Canon XL H1 picture sharpness and vivid colors
 

Hello All, I am new to DV Info and looking for some help from all of you experts. I owned a JVC GY-HD200U for about 2 years and enjoyed it. Just recently I upgraded to Canon XL H1A for my business. I have been shooting with camera and like the quality over all but I am not able to get the results same as JVC's picture quality and colors by default. On Canon the picture quality is good but I cannot make the picture sharp and crisp. I have tried many settings but still I cannot get sharpness. Picture is very clear but very soft at the same time. Other issue I am having is with the color settings. I am looking for vivid colors settings. I shoot Indian weddings which are very very colorful and my clients want to see all the colors. Can someone please advise me how to get sharp/crisp picture with vivid colors or guide me towards a preset that someone has? Any help would be greatly appreciated.

Cheers.

Have you adjusted the back focus? check the manual for the instructions on this. Also a few threads down they discussed this issue.

I would definitely trying downloading some of the presets from this site. Try the presets from Stephen Dempsey (disjecta) called Panalook.

Thanks John. Yes I have already adjusted the back focus and it is fine. Please don’t get me wrong, the quality of the picture is okay but I would like it more if it was sharper with vivid colors.

Thanks Robert, I will definitely try the presets and let you know about the results.

As Mr. Sanders stated, the 'out of the box' look of video with the H1 is rather flat and dullish. But when you apply the wide range of customer presets you can greatly affect the look. I also recommend Steve Dempsey's presets to warm up colors and deepen them

You can also play around with the presets yourself in the menu to get just the looks you personally are going for.

Yeah, the difference between the "out of the box" look and one that is "tuned" is...WOW!

Good evening,

If I recal, the reason they come out a bit flat oout of the box is so that thery is more area to move in post. The xl2 was the same.

Having 6 presets available one should not have to do that at all and have presets for what ever he is about to encounter and have it closer right out of the camera.

Which by the way, is the way we were taught to shoot film.

Thanks guys. I got it to work with my own settings.

Can someone please tell me that under Custom Preset Parameters , what does setting “Black stretch/Black press” do? I am trying to make blacks darker/richer. What values should I increase/decrease? Thanks.

,,,,Hi Dil. Black Stretch *increases* the amount of detail visible in the shadow and darker areas of your image. Black Press *decreases* the amount of detail visible in the blacks and shadow areas of your image. Dil, try out the ""OLEGWARM" by Oleg Kalyan" in the XL H1 Presets library on this website. The preset is called,

"PRESET13.CPF: OLEGWARM -- warm, saturated and film-like when combined with Skin Detail: Middle."

http://www.dvinfo.net/conf/canon-xl-...d-library.html (Middle of Page)

Low lighting shooting
 

Hello DV Info Expersts,

I am doing a wedding job this weekend. This will be heppening at a hotel and I am pretty sure that lighting will be low. Is there is a preset for low lighting shooting that I can use?

Thanks to all in advance.
Dil Singh

Switch to 1/24th shutter BEFORE you start pushing the gain above +3db. You get a little more motion blur but you avoid the noise floor. And for a wedding video I don't think a little extra motion blur is a deal breaker (like it would be for narrative work).

When indoors try to avoid filtration as much as possible as you usually lose some light.

Also, if you are using any of the presets that really crush the blacks or the pedestal is lowered, you might want to turn this off. I use the "Disjecta" preset which is great for well lit scenes, but find I gain about a stop of light back when I turn it off. I have a CP where I use the default camera settings but I change the knee setting to allow for better latitude. This is not ideal for every circumstance and doesn't yiled great color but when covering an event in average to low light it helps. Since it is so dim anyway you aren't getting very brilliant colors anyway. If you are shooting in 30P or 60i use the 1/30th shutter speed also.

Good Luck

Good advice Marty. Turning off the presets that crush black should really help.

Robert,
I should follow my own advice more often since I know that ideally I should be acquiring my footage more flat in camera and color grading it in post. But I do like lowering the pedestal and crushing the blacks as it make the colors pop more. So, when you shot your film, did you set the camera to record a flat neutral image and do all grading in post? I am guessing the footage you grabbed in the studio via the SDI was easier to color grade than the HDV footage but I was just wondering.

Marty

No black crush at all. We did have two presets we tweaked. CinemaGamma and stuff like that was all turned on. We added a touch more blue to the color matrix. We left the pedestal at neutral. All black levels were dialed in during post.

The SDI footage does grade very nicely. It would've been nice if the H1 had a 10-bit output as we did the whole show stem to stern in ProRes. However, I must say that the HDV footage that was cut into the SDI footage graded very well too and at the end of the day I don't think anyone can spot what was SDI and what was HDV. Even on a huge movie theater screen.

Hello Folks,

I am back with another question. How do I do white balance adjustment in the low lighting condition? Or is it even necessary? If I use my expo disk to do a white balance, because of the low light, all camera lens sees is dark and unable to adjust white balance. Expo Disk does really a good job on setting white balance when there is plenty of light.

Thanks to everyone in advance.

OlegWarm is the bomb.
 

I'm with Mark on this one. I use the "olegwarm" almost exclusively. (I used it for a wedding this weekend.) In some low-light indoor shots it doesn't work so well. But for natural light and outdoor "magic light" times-- fantastic. Great saturation. Rich film look. Give it a try.

Thanks Patric for the info.
What do you recommend for the white balance adjustment in low lighting condition?

Dil, we're already over my pay grade here, so take this for what it's worth... I keep the WB on auto in low-light situations. Don't know if that's the way it should be done. I'll look to see if someone more knowledgeable weighs in. Good luck!