V1E scoring again!
 

Last night I shoot a live music performance in a church. Just two musicians (violin and guitar), only natural light; the distance from camera 10-15m, Sony LED on-camera lamp (almost unnoticeable effect with this distance). I admit I wasn't sure whether the results would be satisfactory. I compressed blacks and cranked up colour gain to 3. Using histogram, I very reluctantly increased gain to 9 dB (I knew there would be no noise at 6, but the histogram showed 6 was not enough). I shot progressive, at 1/25th.

To my very nice surprise, it came out gorgeous! No distracting noise, reach colours. Great sound from the Edirol C-50 stereo shotgun. The only problem I had from time to time when changing object was the focus - it was so dark the autofocus took a while, and focusing manually on a face in shadow can also be difficult. But all in all, the experience made me stop worring about in-church shooting in the future!

Great images Piotr. Thanks for sharing them with us. On the focus issue have you tried using the Viewfinder Peaking function? I set mine to red, although it does become less effective as available light decreases and focal length increases. The guitarist's glasses would be an effective target for peaking.

Yes Lee, I always use the peaking function - and you're right about the glasses. There was a lot of edges brighter than the musicians' faces directly behind them, which didn't help, though.

Anyway, I''m quite satisified with the low-light capabilities of my V1E - I am going to use the parameters used last night as a preset for future similar situations. No cinegamma that I use a lot in bright conditions, but compressing blacks and adding a little colour gain is the key to increase contrast and mask those shadowy places where noise would strike first.

out of curiosity, and as a 'practical' to one of the threads regarding audio recording on v1's in the public ng's - how did you record sound - and more importantly, how did it sound?

leslie

Regarding the sound, I'm in fact really surprised how good it came off! I was sure that due to the reverb plus on-camera mounting limitations the sound would be unusable, for reference only; I didn't care because a radio crew was taping the event, and I'll be getting the sound from them anyway. I almost managed to borrow from them on the site, but unfortunately their mixer only had the jack type outputs (the mic inputs were XLR), so we didn't have the right cable (BTW, is this what most of such mixers have? I'd like to prepare an XLR cable for situations like this, and guess I'll need one cable, but all possible connectors - adapters to it).

Anyway, the Edirol stereo shotgun CS-50 did the job. Also, since the camera was on tripod with 523pro LANC control, and the HD60 drive was mounted on the bracket away from the mic, no handling noise...

One thing must be stressed however: the church in question is known in Poland for its perfect acoustics; in fact organ festivals are held there regularly, and some chamber music is performed very often as well.

thanks. i too haven't encountered any serious sound problems - using both me 66 and me 80. then again, all i've recorded so far is sync for ambience, and talking heads - which sound perfectly fine.

i carry a xlt > xlt with adaptors for jacks, mini jacks, and rca. so far haven't come across a desk whose out i can't use....

leslie

I could be wrong here, it's kind of hard to judge but it looks like the camera is focussed on the alter rather than the performers. The printing on the music looks out of focus.
Apart from that the camera has held up very well. I think crushing the blacks a bit helps in several ways.

Regarding audio outs from desk, yes many today only have jacks, just not enough room for XLRs. Suitable leads are pretty easy to come by and worth having in the kit bag

You might be right with the focus thing Bob. This is a grab from the very beginning of the shooting, before I realized I need to focus permanently and stay at manual...Later on, the focus is perfect.

Still learning!

PS. A note on crushing the blacks vs using cinegamma: the results are similar in that overall picture "Colour contrast" is enhanced. However, cinegamma1 (not to mention cinegamma2) tends to steal a lot of light from the picture (like 1-2 stops), so it's no good in already dark environment. Compressing blacks, while leaving highlights and midtones unchanged, only deepens the shadows - thus improving the contrast and preventing noise to some extent... Just my theory, but it worked well in the church!

Crushing the blacks by adjusting master pedestal is different to changing gamma, the former puts a flat section at the bottom of the gamma curve but leaves the rest the same except for maybe a change in slope. Cinegamma would be changing the curve, it'll still tend to push the blacks down but as you noticed alters everything else as well.
And yes I think you're right, crunching the bottom end to get rid of as much noise as possible before the encoder has to cope with it is a good move.
I've done much the same with old VHS tapes shot with dodgy VHS-C cameras in low light. It didn't look too bad off the tape but encoding it to mpeg-2 for SD DVD and it looks horrid. Crushing the blacks can help kill the noise and free bandwidth.

I'd carry a TRS male to XLR male cable of a meter or less. (here in the US, a TRS is also known as 1/4" stereo phone plug). This will get you out of most pro and semi-pro mixers if there isn't XLR for you. Typically, such an output in TRS or XLR will be line-level, low impedance and balanced, allowing you to use a long XLR with the adaptor.

RCA/phono ouput is a little more demanding, assuming you're some distance away from the mixer. You'd want an RCA male to 1/4" mono male, running into a DI also known as a direct box. This will convert a high-impedance unbalanced signal to low-impedance balanced, you can then cable from the box to your camera with xlr.

I think 1/4" is the equivalent of about 6.4mm.

Headphone outputs - 3.5mm or 1/4" out from the mixer into the DI.

Most DI boxes have switchable attenuation, which you may need, depending. The idea is that you listen to the cam with headphones, and, if the sound is hot and/or crunchy at line-level settings, attenuate down to mic level.

Thanks Seth, I'll certainly take you advise into consideration when shopping around.

Piotr, what settings do you use on the V1e to compress the blacks?

Thanks, scott

Scott, you must choose a picture profile and change BLACK COMPENSATION to COMPRESS. Then of course you need to activate this PP...

I agree with Bob, the focus looked a little off of the subject but I understand now from your explanation.

As to the Cinegamma curves stealing light from the picture, your theory has merit. Cinegamma curves often stretch out everything and they try to preserve highlight detail in high contrast scenarios by compressing highlights. That highlight compression is the light stealing you speak of. In lower light conditions, the colors tend to be more muted, and there aren't highlights in danger of blowing out so you were right to leave the top end as is, while crushing the blacks to achieve more contrast. And boosting the color gain helps restore the chroma in the low light. Very nice to see +9db looking as clean as it does.

As always, the proof is in the pudding as they say, and your frame grabs are very flattering of what can be done with the camera. Good job!

-gb-

Thanks Greg for your encouraging comment. Just to illustrate how "dangerous" it can be to leave the focus on auto (or even use PAF when on manual, as I did here) when the main subject is not outstandingly bright, I'm posting two grabs: on the left one, you can see how the camera preferred the golden frames in the background, over the performer's face (dark because of closing the iris with increased focus); the right one shows the result of my manual adjustment, using the peaking on his glasses...

Speaking of peaking, a word of warning to the V1/FX7 users: depending on the scene brightness and the quality of detail you want to focus on, always use the right peaking level; set it to HIGH and everything seems to be in focus; set it to LOW and you will not be able to get a dim edge peak at all (jut two extreme examples).