Night Boat parade shot with EX-1

[Phil Hanna]

Hi all:
I recently shot our city's lighted boat parade. First time to do much with the EX-1 in the dark. I must say I am very pleased. Thanks to Paul and others who helped me with the setup. I shot, voiced and edited the event in Final Cut Pro and the video is native. Hope you enjoy it.

Indian Rocks Beach Lighted Boat Parade 2008 By Phil Hanna On ExposureRoom

Merry Christmas and Happy Holidays!

[Dominik Seibold]

Nice voice, but the pictures are too dark in my opinion.

[Phil Hanna]

I appreciate the comments. I did not take any measures to change the video. I will run a test clip through Apple COLOR and see if I can enhance the quality.

Phil

[Buck Forester]

Right on, good stuff! What gain setting did you use? Very clean footage!

[Paul Cronin]

Buck Phil shot at -3 gain.

[Phil Hanna]

-3db was the gain.

Phil

[Dominik Seibold]

-3db limits the maximal output to a sub-100IRE-value. It's not a good choice in a high-contrast-scene with a lot of tiny shiny highlights.

[Swen Goebbels]

First I must say that I have never seen something like this before! Nice idea this lighted boat parade.

The footage is really noise free but -3 is maybe too much. Would be interesting to see this in 0db maybe +3db, but not with more gain, because then you would have a much brighter and noisy picture. And when you really would see the boats very bright the effect of filming at night will be not so nice as now!

[Paul Cronin]

I have experimented with -3, 0, +3, +6, +9 gain shooting over cities at night in a helicopter. Once we took the footage back to a TV station they would only accept the -3 gain footage for HD broadcast saying all the others had too much noise. Looking at the same footage on my monitor I agree. So on the next 5 shoots we used only -3 with great results. That is why I recommended -3gain to Phil.

[Dominik Seibold]

What gamma-settings did you use?

[Paul Cronin]

Dominik not sure if you mean you or Phil. I use Cine4 for those shoots.

[Phil Hanna]

Paul set me up for this shoot. I did what he said to do and it looked great to me.

[Buck Forester]

Personally I think it looks great! Since it was a dark night I don't see how bumping up the gain would be effective because your settings show the rich darks of night and the boat lights look great to me. Very vivid, like you're there. You have a great voice talent as well.

[Paul Cronin]

Thanks Phil and I am glad it worked out to your liking.

I am sure with all the great knowledge on this forum we can tweak the settings more and improve the setup for future night shooting.

Dominik what settings have worked for your night shoots?

[Dominik Seibold]

Originally Posted by Paul Cronin

Dominik what settings have worked for your night shoots?

I totally switched to the workflow to use cine2 in all situations and keep all other settings neutral, because with those settings I know I'm capturing the most amount of data. All things concerning the look I do in post.