hows sd footage on ex1r?

[Jim Stamos]

i know it doesnt make sense to shoot in the sd setting on this wonderful cam, but at this point, i cant afford to upgrade my sytem to handle hd, so im have to shoot is sd for the short term. id be curious if it looks as good as the dvcam footage i was used to shooting on my dsr300

[Marty Welk]

I just shot in Dvcam with it, because the output will be DVD 16x9, and i cant see the point in compressing the signal 20-1 then downconverting it anways. (unless i need a HD archive)

it aparentally is using the whole chip thing interpolated down to the resolution, so it DOES look much better. plus there are things i have adjusted in the profile that i couldnt adjust in the 250, because it doesnt get that sofisticated. Stuff like Kneeing down excessive highlights.
i dont have a 300, just a 250, which only looks as good as a 170 or a 2100 or a 2000.

the final SD(stuff) looks better than (2 weeks ago) when i shot in full res HD 20-1 then downconverted to SD, many more colors survived the compression. but now i have no HD archive at all.

also the 250 was doing the 3/4 res interpolation to get to wide screen (bloody mess), so the FIRST thing we were hoping to achieve was a real "native" 16x9 instead of the mess the SD cam makes of wide aspect. we not only got that, but with the "starting" high resolution being interpolated down, many things got blended into the SD that would be ruined out because of the lack of intitial pixels.
Pixels is pixels , i still say that , have more to begin with , and interpolate down to where your going , it "blends" into that low res much better, and it is more blendy than i thought it would be too, i might be apt to post in more sharpening this time, but havent got that far.

still huge differences in the lighting they gave us on the stage, i could show you 2 pics of it, and one looks like the camera couldnt film it at all, and another one with good lighting looks wonderfull. so (as usual) what/how the camera is used makes huge differances.

[Matt Davis]

Originally Posted by Jim Stamos

id be curious if it looks as good as the dvcam footage i was used to shooting on my dsr300

Short answer: probably better.

Long answer: As Marty says, intelligent use of the paint settings to better control highlights will, IMHO, elevate the picture over most DSRs used in Run & Gun or ENG mode.

The DSRs tend to be stuck at a standard setting which still includes sharpening and rather narrow gamma. I recently had a job where I had to cut together DSR570 (with expensive glass) and EX1 footage, and as a test I shoved some non-related EX1-R footage shot at SD - happy with that too. I have no desire to go back to big heavy shoulder mounted cameras, and am very very happy with the EX1-R picture, at least in my particular corner of the video industry.

Shooting SD on the EX1-R for me is primarily beneficial when supplying client with rushes for them to edit, as it was getting tedious to explain how to get it edit ready, or for me to pre-digest for them. Now, it's just a bunch of AVI files on a USB powered NTFS volume, knowing that pretty much any edit system will see and edit the files without any further twiddling.

But whilst I'm happy with the SD output, I still prefer to shoot 720p and downsample. The path from 720p to PAL is quite easy, and 720p as a computer file that will play back in PPT or on the web (YouTube, Vimeo etc) is as HD as most of my clients want - PAL SD still rules supreme.

OTOH, I also use EX1-Rs plumbed into a vision mixer for webcasts and the SD here is absolutely fine, even in 4:3 mode (the EX1 by comparison, is soft and diagonals get decidedly 'lumpy'). No complaints over DSRs there (though I know we're not getting separate CCU boxes et al), and whilst 'proper' systems are still the preferred way to go, at least we can still provide a service with the reduced budgets we're working with at the moment.