Shooting football under metal halide lights

[Adam Reuter]

Hey Tom,

720/60p should be fine under stadium lighting. If it works good with my living room lighting it should be awesome under better conditions. Even if it's high school football.

If you want to do slow motion try putting your shutter on 1/125. But that's only for stuff you want in slo-mo. If you're unsure keep it on 1/60. Don't turn the shutter off because I think that makes the shutter 1/30 (I may be mistaken).

By the way the WB button/switch on pro cameras is usually in that "hidden spot" under the lens, LOL.

Originally Posted by Tom Vaughan

Fortunately, tonight's game was only a scrimmage... so I got a chance to learn and experiment. It took me a while to find all the buttons on this camera... the white balance is hidden under the lens, facing the front.

I didn't really have a chance to learn to manually focus tonight. I was pretty busy learning all the basic settings. I love the manual iris control, and manual zoom allows for nearly instant zooming in or out when you need it. I could definitely see the auto focus hunting, but all in all the picture quality was still pretty good.

I tried both 720P and 1080i tonight. 720P definitely looks better when viewed on a 24" LCD monitor (component). I'll have to check it out on my HDTV CRT also. Slow motion is definitely better with 720P clips. The spatial resolution difference isn't really noticeable. It was still light out through the whole game tonight, so I'm not sure what things will be like under stadium lights with 720P... but wouldn't the effective shutter speed be the same for 1080i60 and 720P60 (... 1/60th of a second)?

[Mark Slocombe]

Originally Posted by Tom Vaughan

720P definitely looks better when viewed on a 24" LCD monitor (component). I'll have to check it out on my HDTV CRT also.

Hi Tom - when we've used the EX1 to do panning shots, especially fast pans (as I assume you are for your football shoots) we've had a bad motion 'judder' when downconverting to SD to make DVDs - I can't recall if we saw the effect just on playback to a CRT (after import into FCP) but I think we did. I believe the problem has been experienced by most users. Are you not seeing any problems? Maybe you are playing back direct from EX1? What will your edit workflow be?

[Tom Vaughan]

Originally Posted by Mark Slocombe

Hi Tom - when we've used the EX1 to do panning shots, especially fast pans (as I assume you are for your football shoots) we've had a bad motion 'judder' when downconverting to SD to make DVDs - I can't recall if we saw the effect just on playback to a CRT (after import into FCP) but I think we did. I believe the problem has been experienced by most users. Are you not seeing any problems? Maybe you are playing back direct from EX1? What will your edit workflow be?

Hi Mark,
I just received my EX1 yesterday... so I'm still working through the details of my work flow.

As you know, DVDs must be encoded as interlaced video (either NTSC or PAL). Flags in the MPEG-2 video can give DVD players a clue as to when frames are repeated, so the player can perform inverse telecine to provide a progressive scan output... but you can't encode a DVD in a progressive scan format. So you make a good point... if DVD-video is your main distribution format, 1080i would be slightly better than 720p.

However, it should be easy to convert 720p60 to 480i60, as the field rate is identical (59.94). There should be no motion judder issue. What software are you using to encode the DVDs? Are you using a shutter speed faster than 1/60th of a second?

I'm going to deliver my finished product on Blu-ray disc. I'll provide DVDs also... but I'm committed to going high def. In a year or two I can't imagine that most people won't have a Blu-ray player of some type in their home. Today you can buy a BD-ROM drive for $120, and it comes with PowerDVD. The thing is... most people are buying televisions that are inherently progressive scan displays (LCD or plasma). I own a CRT HDTV, but this is becoming fairly rare. Any conversion between interlaced and progressive formats will affect the video quality, and I want to avoid it. So if the final display will be on a progressive monitor, it's best to shoot 720p and preserve the video in this format all the way to the final display. 720p was one of the main reasons I held out for the XDCAM, rather than buying an HDV camcorder (the other was the higher quality codec).

Interestingly, when I view the video on my CRT HDTV (Sony KD34XBR960) using the component output of the XDCAM, the 720p video looks almost as good in terms of spatial resolution as the 1080i video. The motion quality is awesome in either format when viewed on a CRT HDTV. But when I view the video on a progressive scan display (Dell 24" LCD), the motion quality and the spatial resolution are better for the 720p clips. I may have to try this on a real progressive scan HDTV, rather than a LCD monitor, just to confirm... but I'm pretty sure that avoiding deinterlacing will provide a major benefit for motion quality.

I'll have to do some testing of my full work flow, including encoding and authoring.

[Charlie MacGregor]

Hi Tom,
I very interested to hear any additional impressions or conclusions after four weeks of night (or day) football.

Regards,
Charlie