Sony A1U Footage - Twilight Footage Take Two
 

Let's try this again. That other thread seems to have gotten corrupted. This is some nice twilight footage I shot last week and I thought it had some nice warm colors on the water so I wanted to share it. I used SonicFire Pro 4 to score it.

Twilight Footage

Cheers!

Very nice Greg! I used to live in Jeffersonville, in The Harbours right across the river from where you were shooting. It was nice to see a bit of the old neighborhood again.

I was also surprised at the image quality, given the camera's reputation for poor low-light performance. I've been toying with picking one up and that footage may have just sold me.

Aloha!

Greg,
Thanks for sharing. Reflected sun on water looked great. What settings were you using in camera? Was that a lanc controlled zoom or did you use the zoom lever on top of camera? Black stretch off?

thanks,

chris

A1u's low light is a relative thing
 

I've read all the "no good in low light" posts too. I actually own an a1u I really don't see this.

If you were using a vx2000 or other $2000+ camcorder, you'd be right to complain. However I came from a consumer grade camcorder and stepping up to the a1u means I can actually shoot in low light (i.e. living room light) again with acceptable results.
In low light, the a1u gains up smoothly and while not as good as similarly priced DV camcorders it's low light image is better than many posts would have you believe.

Full daylight-the level of detail is stunning compared to it's $2000+ DV counterparts, to the point where I see detail I've never noticed before in any other video. (I used to use commercail grade $40k Ikegami's too)
I'll never go back to NTSC (never twice the same color) again.

Not trying to criticize anyone here, just a reminder to keep things in perspective.

My thoughts exactly!

I know what you're saying, but the 60i A1 uses the same colorspace as PAL and DVD (thanks to it's native mpeg encoding). Color is now just as vivid on a final NTSC DVD as it has been all along with PAL.

Nice looking footage!

Sunset Shots
 

I read your post and watched your footage and I really liked the way you framed the shot and results you acheived. Inspired by that, I worked on my settings and loggged them in my shot book. Then low and behold last night I went out into the back yard and had one of those "Hunny! get the Sony!" moments.

After months of hot cloudless Fresno summers, we had a cold front move in. I am going to capture the clip tonight and post here if you don't mind me stepping on your thread? If not I will post somewhere.

Of course I only had a few minutes with the light being just right so I didn't have time to get on the roof and frame the shot with the artistic eye that you used. But I call it a sucess to view the clarity and detail of the settings.

The one thing I am having problems with is when I capture the file (30 seconds) comes out in Gigs and not 30 Megs like yours. How do you guys out there get your files portable without loosing quality?

Thx,
tt

Moving on from here
 

Thank you for posting the images of Louisville. It brings back memories from when I was in the Army in training at Ft. Knox, and spend a few Saturdays there.

To build on what you have done with being creative with images like this, I'd like to recommend a wonderful learning resource - Blackbelt Camera Techniques by John Cooksey of elitevideo.com. The techniques are independent of camera, and benefit both stills and video work.