://www.adster.net/videos/coastingforkids.html (60mb, 7:19)

I have to admit to only scanning it because I don't have the time right now to watch it through. I will later, though. Initial impressions are that it looks like a nice piece. Colors were very saturated, what preset did you use?

The sound is distorting a little, is that in the original?

I'll add some more thoughts later. Thanks for sharing.

The preset I used was the original VIVIDRGB that weas posted in the preset thread. I do believe there have been several updates to the preset since, but I used the original one.

The audio was recorded using a combo of a Rode NTG-2 shotgun mic and a Sennheiser EW100 Wireless lav system. This camera is a little louder then my old Sony A1, so the mic levels were set a little higher then I wanted and a bit of clipping occurred. But hey - it's all a learning experience!

PS, I'm starting to want the Letus more and more each time I see your footage...

Nice :)

I would recommend you use the latest VIVIDRGB because it doesn't have any color cast and it is as intense as what you are using.

Yeah, there's something special about using a 35mm adapter on the camera. I haven't shot with the stock lens for over two weeks!

First A1 Shots
 

just got the cam last week and went out in the yard shot some flowers etc.. no tripod yet :( any suggestions on a tripod?

http://download.yousendit.com/3983AB652B12FA5F


-Sam~!

Purdy.

What were you shooting (60i, 30f, or 24f)? I noticed some slight blur from some of the shots either because of slowed down interlaced footage or slowed down progressive and you NLE generating some intermediate frames... If you use After Effects for footage that is slowed down it can generate some really authentic looking interpolation of frames...

Were you using a preset or or did you just do a levels / curves adjustment?

Really nice looking though...

Yea man some of those clips were slowed down in vegas. Thanks for the tip I'll try After FX next time I slow-mo footage.. this is my first time working with hdv. as for the settings I shot in 24f with the ND on 1/6 and 1/32 for some shots and the presets were vividrgb and a modified version of naturalo.

-Sam~!

ahh forgot to mention i dropped a MB on all the clips i think it was the buffalo preset.

-Sam~!