Film Look with HC1
 

I am a complete amateur shooting a Documentary on Colon Cancer & UC.

It will mainly feature talking head style interviews and probably have little slow action movements like some walking interviews and such.

I know I am somewhat limited with my HC1 as far as Film-Like shooting is concerned.

I want to avoid using the Cinema Effect feature on the camera because it takes away many manual controls I like to use and because of the fact that it is an effect!

My question is:

Will using a shutter speed of 1/30 in HD mode be a good idea? I do like the "film like" jittery effect it produces. It does look filmish to me.

how does 1/30 look to you?

I realize that 1/30 is not good for fast movement but like I mentioned, the doc will not have much fast movements if any at all.

Using 1/30 shutter then allows me to use the other manual features i like such as exposure.

What do you think?

Also, do you suggest that I shoot in HD or DV with the Sony HC1?
I will end up downconverting to SD if i shoot in HD anyway since the final source will be DVD.

Any suggestions and/or advice is greatly appreciated!

thanks in advance

You want filmlook on an HC1? Okay, yep, it is possible to a degree. But first of all be prepared for some post production grading of the picture.

Now, take a look at http://www.bbc.co.uk/rd/pubs/whp/whp034.shtml and scroll down to Addendum 19. Read the document VERY carefully. Alans settings can be confusing sometimes. You need to set your camera up to use the settings he labels with a letter 'f'. The black stretch is also important.

Filmlook is a bit of a falesety though. Setting the camera up will not make shots look good. Only cinematography and lighting can do that.

35mm adapters
 

...also, have a look at the Letus35mm adapter...

In general these adapter let you achieve that very shallow depth of field effect that blurs the background -even in wide shots.

I am going to get one and give it a go...


Regards, Nick.

Some classical film-look tips that you might already know of;
* Adjust the sharpness setting in the camera to low
* Place the camera as far from the subject as possible and zoom in
* (ND)-filters so you can use maximum aperture
* Film like lighting

more
 

Maximum aperture (blurred background) can be had by using the 'portrait mode'...

I have found from experimentation for best effect zoom in half way at least and set the subjects about 1/3 distance to background. You could try focusing in front of the subject so the subject is nearer the back end of the range of acceptable focus.

For fairly static subjects the DOF is more important than the shutter speed setting.

"Film like lighting" is a bit broad: more specifically try 3 lights: two main lights facing towards subject roughly on each cheek and one light behind head to create a 'corona' of light or highlight the hairline... Check out "CSI Miami"! If you don't have lights do it in daylight with some NDs and have some card/foil reflectors to highlight face.

Always shoot in HDV, output in HDV, edit in HDV and render final in HDV or SD...


Nick.

I just did this for the first time a few minutes ago but it was so impressive, I just have to post already and discuss this:

I just did a Cineform ConnectHD 60i to 24p conversion using the ConnectHD remove pulldown and deinterlace options. I then rendered this to a 24p DVD writable MPEG 2 file. The result was a wonderful 24p film look. I've gone through all the options: DVFilm, 24p renders from Vegas, Cineframe24 reverse pulldown captures.. this is the first one that looked like what I want.

If you'd asked me yesterday about film-look from a Sony HDV camera, I would have told you to just give up because none of the options were worth that much, but today, I've done a complete 180. Just capture with ConnectHD 3.0.3 with the pulldown removal and deinterlace tabs checked and prepare to be amazed!

Laurence,

I was considering getting DVFilm (but then noted you need the FULL Cineform codec/SW for that to work -not just the freebie that comes with Vegas).
Also what does 'pulldown removal' do? (bit new to this)

I have a Sony HC1 and Sony Vegas 6d...

Nick.

any chance you would post some footage
 

Laurence, I'd love to see the 24p look you achieved. Any chance you could post a short clip? Thanks.

HDConnect / HDLink v3 from Cineform
 

[There is another forum on this website dedicated to Cineform btw.]

I donwloaded the latest trial Cineform HDConnect (v3.03?) for Vegas and gave it a go. I am using a PAL version camera so did some batch 50i->25p (select de-interlace). This has made my editing much smoother too as Vegas copes much better with the .avi than a .m2t files even thought they are 50-100% bigger.

All I am really doing here is a reasonable quality de-interlace though. DVFilm product provides even better quality results I assume.

As I have not loaded Magic Bullets on my laptop I applied a gentle 'S' colour curve in Vegas -something I do a lot in photography. Results looked nice.

I am looking forward to using my new Letus35 'in anger' and will post some images.


Nick.