TrueColor configuration for XH A1
 

After the release of TrueColor 3.0 for the JVC HD100 I've been asked to replicate those settings with numerous cameras. While I don't have an XH A1 one of my clients was able to send me one for a few weeks just to calibrate it at the best of my possibilities. TrueColor is a scene file that aims to set the camera to the most neutral, 1:1, configuration possible. This is to follow the well established practice to shoot neutral, use the maximum precision that the camera can provide and then obtain the look that you desire in post, possibly at 32 bits of precision.

The configuration is available at my site http://www.paolociccone.com or you can link directly to the article using http://www.paolociccone.com/blog/?cat=46

Enjoy!

Thanks Paolo. It`s excellent.

Paolo, we're using the Ambi2 OSGs from DSC and we also own an XH-A1 here for testing. I'll replicate the settings and see how they look on the rear-illuminated versions. We're about to do the same testing here with the EX1, HV20 (not adjustable) and the HPX500 (also no matrix!) to see how they all stack up. Are you doing any dynamic range testing with the cams? If so I'd love to chat :-)

From what I've gleaned talking to the DSC crew, part of the noise problem is OnLocation itself. I find it much easier to read the displays when p frames are turned off in the OnLocation output menu..it stops all the "pulsing" in the scope display.

Cheers,
Dennis.

Hey Paulo,
I shot my son's soccer game with this yesterday as a test, and I am exstatic! I really believe this will even be my new low light preset... Thanks a million...
Bill

Bill, Ivan, you are very welcome, glad it works for you. The HD100 version quickly became one of the most widely used settings. Funny thing how the image "pops" when you calibrate it just for reality :)

Very cool, it'll be interesting to see if there are differences.

Very good point. I forgot to mention it in my post. I compared the A1 to the HD100, a camera that costs about $2,000 more, and yes, the A1 has a narrower dynamic range. In particular you can see how highlights go abruptly from OK to blown out after you go past a given aperture. I mean, it's to be expected. Highlights are the weak point of any digital camera and the extra dough goes to better sensors and circuits, nothing surprising here. For the money the A1 is actually a pretty good deal. The amount of adjustability is quite surprising for a camera of this price range and in a couple of spots it was actually more flexible than the HD100. The ability to dial in the white balance, for example, is not available in the HD100.

That can fix the pulse but the noise is really there. I verified it with other cameras and the difference between the two setups is glaring. The detail circuit is the one things that should be ripped out of the camera. Set it to off or at the bare minimum and you'll get much better pictures. It's a little bit like shootin RAW with still cameras. If you have a camera that captures both RAW and JPG you'll see that the Jpeg files always seem sharper. That's because the conversion circuit adds a bit of sharpening. The RAW files are straight from the sensor. When you apply the sharpening in post you always end up with a better result.

Take care.

Excellent Preset Paolo. I was always unsure about the sharpening, thanks for clarifying. IMO the preset achives a film look without the use of the CineGamma, but thats just my opinion.

You might want to copy the Preset to the XH Custom Presets Download Library thread just so other people might not miss it.

Thanks Paolo. I followed what you did for the HD100, so I'm looking forward to trying this!

Richard

Nice CLEAN preset, albeit slightly dark.

Bumping the setup level up bought in some more light, however I was wondering how this responds to lower lit environments or graduated colour tones (such as shadowed faces)

I agree 100% regarding the fine clipping the A1 is capable of, however I also find that the knee is far more reponsive in this regard than any other camera.

Even modified with cinegamma - this preset produces really good looking pictures. It is the first preset, that show my cat in really natural colors - even this Black&White with this intensive brown... Simply excellent. Thanks!
http://www.bildercache.de/anzeige/20...211527-407.jpg

Hmm... so far my 1st prelim look at this TrueColor preset seems to be on the cool side. Manual WB made whites seem a tad blue. TrueBlue? :) Will do more testing later.

This is a great idea for a preset. I just got my A1 today and am going to plug these settings in right away. Must. Get. Perfect. Image. ;-)

The XH-A1 is indeed a very noisy camera, particulary in low light. You've got my curiousity piqued now though to compare the camera on this criteria to the EX1, HV20 and HPX500. The HPX500 image is noticeably cleaner than all the other cams and this should be fairly evident on the displays.

We're using the 72db (13 stop chart) from DSC labs. Other than setting the "white" bar to 100 IRE on the waveform and reading off the stops, would you have any other techniques we should try to explore the range of these cams?

BTW, here's the preset file "TRUCOLOR": http://www.cinevate.com/images/PRESET19.CPF

Paolo, here's what it looks like from the Ambi2: http://www.cinevate.com/images/trucolor.jpg Sorry about the picture but Onlocation doesn't save the image frame when doing a windows screen print..directx or something goofy like that. This is a still photo of the laptop screen...but the colours look great.

Thanks for the fabulous preset. It's CP1 on my cam! This preset greatly improves the issues I've had with the my XH A1. The image is more natural and will cut better with with other cams. I found it perplexing that the HV20 seemed to have better color than my XH A1.

Bill may have something with the image being a little cool. However, I was only looking through the LCD, so I don't expect all the blue hues to be exact on it. I'd rely on a scope more than what my eye sees on the built in LCD.

Many thanks for posting this.

I look forward to trying it out. It sounds good.

Doug, we'll throw up an HV20 grab on the scope so you can compare to Paolo's XH-A1 preset.

Bill, check your WB again and the settings, there is no blue cast in TC, it's made to be as neutral as possible.

Let me know...

Hey Dennis, thank you for creating the config file, I bet people will appreciate it.
Boy, that looks dead-on to me. Colors are in the right place, the WFM is perfectly balanced.
Regarding the test to check the range, I discussed this with bot David Corley and Scott Billups some time ago and the suggestion that I was given was basically to light the chart evenly and start closing the iris counting the stops and check on a good monitor until all the detail is gone.

To all of you who posted about TC, thank you for the appreciation, I'm glad that the scene file is useful.
Happy shooting!

I'm noticing the same, the image seem to have a little bit of blue.

Each camera can be slightly different and the way the color matrix responds can be different. Please double check the values, there was absolutely no blue cast in my tests but if that's the case with your camera than the only solution is to calibrate it.

ok, thanks

Put me on the list. A slight BLUE cast. I adjusted the setup and gamma to make it more light sensitive.

I appreciate you taking the time to compile and post this preset file. While I was looking at these settings I noticed that a few things looked different. The values for GRM and GBM in the above preset file were -12 and 1, rather than 6 and 0 as shown on Paolo Ciccone's page. Were these changes a tweak for something?

Yeah on the site it says 6 and 0...could that be the reason for the blue cast?
I followed the exact settings from Paolo Ciccone's page. Here it is. Of course you must rename the file. Let me know if it is any better.

You can upload .CPF files as attachments here... no need to zip them.

That cpf error was a typo on my part...it's fixed, same url. Sorry about that Paolo. I'll try the stopping down method and see how that compares to just setting white at 100 IRE and reading steps off the wfm.

Cheers,
Dennis.

No problem Dennis, thanks again for taking the time to set the file. There are many parameters and those tiny menus in the cameras are so crammed that anybody can introduce a typo.

Interesting approach, which looks very similar to the experiments Wolfgang Winne did perform in Germany (www.fxsupport.de). He also used vectorscopes and other electronic equipment to develop a number of presets. Purely looking at the parameters, hard to find any similarity between both approaches - which I theoretically should expect, to certain extend in the pure color settings & matrices.

What I question a bit, is the theory about sharpness. A complicated discussion, since nobody knows the real internal processing of the A1 (how can we say that a camera is not good in sharpening, while we hardly knowing it's really doing it?), and secondly, there's also a lot of subjective feeling in it. There's according to me no defense regarding projection of footage, as a lot of project systems tend to soften the focus anyhow. Going to the most blurry setting in this camera looks very challenging to me, and I hope that everyone in this thread realizes this is truely happening in this setting.

Let me put it as such: I personaly would never dare to go that far, risking to return with too unsharp footage, but again, it's a personal choice.

I also read something about the dynamic range of the A1 versus the JVC (which should be less), to be honest: the CCD's and circuits are almost identical to the H1, which is a standard in his level of camera's. All camera's are different, and I've never been working with JVC, but it would surprise me that its footage would overclass the A1's or H1's in this quality aspect.

Back to the preset, this is called 'trucolor' after all. And at first glance, the colors look quite neutral, a bit more then WW's preset. I must say, I've been filming a while with Wolfgang's settings, but left this approach after a few movies.

With a clear pitch towards filmic settings, and with also a lot of respect to the searchers for the perfect neutral preset, I doubt this is really the aim of most A1 users. This was exactly the reason why I dropped earlier Wolfgang's presets, and wouldn't use this one either as my favorite: it looks a bit like shooting with an old VX or PD, without any filmic appliance at all (don't take this as an offense, it's again a subjective issue)

My preference: still, it's in the original DV Info preset list: nr2, ACPREF. With a little color exageration but nice cine tonal balance, sharp, crisp footage without blowing out the entire color balance. I never had any bad comment on it, surely not regarding problems with the sharpness ;-).

You can tune a music instrument as well with a lot of electronic stuff, but when it's done with the bare ear, you will surely come to a somewhat deviating, interesting result. A little bit, like this, isn't operating of the A1 a bit like playing on a violin?

I'm looking forward to trying this preset.

One thing -- I have found that turning the Master Pedestal down to -9 actually clips out some black areas (as in, I can't pull that information back up at all).

It all depends on the tools used. I don't know what Wolfgang used to calibrate the camera but different chart are going to give different results. It's interesting that Dennis Wood was able to reproduce the values in the monitors when dialing the same settings and using the same style of chart, although he employed the backlit version. This gives a measure of reproducibility and objectivity about TrueColor.

While we don't have information about the working logic of the sharpness circuit of the A1, pretty much all video cameras use the same approach. They take a perfectly fine signal and add "detail" by drawing darker pixels in the areas of high contrast. The artificial "enhancement" of video images is well documented by several sources including Scott Billup's "Digital Moviemaking" and Stu Maschwitz "The DV Rebel's guide". The senosr of the camera, if the lens is in focus, will capture a perfectly good image. It might look a little soft but the sharpening can be added in post using After Effects or similar programs, generally leading to better images. This is, of course, assuming that you have the time to post process the clips. If you don't have that luxury then dialing is a couple of points of sharpness is perfectly fine but generally tye factory levels are way too high.

In my testing the JVC's range is wider, as expected since the camera is $2000 more than the A1. The XDCAM can turn even more, around 9 fstops, again, perfectly expected given the price range of that camera.

Actually I got the commission to develop TrueColor A1 exactly by a client who is filming with a couple of these cameras. The goal here is to obtain the most out of the camera with the least amount of "bias". This approach is generally preferable if you try to develop a specific look for narrative work. This is because you will have all the power of your grading suite to work on the full spectrum of colors. If you shift the camera to a part of the spectrum and drop a series of wavelengths in order to create a look in camera you will never be able to regain them later on. On the other hand you will be able to shift everything as radically as you want in post and then recover and fine tune at your liking.

TrueColor is just another tool in the arsenal of the shooter. BTW, the name was given to it by one of the moderators of the JVC forum, not by me. It just stuck :)

You know, you are actually right, I meant to raise that value a couple of notches but I forgot. The initial setup for the DSC chart asks to move the master black so that the black chip falls in the zero IRE point but the chip is, of course, partially reflective. A more accurate configuration would be to keep it around 1-1.5%. Try at -7 and let us know.

Another blue ...
 

Hello,

also being a new owner of a A1 I am looking for good presets. This TrueColor looked very interesting to me. When applying it I also remark much of blue.
I saw some other people have the same problem. Any solution/suggestion how to correct this ? (I have no calibration equipment)

Greetings,

Rudy

Thank you for this correction. I also had found this with the black and wondered if I had set something wrong.

Hey All,
I did some testing with the true color today, and I noticed that the color changed so radically, that I had to re-white balance from other presets. Once I did, I found that the blue went away. I also raised my sharpening to -6 and the ped to -7. I think it looks good. I also seemed to get a light boost somehow. This one might be a winner. I will post results when I get them.
Bill

Dirk the approach using charts like the ChromaDumond makes a lot of sense and is well established in industry. The colours in these charts are spectrophotometrically accurate and comply with SMPTE 274M colorimetry. There is really no better way to calibrate a camera as human perception, LCD calibration, monitor calibraton etc. are all taken out of the equation. It's not perfect, but I've yet to stumble over a better solution.

I hear what you're saying, all, and really: it is very interesting.

I was one of the first wave of A1 owners, and have been playing with quite a few presets ever since then (DVInfo was the major focus for me, but also Wolgangs' website was quite interesting). Like probably everyone with an A1, I spend quite some tapes and hours, capturing, comparing, ... in establishing a shortlist of presets, that could serve my purpose - because after all, not all shooting purposes are the same.

Also true - like probably again quite a few A1'ers, I've sometimes been disappointed after I shot the final footage, even after a lot of experimenting. Looking for something more cine-look, I went over the DVX-emulations towards, VIVIDRGB - and this one in particular - put on a pedestal by some in this forum - has entirely mislead me, because greens suddenly go to... brown. Something I experienced in the field, and I don't say I'd spoiled my footage, but I was not happy either, this type of exaggeration was one street too far.

The increase in gain by applying presets is not really new - it's not so much surprising me.

You convinced me to do some further testing with this preset. Paolo, I'm sure you did a great job, let there be no discussion about this, thank you very much to set direction.

Dirk, I've noticed your posts before regarding green looking brown. I've never seen this at all.

The only weird thing I've seen is with certain shades of purple being blue, no matter what preset and/or WB is used. Wolfgang's site at one time had something about this but I can't locate it anymore.

I will play with this setting this weekend.

Bill Grant - looking forward to your findings on your adjustment and maybe a nonCC screen grab or two...

Thanks Paolo for this new preset (and everyone who has been tweaking it and Taj and Dennis who coded it for us). I watched a PBS show on Ansel Adams this week. They focused a lot on how his goal with large format landscape photography was to acquire a film negative with all the latitude he needed for artistry in the dark room.

Of course the XH-A1 will never have the latitude of film, but I am excited about emulating this general approach with the A1.

Cheers,

Pat