Black line?

[Darin Boville]

Hi,

I recently (two or three weeks ago) bought an fx1--I'm getting a think black line at the top edge of my videos--seems to have to do with the stablization becuase it seems to vibrate a bit when the camera is jiggled.

Is this normal or a defect?

Any easy way to remove without degrading image--I'm shooting mostly for the web and the edge shows...

Thanks,

--Darin

[Chris Barcellos]

Darin:

If you could post a screen shot or something, it would be helpful.

I have and FX1, and don't recall seeing that. If you look at first scenes from my DVC5 film "Proof of God", these were shot with FX1, and have not been resized or anything. (See it http://makeyourfilm.net/Download.html)

Do you see anything there that resembles the problem ?

[Darin Boville]

Originally Posted by Chris Barcellos

Darin:

If you could post a screen shot or something, it would be helpful.

Sure. Here is a sample:

http://www.video.photodemocracy.org/..._Slide_II.html

It also shows if you link to the movie directly (i.e. not an issue with the html).

Thanks,

--Darin

[Mack Fisher]

Are you shooting in cineframe?

[Darin Boville]

Originally Posted by Mack Fisher

Are you shooting in cineframe?

Hi,

No, it's turned off. I shoot the original in HDV then let the camera downcovert to DV.

Here's a video where I had the camera attached to my roof rack--you can see that the black line seems to vibrate as I hit rough spots in the road (or is that an illusion?)...

http://www.video.photodemocracy.org/..._Sunny_Day.mov

--Darin

P.S. If anyone is here in the SF Bay area these are shot Devil's Slide and the resulting traffic on Rt. 92, the only way out of the midcoast...

[Robin Davies-Rollinson]

Darin

I think that it's certainly to do with the image stabiliser. Does it disappear if you turn the function off?

Robin

[Darin Boville]

Originally Posted by Robin Davies-Rollinson

Darin

I think that it's certainly to do with the image stabiliser. Does it disappear if you turn the function off?

Robin

Hi,

I tried it on all three settings as well as off--no change...

Starting to sound like a defective unit?

--Darin

[Joe Lumbroso]

Interesting. I had the exact same problem with some of my footage from a short film I shot. It bugged me enough that I chose to crop the top of the frame out for public screenings. I shot with stabilizer and cineframe on. It becomes more apparent with higher exposures.

Darin, what settings did you use to export QT those videos? As soon as I figure that out I'll upload my examples.

[George Griswold]

I am going to risk stating the obvious-- most encoders have a function to crop frames. At least you can save what you have already shot. I couldn't load the movie so I don't know how much of the frame you have lost.

[Darin Boville]

I used H.264 via FCP HD to convert to Quicktime (which is also why you need the newest Quicktime installed to get the videos to play).

I just did an experiement which may indicate that this is a Final Cut problem--or maybe not. I shot footage of a white wall, changing the steadishot settings as before. But this time I imported it as HDV rather than downconverting in the camera.

At first the black line was clearly visible on playback. The I stopped, moved the head to an arbitrary point on the timeline, and--poof--the black line went away. I converted to Quicktime (again) to make sure and that was o.k., too.

I'm going to post this question over in the Final Cut forum--maybe it will sound familiar there.

Thanks for all your help!

--Darin