Comments after Wedding Number 4

[Chris Harding]

Hi Guys

Cameras still are working fine and our ceremony yesterday was at the crest of a hill overlooking the Swan River and southern suburbs and had plenty of unavoidable sky in the shot! I defaulted EV to +1.7 but stupidly based that on the celebrant who was wearing dark clothes!! The bride's dress, all in white, was somewhat blown out so a lesson here to to base EV correction on a white dress/shirt when you have a backlit scenario so the bride's dress doesn't over-expose... I don't think there is any way to change EV mid-stream is there...I didn't try going to the menu during recording and dropping EV down to +1.0 just in case it messed up the footage! I can correct nicely in post so it's not a big issue...it would however be neat to be able to correct EV on the fly!!
I used PP2 for the outdoor shots and PP3 indoor and all looked very nice...PP2 is actually a nice general profile but still a little over saturated for indoors.

I also used spot focus on my A-cam for the ceremony and speeches ...it's really awesome and works a treat (apart from fingermarks on the LCD) If you didn't know you can only use it in manual focus but that's all I use on tripod mounted cams anyway.

As already posted elsewhere I cannot get my zooms to shift/jump at all so no issues there!!

Audio was excellent and I continue to be impressed by the cameras!!

Chris

[Chris Quevedo]

Would you possibly be able in the future to post one of your wedding videos made with the NEX-EA50? I would love to see how it handles a dimly lit reception

[Chris Harding]

Hi Chris

Our receptions are terrible..they dim the lights a huge amount so you can hardly see so even at 30db (which I wouldn't use) isn't enough. Brides like bright images and expect the camera to show that in their wedding video too so I use an on camera light at receptions...What I did do (thanks to Noa) is split my light and battery and mounted the battery on my bracket at the back of the shoulder pad to counter balance the camera better. I use a dimmable 6 x PowerLED on camera light which is more than enough to light people without ruining the ambience.

All I really do is limit the gain using the stock lens to around 12db or so at F3.5 and that provides a nice clean ambient background and then expose whoever I'm filming by using just enough light to expose them correctly. If you are using primes then you might get away with a bright image if the lens is fast enough but with weddings I do find that using an F1.4 prime restricts my DOF a bit too much and I get a better result by rather adding a bit of light and having enough DOF so I can have more than just one person in the shot and I'm not trying to play with a 6" focus span.

Chris

[Chris Quevedo]

Hey,

Wow sounds like a simple and complicated light setup at the same time, could you maybe post a picture of what that looks like with the light mounted on it? Maybe the brand you use and the model # of the light? Thanks

[Chris Harding]

Hi Chris

The battery/receiver mount on my B-Cam is on the thread below...It's just a generic Sony F770 battery

http://www.dvinfo.net/forum/sony-nex...es-so-far.html

My lights are off eBay and are really good!! Just search for 5010A video light and you will find them ..They have 6 x PowerLED's and are nicely built and work really well ...they have a input as well so you can split the battery and light. Cost is around $70 which is cheap!! Mine have run for a year so they are reliable too

Chris

[Noa Put]

Originally Posted by Chris Quevedo

I would love to see how it handles a dimly lit reception

Eventhough I have not use the camera at a wedding reception based on my experience I would say it performs the same as my 550d if I apply a technicolor cinestyle preset to the 550d and use the pp3 factory default preset on the ea50. I don't use lights but use fast lenses instead. In dark venues you can expect to use 1600iso and f2.8 will just cut, but only just, so 3200 iso would be better but that is noisy. If you want to limit to 1600 iso you often need a f1.4 lens.

Wedding season starts next month for me and I plan to take the camera with me once (I use other smaller camera's for weddings) so I can compare with my 550d to see if I"m able to match them. If a bridescouple allows it I"ll post a trailer.

[Chris Quevedo]

Oh ok, we'll I've never used a canon 550d (is that the t2i in the states?) I've used the canon 7D a lot though

[Noa Put]

The 7d has the same low light performance as a 550d (or t2i)

[Peter Rush]

I use this Wallimex Pro LED light along with a Sony F570 Battery - lasts for hours plus you can dial-in colour temperature - great for a little warming/cooling! and with the F570 it doesn't add too much weight so the balance still feels OK

[Chris Harding]

Nice Pete

What you can still do is mount the battery back behind the shoulder pad like I have done and then run a cable back to the light..I see there is a DC socket on the back. Is that a PowerLED unit (with up to 10 big LED's) or is it a multiLED panel with like 150 +++ 3mm LED's ... You never showed us the front!

Chris

[Don Bloom]

It's multi LEDs like my Fotodiox 312AS. The big difference between Peters and mine is I can run mine off of 2 batterys at once, although when I use it on my 700 I just use a power tap cable back to the camera battery. Sucks up the juice but eliminates the weight.
I have one of those Chinese 8 power led lights I used it once and didn't like the look so now I use it on a stand when needed and I have used it outside for a fill. The 5600 temp seems pretty accurate and it's got some power so even outside at 8 to 10 feet it has some effect.
Ooops sorry, we're supposed to be talking about the NEX-EA50 aren't we? Uhhh, so how 'bout them prime lenses? ;-)

[Peter Rush]

My 3rd wedding yesterday and I'm getting used to the EA50 now - the servo zoom pretty much sucks so I'm getting used to using it on manual for reframing purposes only. Autofocus is a tad slow so much quicker to do it by hand but the peaking seems a little clumsy as it also points to areas that are not in focus - which is off putting!

I used my Genus ND fader for the first time as it was a whiteout yesterday - I colour balanced by eye using the WB shift and the footage is ok (it was blowing gusts of snow everwhere so was a tough 5 minutes, plus the bride was freezing.) I'd left PP3 on by mistake so the footage is a little washed out but easily fixed in post.

BTW 2 hours digging snow to get my car out in the morning before filming a full day wedding - now that's dedication!

[Noa Put]

Not using the servozoom either and zoom manually which I think allows pretty smooth zooms as well. Peaking has worked well for me with my primes but yesterday in some cases would give me false info when I was shooting with my 24mm at f1.4, it was darker at a reception and it was not always clear if I was exactly in focus or not as some objects in the background would have some yellow peaking as well eventhough I knew it was not in focus. Then I just used the magnification to fine tune.

[Noa Put]

When I shoot talking heads at reception I used my 550d on a tripod with a 85mm Samyang lens, the tripod had it's legs folded in as much as possible and then still I was often limited in moving space when things got crowded, yesterday I shot handheld with the ea50 and a unstabilized 85mm and I just saw the results and all shots are perfectly usable, not as stable like the tripodshots with my dslr but stable enough, that's something I don't have to try with my dslr handheld. I also liked the fact I could move around quicker, re position and shoot again without finding space to place my tripod, just focus on what I wanted to shoot.

One thing I did notice, with my dslr I was sometimes a fly on the wall but the ea50 you stand out in the crowd and I don't like that, people see me more often pointing the camera towards them and you can see that in their reaction, with my dslr I could get more natural reactions as people hardly would notice me. I think I got 3 "wow, that some kind of equipment you have there, kind of reactions by which they meant the ea50 yesterday, also the first time for me.