Venice Beach and Santa Monica Pier (w/ ca. blonde)
 

I went down to the Santa Monica Pier and walked to Venice Beach with my XH-A1. Here's some great footage from the trip. I used the TrueColor preset for everything. Music is California Blonde and Hot Sexy Girls (California Remix).

Some of the locals thought I was from channel 9 news for some reason.

http://vimeo.com/1137835

Hi Alex,

Great looking stuff! That roller-coaster shot going round-and-round at the beginning is fantastically smooth.

The autofocus seemed to defeat some of the clarity of your shots... It seemed to pulse in and out... Whatever you rendered to appeared to degrade some of the quality of your shots as well...

You had some great shots in there, but I found myself imagining what the 'real' shots looked like... : )

Thanks Alain. I actually shot all of this handheld since I couldn't bring my tripod with me to california. I applied the image stabilization in post.

The beach
 

I always love to "see" location material like this. Never been but now would love to visit; after seeing this footage. Thanks for that.
IMHO it could use a bit of post for contrast as it comes up just slightly flat looking on my (calibrated) Viewsonic. Great grabs though. I enjoyed it.

I agree about it looking flat and it is actually the result of me applying some gamma correction in post due to an inconsistency in final cut pro.

I have displays calibrated to 2.2 gamma and couldn't figure out why things looked fine in Final Cut Pro and then looked washed out when I exported. Well, after some research it appears that final cut pro assumes your gamma is set to 1.8 and darkens the gamma in the canvas to compensate (even if your gamma is correctly set to 2.2).

The only workaround I found was to calibrate the displays to 1.8 gamma and switch to that color profile when I'm working in Final Cut Pro and switch back to the 2.2 profile for everything else. I recently tried using this workflow and the end result looks perfect.

Gamma
 

Thanks for the reply Alex. Good to know. Within the last year I converted from CRT to LCD. Didn't like it much until I bought a Spyder. What a difference. Shades are back. I feel good about colour looking like it should, and work is transferring well to CRT with consistency to LCD. Took some getting used to, but am hooked now as I am mostly working HD and have come to trust my gear again.
The Pre's help. -3 rules, and Panalook2 ... my "go to" presets.