Canon XL H series -- various sample clips

[Barlow Elton]

This is a 720p clip from back in January of a 3 minute mini-doc I did of a filmmaker at the Sundance FF.

It's an extremely simple piece with merely available light and all handheld shots (true run-and-gun) but it will give you an impression of how well the H1 performs in fairly adverse conditions.

This is one of the first projects I had with the camera and since then I've learned to tweak it better but I've come to appreciate how easy it was, in general, to get decent footage without a whole lot of knowledge at the time.

The H1 makes a nice 720p camera too. :)

http://media.dvinfo.net/xlh1/Elton/CarlosSundance.mov (143 MB h.264 QT)

[Jason McKelvey]

found it thanks. Jason

[Travis Pearson]

It was shoot well. I wished there were more images than scoring to carry the tension, something like Brahkage. Was that 16:9? How did you get the widescreen?

[Jeremiah Thompson]

I had been told that the newest Final Cut Update would support importing 24f video. I would like to know if you have any preferences for setting up with 1080i60 or 1080p24 when capturing into FC Studio

[Ramon Boutviseth]

was wondering if anyone knew of any music videos online that has been shot on the xl h1, thanks-ramon

[Luis de la Cerda]

How can anyone not love this camera? :)

The clip was originally shot at 60i, deinterlaced and slowed down 50%, stabilized and downrezed to 720p. Enjoy.

http://www.js-films.com/nitro.wmv

I'll share some new settings I worked on for this project as soon as I can.

[Luis de la Cerda]

This is a shot of the new Chrysler Sebring, same preset, 35mm adapter. It looks a bit soft because of this, and there appears to be some problem with the adapter or lens, because inexplicably some of the background trees to the far right appear in focus and they shouldn't be. In any case, the shots were meant for SD and they look fantastic at the lower res.

http://www.js-films.com/sebring.wmv

Btw, if DVinfo could host these to keep my bandwidth at bay, I would appreciate it :)

[Barry Gregg]

Luis;
The Nitro looks fantastic. Could you be more specific on your work flow? Deinterlaced with what software? Stabilized with which software?
Thanks, Barry

[Luis de la Cerda]

Hello again. It was stabilized in Adobe After Effects. I can't really tell you much about my workflow yet, but as soon as I can I will :) I will also share my new camera preset which I think looks fantastic. I'm not sure if I should share it as is or if I should modify it a bit further, since it is designed to leave shadows a bit washed out to deal with shadow detail in post.

[Luis de la Cerda]

Ok, as promised, here's my new camera preset...

Gamma Normal
Knee Low
Black Stretch
Pedestal 9
Setup -9
Sharpness 2
H DTL FRQ HIGH
DTL HV BAL 0
Coring -4
NR1 off
NR2 Medium
Color Matrix Cine 2
Color Gain 6
CPH 0
RGN 0
GGN 0
BGN 0
RGM 0
RBM 0
GRM 0
GBM 0
BRM 0
BGM 0

We could call this preset Nitro.

Shadows will be a bit grayish, so you can tweak shadow contrast in post. If you want darker shadows all you need is to tweak the Pedestal Level until your blacks hit 0, but depending on available light condition this value could vary. I also recommend setting white balance manually as the camera tends to balance a bit on the blue side of things. I usually set my balance around 200°K warmer than current light conditions. If light is very dim and you need to boost your gain, you can also tweak NR1 to Low, but do not go higher than this because ghosting will appear.

[Dan Keaton]

What 35mm adapter did you use and with which lens?

[Jeff McCutcheon]

New footage here.

http://jeffmccutcheon.com/moses_002.htm

enjoy!

[Chris Barcellos]

Jeff. Looked at the lo res. Seems like you have the system working pretty well. Of great interest to me because I'm just tuning up a self built Micro35 based on Redrock plans I bought last year.

I did notice a kind of washed out appearance (lack of saturation), maybe due to your actual artistic approach or encoding to lo res (I've had that issue before.)

[Dennis Hingsberg]

Hi Jeff,

It was great to see some H1 footage through an adapter! I've been keeping my eye out for such!

Don't take any of this the wrong way but most of the footage seemed soft and it seemed as if it might have been difficult for you to "find" the focus during your test shoot. The footage is only sharp in only some places for very brief moments.

A suggestion would be to use a f-stop higher than 1.4. Somewhere perhaps between f4 and f5.6. This will make it a little easier to focus since a completely wide open iris gives you a very small range of focus (usually within inches). This makes it really hard to keep focus on a subject who may be standing still but leaning left to right or forward etc.. Also if you are using the Canon ViewFinder (like I do when I shoot with a Canon and adapter) it can be very difficult to know if you really "have" focus. Again increasing your f-stop gives you more room to work with by increasing your focal range.

I would love to see more footage of your system, keep posting it and try a little bit higher f-stop. Also if you can do some indoor stuff that would be great to see too.

As for the comments regarding a "washed out appearance" this could be due to shooting wide open. The sweet spot of most lenses is somewhere in the middle between f1.4 or f2.8 to f11.

I also played around with some sample frames and tried a few different color corrections - check this out, it's quite impressive what the camera/adapter can do with a bit of post:

Original Frame

Example 1
Example 2
Example 3
Example 4
Example 5
Example 6

[Geir Inge]

It's a huge step from my Panasonic DVX 100, wich I still got, and there's a lot to learn. I "shot" our cat last evening :-) I had to try the camera at once. Though I had some problems with the codec, when exported the clip. I use Avid Liquid for editing. Anybody with experience in that matter in the forum?

Canoncat