XLH1 Grab
 

From some footage of my daughter:

http://www.pinelakefilms.com/images/taraxl.jpg

what settings did you use Steven?

XLH1 Footage
 

Just a quick piece showing some flowers and birds...it was raining, the color is off because I didn't white balance but it shows the beauty the camera can capture. The rain in the background gives it a really nice look.

http://www.realm.cc/upload/disjecta/flowers_bird.m2t

117mb

Thanks for posting this, Steven! Nice!!

Questions: Was the cam handheld or on tripod? IS enabled or not? Fully zoomed-in? Exposure manual or automatic? And the naturalist wants to know what bird species it is... :-)

Ron, the OIS was engaged on the lens and it was fully zoomed in. No tripod. All manual, no auto. The bird is a dark-eyed junco.

Thanks for your comments.

Impressive. The OIS seems to work incredibly well and the resolution and color are outstanding. No grain, either. Wow...

The compositions are nice, too (unsurprising given your dvx work) but I love especially how the telephoto lens compresses the drops of rain (which seem large since your subject is a small bird) into kind of abstract out of focus blurs. Shot in slow motion that would look particularly beautiful, but it's pretty unbelievable as it is.

Looks like you picked the right camera. Fantastic.

Black and white stills
 

I'm in the midst of developing a new Black and white setting and there are also two color shots. All from my son's baseball game:

Wow, looking great! I'm tweaking my own B&W preset, can't wait to compare notes with you.

Northwest Sunset
 

This is why I love living here. This is from a shoot I did last night. These stills are highly compressed but the original footage is pristine and artifact free. This is just to give you an idea...

Steven, pics look good, how did you set up exposure?

I had to resort to a pretty fast shutter speed, maybe 1/1000? I can't remember exactly. Having shot with the DVX for so long, I'm still getting used to the fact that I can't shut the iris down on the Canon as much.

There's an interesting lens flaring that happens with the 20x lens in that it produces a thick line that is perfectly vertical from top to bottom of the frame. I haven't experienced that with the DVX so I'll be avoiding shooting directly at the sun with the XLH1, which is kind of a bummer because I like those kinds of shots.

Hey Steve,

In the "pebble" still grab, that is actually not a lens flare but a CCD artifact. Not sure if camera engineers have a more sophisticated name for it, but it has been discussed on DVi every so often as "vertical smear." Bigger and better chips are less prone to get it, but it can happen even to the big dollar broadcast cameras and I've seen it happen on network broadcasts.

If you key word vertical smear, you'll find several threads about it on various cameras. But you've already found the solution: avoid shooting objects so bright compared to their surroundings that they exceed the CCD's capacity to handle them. Here's one of several threads:

http://www.dvinfo.net/conf/showthrea...vertical+smear

Great to know, Pete. Thanks.

Stills from a trip to the zoo
 

Took the kids and cam to the zoo today:

Good work!
Steven, are they deinterlaced frame grabs from interlaced video?

I use cineform Aspect HD for capturing and it strips the pulldown making it 24p native. I took these stills from the 24p end file.

How much res do you loose when doing that Steven?

None...it's just extracting information that's already there and stripping away extraneous info. The 24p frames are not actually "processed" in any way so they remain clean.

H1 and a ProMist 1/8
 

http://www.realm.cc/upload/Elton/AhhhCute.m2t
http://www.realm.cc/upload/Elton/Buds2.m2t
http://www.realm.cc/upload/Elton/Buds6.m2t
http://www.realm.cc/upload/Elton/Buds7.m2t
http://www.realm.cc/upload/Elton/BudsSwing.mov

The last one is is slow motion clip in PhotoJPEG 720p QT format. It's a large file, but the quality is good and seems to be reasonably cross-platform compatible.

Martin Costa's 8bit and 10bit uncompressed stills
 

Rec'd from Martin Costa:

"I've got a couple of uncompressed stills from my XLH1. One is 8bit and the other 10 bit of the same subject, the difference in colour surprised me. They are 5mb in size."

8bit image, 5.6mb: http://media.dvinfo.net/xlh1/mcwinch418bit.pctx
10bit image, 5.6mb: http://media.dvinfo.net/xlh1/mcwinch4110bitnew.pctx
10bit image, 5.8mb: http://media.dvinfo.net/xlh1/mcgreen10bit.pctx

To view these images, download them to your local drive and re-name the file extensions from ".pctx" to ".pct" and open them with an image browser that supports the Macintosh PICT file format. Most photo apps such as PhotoShop and Paint Shop Pro will do fine.

Here are a couple of half-size .jpg's which show the color difference Martin is talking about. The 8-bit version is on the left (or top, depending on your browser) and the 10-bit version is on the right (or bottom).

Cineform it is then!

Chris, can you take this post down? Need to conserve Shane's bandwidth.

Sorry guys, I took the clips down.

Barlow,

Since we're on the topic of filters... are you using a matte box or threaded 72mm on the front end? If a matte box, which one?

Thanks,

Ken

That 1/8 pro mist is a nice subtle effect BTW.

I downloaded ahhcute before it was pulled.

Barlow, my apologies... I didn't even look at this thread until now. Sorry about that.

Just a reminder -- I'm happy to host video clips here for anybody. Plenty of server space and bandwidth available.

Simple 72mm front end.

Rain short - Reposted!
 

I reposted this. Thanks to Chris Hurd for hosting my file. It has been raining all week so I haven't been able to do much with the camera so I said to myself "Self, why not shoot the rain?" :)

http://media.dvinfo.net/xlh1/rainfinal.m2t

It's a big file (357mb) Right click and save as...

I don't seem to have editing privileges for the first post but I made a few changes. Disregard the link in post #1 and use this:

http://media.dvinfo.net/xlh1/rainfinal1.m2t

Thanks for the update Steven... the post editing privs expire after 24 hours I think, so a corrected follow-up is always the best way to go. Much appreciated,

Very nice. Never figured rain could be that amusing. I noticed some artifacts but I figure that has to do with the compression of the file? And how did you do that with the clouds? Is that the feature called "interval timer"? I am looking to do that and I want to know how.

Thanks Fredrik,

The artifacts are as a result of multiple compression passes, they are not in the original. Cineform and Premiere Pro combo is still very buggy but it looks like there will be a fix very soon.

The new timelapse at the end was done in real time and then sped up in post. There is not an intervalometer on the camera. Even though the DVX100a (my other camera) has this, I rarely used it, preferring to do it in real time.

oh, that's odd since the XL2 has it. But I am going to give it a try and see what happens.

Lighting Test
 

I was watching "21 Grams", a great film by the way, and was inspired to do some lighting tests and added a little Magic Bullet Bleach Bypass. I think it looks pretty good.

500w softbox for keylight, 250w Lowel pro light for fill and another 250w Lowel for a backlight (need to better position that one) for the first closeup.

Night Footage??
 

Does anyone know where I can find any city night footage shot with the XLH1? I've found one shot, but it was too dark to be a good example.

Thanks,
Paul

Lunar Landscapes Again
 

Shot last night, with kind of an oddball set-up: XL H1 plus 1.6x extender plus EF adapter plus Sigma 70-300mm telephoto zoom. Maximum available aperture about f/5.6, so exposure is controlled by shutter speed. Basically I just dialed the shutter up until the zebra went away. No access to EXIF data from my laptop here, unfortunately, but if someone wants that info, I can get it from home. No presets, just the default H1 image. Somewhat soft all the way around, and some significant chromatic abberation, both induced by the price tag of this Sigma lens (it was not expensive, and it shows)!

Nice shots, is that the lunar rover... Maybe they should send your setup to Mars.

SDI Uncompressed frame grabs...
 

I did a little test yesterday shooting live SDI straight into my G5/Kona and captured with the Sheer "lossless" codec. Here are a few grabs:

http://media.dvinfo.net/xlh1/Cousins24FSDI-1.jpgx
http://media.dvinfo.net/xlh1/Cousins1080jpeg.jpgx
http://media.dvinfo.net/xlh1/LilBuds1.jpgx

Right click/download/save and remove the "x" for a 1080 jpeg pic.

The H1 is ridiculous. :-)

Excellent colours and textures, you live in a nice place man!

I agree.

What's the DOF like Barlow? Can you throw the background out of focus quite easily?

James.