Major SD Problems
 

Hello,

Unfortuantely I have been told that I will not be booked on certain jobs if the footage comes out the way I have been providing. My client tells me the SD footage looks pale, flat, contrast is off, and during the reception there is no background while people are dancing. The other unfortunate thing is that my client wishes that I still owned my pd170 and will not book me unless I figure out how to use the camera properly. It's understandable. He is very happy with the shot selection ect. but the image is not good.

I am pretty sure it's not the camera and is me as the operator so can anyone give me some advice to prove to my client that the camera can actually get the quality he is used to.

I understand gain, shutter and always use manual as my setting. I have read through the manual but still having some issues. I think I am just missing something that is making the sd footage look very unacceptable. The thing is, I agree with my client that the footage looks bad.

Any help would be much appreciated and I hope none of you are having the same issues as I am. I will apologize in advance if there has been a thread similar to this.

Thanks

I shot a short documentary in SD using the custom preset 02-ACPREF1, from the library posted on this forum. I was shooting 24f, in Tv mode with the shutter set to 1/48. I thought the footage looked amazing when I viewed the final product from a DVD on a CRT monitor.

I've shot a couple of different SD things for a friend who had been using an XL2. He says my stuff looks significantly better than his XL2.

it sounds to me like you've got some adjustments way off. What I would do is check the manual and see if you can reset everything to teh factory default. Then get all the automatic stuff turned off. Make sure you're not shooting at a high gain. Set the zebras to about 80% and learn to use them. Make sure you're in manual mode. If you can shoot good footage with the PD170 you can do the same thing with this camera, although in really low light situations you may have to go to a +6 db gain, or maybe a +12 under really difficult circumstances. Even at +12db it should look better than the PD170 at +6db.

Also, make sure you're not shooting with an ND filter switched on.