New Sample Footage
 

Here are some links to footage I shot in Nicaragua. I think the V1 makes some great pictures. All were shot with Cine Gamma Level 1. Manually white balanced. And shot at 30P. I'd have put more up, but man my upload speed is S-L-O-W.

http://geekstudios.com/demos/village.m2t
http://geekstudios.com/demos/church.m2t
http://geekstudios.com/demos/shoeshine.m2t

Thanks Brett ! Great footage, great colors ! It would be great to see more !

Cheers,

Kristin

Very nice! Impressive color and detail. Thanks for posting!

Brett, where do you have your sharpness set? The reason I'm asking is that I see no sign of edge enhancement. I'm not sure if this is a function of your sharpness setting or the progessive mode. When I shoot at default settings with my FX7 (7 sharpness), I can see EE in areas like wires against a sky.

Very nice! Thank you for letting folks look at your shots.

Thanks for posting these 30P clips.

These look so much better than 25P. Some faith has been restored that we'll get a usable 25P some time.

Are these clips recompressed?

TT

Hi Brett , I would like to view these clips very much, others on this site have been no problem, but these just come up as confused text on the web page. Can you advise or post me another link? I'm using Mac OS 1.46 Safar.
Thankyou Graham

My settings were:

Color Level: +1
Color Phase: 0
Sharpness: 9
Skintone DTL: Off
WB Shift: +2
Blk Compnstn: Stretch
Cinematone Gamma: Type 1
Cinematone Color: On

I created an html page. Just go to www.geekstudios.com/demos. Then you can try "Save Target" or "Save Link" to download the clips. If that doesn't work, you can always find a friend with a PC.

First, thanks for posting the videos Brett. My favourite by far is the village clip - detail EVERYWHERE! In the highlights, in the shadows, and, most notably, there was a very detailed blue sky filling up 50% of the shot! Looked like a hot day.

Watching this video brings up a couple questions for me. I have a Mac Pro, and am a well-versed mac-user. I edit HD in FCP, and have been able to export and playback HDV.mov files whenever I want in QT Pro.

However, I can't open any m2t files in QT. Is this normal? I use VLC Player, but it's crashes 70% of the time I play any downloaded m2t file from this site's users.

To recap:

a) on a mac, what should I be using to open and play m2t files? VLC is the *only* app that works for me.

b) and since VLC provides very little information about the video I'm playing, is the resolution of the videos you posted Brett, 1920 (or 1440) by 1080? They always play at what seems to be a resolution of approx 1280x720 for me, but I can't make it go larger in VLC Player. I can't tell if you've recompressed them to a lower res or if VLC Player is messing with me.

Hi Robert,

I have experienced the same issue. Moreover once downloaded, the .m2t files appeared with a .txt extension. If I tried to open them with VLC, I experienced crashes, however it played - not smoothly and reporting errors in the meantime.

Here is what I did:
Apple i - to get file info. In there I removed the .txt - it was interestingly not possible just by renaming the file, or if it appeared so, the .txt extension remained there in the info panel even if on the desktop it disappeared. Also the text file kind of icon remained.

So in the file info panel I managed to remove .txt, then set VLC as the app to open all similar files.
Now if I play the files in VLC, they play nicely. I also set loop playback so I dont have to restart VLC always once the clip finishes.
I suggest also to set the the movie size to half (unless you have a large screen). On my PB this way VLC produces quite acceptable playback.

Zsolt, thanks for your detailed reply. I've always renamed the files before playing. VLC still is buggy for me, on my Mac Pro there is no speed deficiency. I'd be totally open to transcoding an m2t file into a QT file, if QT would open it ;)

So there is no other player for Mac OS X? And were the videos a full HDV resolution? (1440x1080)

Brett, I'm shocked you used a sharpness of "9" but yet there's no apparent EE. Perhaps it's the progressive mode or the small computer monitor I'm viewing it on. If I saw the same clips on my 50" plasma, perhaps they'd look different.

Nonetheless, they look great and thanks for sharing!

I'm now recommending "9" for both progressive and interlace. (Or, if you like soft progressive, "7".)

The reason is I'm now burning HD DVD discs for playback on my Toshiba HD DVD player. That means exporting VBR MPEG-2 at 25Mbps. My "7" interlace video looks a bit too soft.

Remember, while detail is unimportant going to DVDs -- it is very important for outputting HD.

Moreover, some tiny amount of EE is useful to increase apparent sharpness.

For anyone that's seen the footage: was it 1920x1080 (same as 1440x1080 for the sake of my question)? Or was it rescaled to lower dimensions? Thanks.