Hi-Def questions

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dayrate

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Tom, Dino, and all--

I'm feeling a bit nervous and a little excited --so I know change is about to happen.

I'm leaving in a week to go to PA to work on a Hi-Def doc for 10-12 days. We're using rented Sony 900's (two crews), shooting in widescreen, 24p. The doc is going straight to conversion to 35mm for(hopeful)film release.

I, like most of us, am used to the 4:3 world. I'll be leaving my V59 behind and altho' it is switchable, along with two lenses, I've never been asked to shoot in 16:9. (4:3 is not a concern on this shoot).

Tom, I just re-read your post back in February on tips and thoughts about Hi-Def shoots. Thanks for the great insight. This will be my "first date" with both Hi-Def and the sony 900. Do you, or others, have other tips, advice, or web-sites where I can find info/manuals on this camera? I won't get the camera in-hand until the morning of our first day. (Not my call). We will have two monitors, only one is an HD monitor. We'll be fairly mobile, often handheld, wide-angle lenses, and small lighting kits, including tungsten and hmi's. Any thoughts?
 

dayrate

Active member
Ivan--

You're always a walking, talking encyclopedia of info. I hadn't found a link to the manual yet, and the hd.cinema site has some good tips.

I really appreciate the help. I'll let you know how it goes.

Others??? I'm all ears ...
 

HDTV

Active member
Dayrate:

I mostly use the HDW-700A. I've used the 900 once...but didn't shoot in 24P, so I can't offer much help there.

I would assume that they have an engineer setting up the cameras. There are certain things you need to do with the gamma settings if you are transferring to film versus outputting to video.

I find that when shooting HD, I rely much more on a monitor. I use a 14" HD monitor...a little heavy to drag around...but the picture looks great and since what you'll be shooting is planned for the big screen, I would want to see as large an image as possible.

I would recommend practice shooting some 16:9 with your Ike. I didn't have problems adjusting to the framing, but it took a little getting used to.

Other tidbits:

These cameras use A LOT of power, so be prepared for lots of battery changes. I go through 1 BP-L90 per tape.

The camera gets hot...right where your face goes when you're hand-holding it.

The camera has a cooling fan in it...much like the fan in a computer. It can cause audio problems, but it comes on after a few minutes, and once it's on it stays on, so it's generally a constant noise (versus switching on and off).

Operationally, these aren't much different than any other Sony camera (600, DigiBeta, etc), so I wouldn't worry too much. No major changes required in lighting style either.

The hardest part will be after shooting HD for a couple of weeks, going back to SD will be a big let-down.
 

Thomas

Well-known member
I have been out of touch for a while. I would be glad to answer this question if it is still valid. If the shoot has happened, I would rather hear what dayrate thinks of the experience and what he learned from it.

For handheld HD, 24 fps I think the Panasonic is the better choice -- even though I know the F900 is the client's call, not yours.

I also believe that when shooting handheld and in a run and gun envirnment, the camera should have a good set-up card made for it in advance so that you are not worrying about how things look.

More later depending on where we stand.
 

dayrate

Active member
Tom, I'm leaving in two days, so post away!

HDTV, thanks for the info on the battery drain, camera heat and cooling fan noise. Good things to know ahead of time. I appreciate your time and help.

Some of the links that Ivan gave have helped, too, on the camera set-ups, gamma values, etc. I think I'll actually miss having a good monitor the most. I'm gonna try one more time to lobby for a 2nd HD monitor.

I'll let you know in a few weeks how it went!
 

Thomas

Well-known member
Don't apply make-up. Beta SP is forgiving with make-up. If someone has to apply make-up, insist that it isn't you so that they can't blame you in the edit room when they see powder on the subjects' faces. Use a blotter pad if you have to use anything. Only a professional make-up artist who knows HD should be doing make-up with the F900.

The exposures are difficult to make with the F900. You can set the zebra stripes anywhere you want them. Think of where you want white flesh tones to fall (88 IRE?) and set the Zebras there. then you will know when you are clipping on white flesh and when you are not. It's hard to tell when you are over-exposed with the F900.

If someone says "We'll fix that in post.", be very suspicious. You can fix a lot of things in post but who knows how they are going to post the HD. Are they going to down convert to Digi-Beta and bypass the HD masters? If they do that they will be able to fix less in post than they think.

I would have the F900 set-up in advance. I own a card that Roger macie made with an F900 that looks very good. The basic set-up from rental houses tends to be a flat, Sony-driven look. I don't like looking at it and its hard to light to it since it doesn't give much back. You have to work really hard just to make it look good, in my opinion.

You won't have a lot of time to go into the menus and adjust the camera. That is a fallacy that gets promoted a lot. If you have taken the Santa Fe workshops you may be faster with the manipulation of the camera but if you are just starting out it may take you too long and the producer or director won't feel confident with you futzing with the camera.

There's a lot more to say. There are a number of great links that I would have to retrieve by writing them down and posting them here. What I can offer is that if you have amoment to call me, I will go on-line while we are on the phone and dictate two or three websites where there is fantastic information. One has a methodology for setting up an HD monitor that is great because set-up is no longer 7.5, it's 0.

Other than that...good luck. Trial and error. Here's my phone number. I will leave it up for a day then erase it.

Tom 617-696-4590
 

dayrate

Active member
Go ahead and erase if you like. I've got the #. Thanks.
I'm packing, and have my twins and another visiting pair of twins (all 3) running thru the house "helping". I'll try to call soon, if I can get a minute!
 

dayrate

Active member
Thanks. I had not seen the Calcote site, yet. I'll scan and print some pages before I leave, as it's gettin down to the kiss-the-wife-and-kids-time.
The other DP has some time on these cameras and asked me to join him knowing I was a newbie, and he's having the cameras set-up, so I'll just try to absorb & learn while on the run. Sounds similar to the past 20-some years. What a great life!
I'll check back in after the shoot. Cheers.
 

dayrate

Active member
Back from the Crusades! 10 very long days. The shoot went well, mostly. We shot 67 tapes (approx. 49 minutes long at 23.98p) between two crews. Not much time to stop and smell the roses. (Saw the camera for the first time about an hour or two before the first shoot).

My thoughts:
I love what these cameras can do. They rock! We shot a lot with minimal light, interviews were often supplemented with only one light, usually a Kino-Flo or an HMI. We wanted to shoot fairly wide open much of the time. When you think you've got very little to nothing in the viewfinder, the camera will pull out a really nice image on the monitor. The contrast range is incredible.
We shot aerials 500 feet above ground, and down in a coal mine, 600 feet below ground. High humidity, then into air conditioned rooms. Never had any problems with the cameras, operationally.

Tom, you were right, this probably wasn't the best choice for run'n gun. The cameras are heavy, with the big Fujinon HD wide angle lens. I did not like the zebras. According to the rental house, I could not change the setup to distinguish between the "pattern" of 78 & 100% zebras, therefore about 1/3to 1/2 of my screen was constant zebra "gibberish". When focus and exposure is so critical, it constantly kept me wondering. Not a good thing.
I had one really bad experience with the filter wheel. I'll chalk it up to using an Ike for the past 10 years, and not knowing the Sony "thinking" on why they have filter A as 5600 (daylight), filter B as 3200K tungsten, filter C as 4300K, and D as 6300K. To make a long and embarassing story short and sweet I rolled to filter A (in a hurry, running from one location to the next) thinking it was tungsten, but instead it was 5600K.
Can anyone shed some light on this for me? Wouldn't it make sense to start with clear, or tungsten on A, then move on into the various daylight, or higher color temps with B, C & D? Or am I just trying to justify my stupidity? On my Ike, filter 1 is clear, 2, 3 & 4 are various ND steps, and there is a switch to electronically switch between tungsten and daylight.
I still feel somewhat unsure of what we got, as we only had one HD monitor and it was a small Sony field monitor. In other words, I never saw any footage on a big, widescreen HD monitor.
The cameras did better than I expected on battery power. I had Anton Bauer Hytron 100's & usually got close to 2 tapes on a battery! I don't remember the camera heating up more than normal, and I didn't notice the fan causing any audio problems. Shooting in 16 x 9 was great, but it did take a day or two to get used to checking the edges of the screen!
I'm anxious to get some time with Panasonics Varicam to see how they compare.
Thanks again to all for the suggestions on the front end of this shoot.
 

Thomas

Well-known member
Welcome back. Sounds like you had fun and that's really what makes this such a fun business. The stress and anxiety of making mistakes keeps you honest as does the thought that you could be wasting a lot of someone else's money. That stuff happnes all the time in the corporate world. But there you can cover things up if you are crafty enough. In television, working as a photographer, the results are there for all the world to see. Your soul is laid bare, as are your skills and the basic aesthetic the lives inside you.

The Sony portable HD field monitor is a piece of crap. In fact, I don't think it's much more useful than the SD HiRes (8045Q?) with the SD converter on the F900 output. The only monitor I ever used that looked right was the 15" H studio monitor. But that's a drag to lug around and power.

I wonder how the cameras looked? Did they respond to your lighting the way your own Ikegami responded? Or did you have to adjust your approach? How did the colors look?

The focus is tough as well, just when you think you have it you find you can get it a little better. Thyen you wonder about your first focus choice.

Write more. I'd love to know.
 

dayrate

Active member
Glad to hear your thoughts on the Sony HD monitor. I never got the sense (from the monitor)that what I was shooting was HD. (I'm even thinking about flying out to LA some time during the editing to get a sense of what the results look like, otherwise, I feel like I'm not going to get usable feedback).

The camera I was using had a playback problem that was never resolved, so thru my down converter, the images had some blue & red lines running horizontally, as well as some color-shifting, so I tried to spot check at night with the HD monitor, but you're right, it's not much better than an SD monitor, but it's the best I had.

As far as lighting, we lit differently than the "standard" lighting setup, so it's hard to gauge how the cameras differed from my camera. (Never a background or hair light. Usually one Kino or Joker, off to the side, acting more as an "unconventional" key. We tried to use existing as much as possible, to keep it from looking lit.) But I can easily say we could get away with less lighting when needed, as the shadow detail was so much better than SD. But the range was there, so you still had modeling. From what I could tell, the colors were great. From what we saw on the monitor (as opposed to what it looked like on the camera monitor)+3 and even +6 gain were quite useable when needed.

The focus still scares me, as the final "home" for this project is supposed to be the big screen, and every mistake or dirty lens will be amplified. And, since HD has much more depth of field than film, and we tried to get some depth by keeping our iris' as wide open as possible, that focus will be even more noticeable.

All in all, a great experience, now that it's over. I worried the whole time about the "spending someone elses' money" tho'.
 

Thomas

Well-known member
I used the F900 for the first time not really thinking about the setup of the camera. I rented it from the biggest house in town and they had an engineer on staff. My Sony D600 and the rental DVW790 DigiBeta Camera I had been using were both set up by Roger Macie. The way I light, therefore, was skewed to the "look" that Roger had built into the cameras he set up. I light a certain way (lots of contrast, out of focus backgrounds, strong highlights when possible) and I like Roger's "look" worked with it in mind in my orientation to lighting.

So, when I used the F900 for the first time and it wasn't set up by Roger, I struggled to get the camera to peform the way I wanted it to. At first I used the downcoverter into my small Sony high-res monitor alongside the portable HD monitor. They looked virtually the same. The next day I brought in my 30" Sony studio monitor because I was sick of looking at the tiny 16x9 picture and the client wasn't jumping to rent the 15" HD studio monitor. The 30" helped because it looked better but I also had learned a few tricks for making my F900 look good. The trick consisted of using some daylight mixed with tungsten lighting in the background to make the warmer tones look stronger in contrast to the cooler blue ones.

That worked for an interview or two but I was still tired of struggling with the camera to get it to look the way I wanted it to.

All along I was complaining to my client that I didn't like the setup of the camera and I asked that they let me bring it over to Roger to have him set the thing up. There was never any free time to do that. By day three I was tired of wrangling with the F900 but I did the best I could. Even if I had known how to go into the menus (which everyone I encounterd who was familiar with the F900 was suggesting I should know how to do) I still wouldn't have had the time I needed (or the waveform or the vectorscope) to make the adjustments.

A few weeks later my client had looked at the footage from the first days of shooting. They seemed kind of happy but they listened to what I said about bringing the camera to Roger and now they wanted me to do that. I brought the F900 to Macie and he created a set up card for it (A Sony Smart Stick or whatever they are called) but he cautioned that it would only work with that particular F900, not any others.

On the first round of shooting we had to stop early with one of the subjects. I diagramed the lighting set up so that when we shot him again he would have the same lighting as the first time. On the next round of shooting we happened to interview that subject (with the lighting diagram) first. I put Roger's card in and had the camera download it into memory. Then we ran back the tape from the first shoot. So on the one hand we had the footage from the pre-Macie setup (digital, HD and looking like E-to-E material) and in front of us in real E-to-E, we had the subject in the EXACT same lighting. We also had the 15" studio monitor to boot.

How much of a diference was there? So vast, so huge that I could hardly believe it. Macie had set the camera to look wonderful. The blacks were rich, the colors vivid. It had the punch that I expect from the cameras I work with and it gave my lighting the look I work very hard to derive.

The set up of the F900 is absolutely critical to the look of the camera. People love to say that you can "fix it in post". And, I guess to a great extent many many enhancements can be made now in the edit room with digital HD footage. But, when you are shooting something and it doesn't look right, that is hardly much consolation. If the footage looks like crap, you feel like you are making crap and you want to make excuses to your client explaining why it doesn't look like the stuff they saw on your demo reel or the last shoot you did with them. When you begin to make excuses for your work, you lose your confidence, your footing, the edge you have as an accomplished professional.

I wrote about this experience once on the HD discussion website. The rental house where I got my camera monitored that website. Since I was writing very quickly (as I am now) and not too concerned about who would be reading what I wrote, I managed to piss them off at the rental house; unintentionally of course. They thought I was saying Roger was great and their guy sucked. I never meant to denigrate their engineer but I did mean to say that I had great respect for Roger and that his set up had made the difference in the F900.

If I had to shoot tomorrow with the F900 in a similar documentary situation, I would bring the camera to Roger (he lives in the next town) and have him set it up for me. I did save the Smart Stick and I have used it in another F900. It worked very well, even Roger confirmed that. The first time out shooting with the F900 was like driving a Porche with 7 gears and never geting it out of second or third. That's frustrating.
 

dayrate

Active member
I hear you. I was not ready to go into the menu, yet, especially on this camera and in particular since I knew both cameras were already set up by the DP/Director to match one another. But I was frustrated by not being able to do some minor tweaking.

Roger does my set-up too, and I think you and I work the same shows, but the goal on this doc's look was definitely away from the mag-style interview. So I never really had the opportunity to see the camera under those circumstances. (Except that the other crew did a shoot in a wet, coal mine: pitch black with a few area lights, and 10 or so coal-miner helmet lights ... You would swear you were watching the prototype for ALIEN or the night chase-scene from ET: The Extra-Terrestrial. Fascinating footage. Crisp blacks and just as crisp were the flashlights and the wet highlights of the cave as they were sloshing along in the cramped space).

Did Roger ever give you details on what specifically he changed? Just curious if it was radically different than the "typical" setup on the 900 (ITU-709, I think is a typical setup?)

The concept of "fix it in post" is not really in any of our vocabularies. Maybe one of these days it will be, but I sure hope not. It's great to have the capability, but it sure doesn't say much for us, does it? I'm more than happy to know it can be done, but especially with HD, I assume it's expensive, and worse, it just goes against the grain.

I'd love to see your A-B comparison of the interview. I guess one of the wonderful things about these cameras in particular, digital in general, is that you can set 'em up for the specific look, tailored to the specific shoot. Similar to your analogy of the Porsche: If you're driving to and from work only, you won't set it up the same as you would if all you do is race it. I just hated going out to the race, not knowing how this thing was set up, and it felt like I was "racing" or shooting with blinders, since the monitor was not giving me adequate feedback. So, yes, I felt like I was not on top of my game much of the time. That is frustrating.
 

Thomas

Well-known member
Roger did vary from the Sony recommended ITU-709 set-up. To what extent I do not know. But the results were significant. If singing were the equivalent of lighting, working with the basic ITU-709 is akin to singing almost acapella with a subdued track accompanying you from somewhere down the hall. If you don't have a great voice, it isn't going to sound all that appealing. However, with Roger's set-up I felt as though I was lighting/singing with full accompanyment. The music helps your voice sound better and the better you feel you sound, the better you sound because it is self-fufilling.

My point is that broadcast photographers such as we who use these F900 cameras, are in for a big surprise when we shoot with the camera at the basic settings default. When I took my new Sony D600 Betacam out of the box five years ago I immediately went out on a shoot with it. I had been used to working with a Roger Macie tweaked Ikegami HL V55. I didn't have time for Roger to reset the D600 and I went on my first shoot with the Sony settings in place. When I turned on the monitor and started to light, I panicked. I thought the camera looked awful. Then I remembered that the Sony settings are generally known to be flat and dull. It's the same with the F900 only since we don't own them we forget that they might have a substandard look. We also assume that because they are HD, they are somehow going to look better than our prehistoric Betacams. And, when they don't, but can be very frustrating.

I think the Panasonic Varicam is the way to go -- far more user friendly and balanced like a Betacam. It also has different looks preset into the menu (one or two, one being a "film" look). And you can simply switch the camera over to that look if you prefer it rather than dialing in all the new settings by trial and error.

Sony is also screwing up their own market by making drastic changes to the F900. They undercut the people who bought the first run of cameras by modifying the F900 so soon and so regularly. If you look at used F900 prices, you can generally buy one of the first or second generation cameras in the $60,000 ballpark. That's a 50% discount over new. Conversely, I paid $34,000 for my D600 five years ago, I'll bet I could get $17K for it now and it has been used far more than any F900 possible could have been in half the time.

I have shot with the Panasonic but I have never lit it in a studio setting to truly understand how it reacts to lighting. Until you do that, I don't think it is possible to have a real "feel" for a video camera.
 
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