AC90 Sample Footage

[Noa Put]

Originally Posted by Tim Akin

My on cam light is led, will that cause the banding.

No it won't, this only happened to me twice with large led lights from a dj, those that emit different color and then once there where small spots build in the ceiling of a small venue and each spot had 4 small led's, those where really bad. I can only hope I won't encounter this too much.

[Noa Put]

Thx for the test Tim, looks pretty ok to me, I really would like to see the cam in action at a wedding, guess we have to wait a few months before the first wedding videos appear online.

[Tim Akin]

Well I'll have one on the 15th of this month so I'll know then. I usually have a trailer up within a week if I get to work on it enough.....I'm just part time with video. Those cars you saw in the test is what I do haha

[Don Bloom]

Tim,
your footage has helped me to decide which cams I'm going to get after the first of the year. Thanks for all the hard work, time and effort spent.

[Tim Akin]

No problem Don, I was doing it for myself too. If your like me, you may change your mind several times before the first of the year :)

[Chris Harding]

Hi Tim and Noa

The 90 certainly should have syncro-scan? The 40 and 80 series have it.
I actually don't even use it as it's mainly used if you want to film a TV/monitor/powerpoint show and are getting banding.

LED lights on the camera will cause no problems at all!!! The ones people were complaining about were the ones venues and DJ's were using to light the dance floor/venue

Chris

[Tim Akin]

Here's some more test footage from the basketball game. Scrubbed the timeline and pulled some of the more challenging shots. Fast zooms and pans to see how fast the auto iris/gain could compensate. Very well I would say. Wide shots would have 0 gain and full zoom would go to 18db. It worked fast and looks seamless, not in steps.

The full zoomed shots are i-zoom, there is some degrading and loss of color but not as much as you would expect. I can see using izoom at weddings in a have to case.

You don't have to worry about out of focus shots much because everything is pretty much in focus. If you like those cinema looking blurry backgrounds, you will have to work real hard to get it from this camera. That's not what I want from this camera, it's to get the shot...thats it!

Scene settings were Detal Level -2, V Detail -2, Coring +2, M Ped -2, Auto Iris -8, Gamma Cine-Like V, Matrix Cine-Like, everything else 0.

Vimeo

[Noa Put]

Originally Posted by Chris Harding

The 90 certainly should have syncro-scan? The 40 and 80 series have it.

The manual from the ac90 however doesn't mention this?

[Noa Put]

Originally Posted by Tim Akin

The full zoomed shots are i-zoom, there is some degrading and loss of color but not as much as you would expect. I can see using izoom at weddings in a have to case.

Is that something like a digital zoom? The footage from the ac90 is very sharp, however I noticed several shots where you zoomed in completely on the people on the opposite of the room and those where noticeably soft, as if the camera didn't manage to get it into focus, is that the image degradation you mention while using the "i-zoom"?

[Tim Akin]

Yep, that's it. You can read about it in the manual. It says there's no picture quality loss, but I would have to disagree. It's different than digital zoom though. The 90 has that too but I don't see using it. I would have to compare some i-zoom and 2x digital zoom shots to see how much difference there is between the two.

[Noa Put]

I just read the i-zoom is 25x zoom, (I already thought that amount of zoom in your film was much more then 12x) there was also stated that it was without image degradation, from what I see in your film on Vimeo in HD there is a definitive softness, almost like out of focus degradation going on.

I find it hard to believe that doubling the optical zoom would retain image quality.

[Noa Put]

Originally Posted by Chris Harding

The 90 certainly should have syncro-scan?

I just received a confirmation that the ac90 does not have synchro scan, there are only fixed shutter speeds :(
Not the end of the world but could cause issues if you are facing banding and the fixed values don't help.

[Chris Harding]

Hey Noa

That's a bummer for people who need to do shots of computer generated screen projections cos it will cause banding. The 90 also doesn't have a WFM which is a pity but I guess they had to cram a lot of stuff into a tiny body!!!

One of my other concerns is that with such clean gain one would have to be very carefull that your night shoot doesn't appear to look like daylight!! I would think that even with clean gain, a manual exposure would be the right thing to do as autoiris will simply be looking at all this dark background at the wedding reception and then lifting the gain to expose correctly so backgrounds that should be black appears a lot lighter which to me ruins the ambiance?? I go manual at receptions and limit my gain to 10db so the ambience is preserved but of course I need to splash some light on the subject which works well!!

With your DSLR's using your incredibily fast lenses, how do you keep the subject nicely exposed but still keep the background as it should be???

Chris

[Noa Put]

Again confirmation from Barry that the izoom is a 2 times digital zoom and he recommends to turn it of and to only use it if your shooting standard def, the softness you see in the image at 25x is a result of that.

About the ac90 overexposing at dark reception I wouldn't worry about that much, from the comparison tests in this thread my cx730 should be more sensitive so I think the ac90 will just cope wide open at 30db.

In the "shooting weddings with small handicams" thread I started I posted a video of the last event I did with candle light only in the centre and spotlights on the side of the venue, in those more extreme situations I think the ac90 would have issues getting the "right" exposure because it would underexpose.

About how I keep exposure right is very simple, I always do that part manually :) You can see in Tims basketball video he used auto exposure because you can see the camera adjusting everytime there is close up of someone with a white shirt, the camera sees a large part of that bright white in the image, adjusts to that and underexposes. That's why controlling the iris manually is so important.

My handicams only allow to adjust one thing at the time and I have the knob on the front of the camera set to exposure, there are also 3 assignable buttons on the lcd screen and they are assigned to controlling focus on the touchscreen, turning the ois on or off and to change the white balance to in- or outdoor presets or just to auto.
The camera holds focus very well, also in quite dark places and even in tricky situations with indoor light mixed with outside light it gives a quite accurate color, but with setting the exposure the camera can mess up the most so I feel that at least is the only feature I always should control manually. WB I always set to presets unless it's a mixture of light and then just let the camera decide, focus usually on auto unless I zoom in on a face, then I first fill the viewfinder with the face, switch to manual on the touchscreen and then choose my frame.

With my dslr all is manual but I only use that for controlled situation, I set WB, focus and exposure manually up for every shot before I start shooting, You can however set the ISO at auto to get very gradual changes in exposure if you would make a outdoor to indoor shot in one move on a steadicam, works very well but there is a risk of getting too high gain and a very noisy image, I only use that when I have no other option.

[Noa Put]

The ac90 has left me a bit sleepless the past days :) I"m not that kind of guy that always wants the greatest and latest and I do have a limited budget. I choose my gear based on what would work best for me and I choose the cheapest camera's possible that can deliver quality that is on a level my clients would accept. I usually go for proven technology so camera's that have been out for a while and where there is enough user feedback to be found so I always do my homework before I buy and don't just pre-order based on speculation, only with my cx730 I did change that approach as I knew the cx series where good so I couldn't go wrong with a updated version, the panasonic ac90 though has left me in a bit of doubt since it is so new but it does offer so much considering it's price and that is what makes it so tempting.

I left my xh-a1 at home mid this year because it's just not up to it's task anymore doing weddings and events and the cx730's are much better, I used the xh-a1 a few times the past years on corporate videos and there it was good enough, there was always sufficient light and then the camera does well, but I have to be honest that at least 95% of what I do is weddings, businessevents and a few danceperformances and those just scream for lightsensitive camera's.

The only thing I miss so much on the handicams is real control like I had with my xh-a1 and that gap the ac90 can almost fill at a price level I can afford now.

I always myself ask if I buy something, "do you need it or do you want it?" :) The ac90 fits that "need" bill partly, I need a camera that gives me control during dance performances AND that can keep focus once zoomed in and locked, the cx730 don't as I found out last time, you zoom in, lock focus and you'd expect it to keep focus then during zooming in and out while you follow dancegroups in close up but it doesn't and that is quite bad. My xh-a1 doesn't cope there anymore because it produces a too flat image and it's hard too color match and its not sensitive enough and produces too much grain.

At the event I did last week I so missed having a real focus ring so I could zoom in quickly on a person and then set exposure and focus manually, now it's so fiddly and you see that sometimes during my filming because I"m messing about on the touchshcreen.

The only few worries I have so far is the missing synchro scan, the fact that colors might deviate compared to my cx730 and it would be hard to color correct, the fact that it might be too sharp to match my small Sonys, but here I guess some sharpening in post can solve this and the fact that the camera has issues with high contrasts like glaring sun a shades because for such a small sensor camera dynamic range is not that good. I have owned a dvx100b and that one too had issues with handling highlights on faces (outside in the sun), similar to what the panasonix af100 is suffering from.

The Sony nex ea50 crossed my mind as well but it's twice the price and it would compliment my dslr's only, that would be great if I was a 2 or 3 man team but as a solo shooter I can't do multicam shoots with 3 dslr's (like a wedding in church) but I can do that with regular deep dof videocamera's and that makes such a difference in the end result.

I have 2 more weddings to do this months and then nothing will happen for about 2 more months, the ideal time to test a new camera before it's put to a paid use but will have to sleep on that some more :)