Golden Gate Bridge at night, more test footage
 

The first one was shot at 480i in SD, and the other 5 were all shot in HD, 720p at 24PA.

http://www.jlboyce.com/video/Bridge_at_Night_1.mov
http://www.jlboyce.com/video/Bridge_at_Night_2.mov
http://www.jlboyce.com/video/Bridge_at_Night_3.mov
http://www.jlboyce.com/video/Bridge_at_Night_4.mov
http://www.jlboyce.com/video/Bridge_at_Night_5.mov
http://www.jlboyce.com/video/Bridge_at_Night_6.mov

I only have 1 4 GB P2 card for HD, but by bringing my laptop with me, I could download the footage immediately, wipe the card and plug it back in. I got about 40 minutes of footage in an hour and a half, I could have gotten even more if I had another card!

So far I'm thrilled with the camera.

Not bad. If you get a chance could you try boosting the brightness/gamma curve on the first clip to see if you can bring out the lighted areas a little more? I'd be interested to see how far you can lighten this before it looks unacceptably grainy.

Very cool!

Tom

I noticed some field issues in the 6th sample that was shot at 720p. Was this encoded in the Quicktime as an interlaced format? I'm wondering how those interlaced fields got into the video. Thanks.

Yeah, I exported as a quicktime movie, then used quicktime to encode to .mov for the internet. I want to get into compressor and start coming up with better compression settings because I know I can get nicer quality with an even smaller filesize using Compressor. It's all a little over my head at this point, but at least I have good reason to start learning better compression.

Any tips or ideas on compressor settings?

I re-outputted clip #6 using Compressor, with a bit of colour correction. The file size is under 1mb now for the same video, but is the combing gone? Ican't tell on my screen if it is or now.

http://www.jlboyce.com/video/Bridge_at_Night_6-A.mov

Looking better, but the fields do appear here and there. I doubt this is a problem with the way the footage was shot, but rather the way the footage was either imported into a certain timeline and/or the way the footage was encoded for our display.

Shuttle to a frame that shows interlace artifacts, then three frames previous and three frames after are "clean" progressive images. This cycle continues. One frame with even and odd fields, then three progressive frames, then another frame with even and odd fields, then three progressive frames, etc etc. Definately sounds like a problem with pull-down.

I only noticed this effect after about half way through the video, which seems to indicate a possible problem in final encoding. If the preview window in your edit shows no artifacts at all, then this helps confirm this. I'm not an expert with QT encoding, so perhaps someone else here can shed some light on the problem.

Looks great otherwise. :)

Bob

I didn't see the interlaced fields until I viewed the clip on my 23" Cinema display. But you are correct.