The DOF of the 20x really surprises me. Hard to say why, but it definitely feels like there's more ability to throw out backgrounds with less hassle than with any previous 1/3" camera, and that's at equivalent focal lengths, say, to the XL1, not just the extra 4X of the stock lens. (which stops down anyway)

Yasser--that's actually my folks place up against the Wasatch range. (Utah Rocky Mountains).

My yard has a long ways to go. :-P

My guess is that the high resolution of 1080 makes out-of-focus areas more obvious as compared to a subject that is in razor sharp focus; in other words, at lower resolutions such as DV, the apparent depth of field is widened a bit just because the smaller number of pixels in the image hides the difference between the in-focus subject and something that's just slightly out focus optically speaking. Otherwise, cameras shooting with the same sensor size, f-stop, and focal length ought to have about the same depth of field.

Chris has been asking me to do some XL H1 in 24F versus XL2 in 24p comparisons, which I haven't had time to do. But a little experiment about this DOF might be a small project I could handle this next week when I'll hopefully be a little less busy than I am this week.

I think your hypothesis is spot on. Makes sense.

btw, that'd be a cool experiment.

A couple more things
 

Two new things for your viewing pleasure:

First up is a work in progress. This is the time of the year when cottonwood trees lose their cotton and it's a pretty cool site, it looks like it's snowing. There's a cottonwood in our yard and it was shedding its skin the other day and I couldn't pass up the opportunity to shoot.

I will probably include this in a more ambitious piece in the future because I really didn't have enough footage to work with even for this short edit. Anyway, it's pretty spectacular so I wanted to share it.

This is a fairly low bitrate 24p WMV so the blocking in the water IS NOT IN THE ORIGINAL. Sorry for shouting but I don't want the focus to be on something that's a result of post process compression and not the camera's ability.

There are a couple of shots in there that I took in the middle of the night of the moon. I cranked the gain up for those shots so they are riddled with noise but that's intentional. The next time I do something like that I think I'll experiment with NR1 and NR2 to see their effects...

So here goes:

http://media.dvinfo.net/xlh1/cottonwood_tree.wmv

Second up is some footage from a recent Little League game my son was in. Nothing unusual here, just some random shots.

http://media.dvinfo.net/xlh1/baseball.wmv

Enjoy...

Steven,

Well done on both, I find the music adds so much to your visuals. Not that they need it but it does add that extra sense of drama.

I assume you're using your 'Panalook' preset in 24f for most of your stuff lately?

Ken.

Yes Ken, I am using that preset exclusively now in conjunction with the incremental white balance button for warm or cool looks. I find this preset to be almost identical to what I had my DVX set to and, when lit well, I can manipulate the image very well in post if I choose.

I have a musical background (played in various rock bands for 12 years) and that plays as important a role to me as the visual image. I tend to "see" music when I hear it and it dictates all kinds of imagery in my head that inspires what I shoot.

same James
 

I am a drummer .......10 years

nice to meet u ....man !

rock ....metal....jazz....fusion......

now I own a show band club........


and thinking about to make movie

VFX on XL-H1 Footage
 

Hay everyone, I uploaded footage of the water fall clip that Steven Dempsey posted earlier.
I took the clip and tried to look at as if I were the Producer of an upcoming movie.
"You know, that's a great shot of a water fall, but, can you give me more"?
"And that building by the water, can you move it closer to the center of the frame"?
"And the hotel, I'd like to have a more rooms so our actor has to go into a seperate section of the hotel. Can you do that with HDV?
I think the answer is YES.
Please give me some feed back.
The link http://media.dvinfo.net/xlh1/fallsfx.mov

Here is a picture of the orginal footage in case anyone can't play Quicktime movies http://media.dvinfo.net/xlh1/falls orginal frame.jpg

Here is a picture of the finished VFX shot. http://media.dvinfo.net/xlh1/fallsfx.jpg

Darrell
FIRST CINEMA PICTURES

Another Short Subject
 

Perpetual Motion. Shot at Snoqualmie and the Montlake Fill here in Seattle.

http://media.dvinfo.net/xlh1/disject...ual_motion.wmv

OIS Panning Motion
 

Love watching your sequences. Do the first couple of pans use OIS enabled? There appears to be some OIS twitching. Could be my playback.

Best,
Christopher

No, I think I may have captured the footage with the wrong settings. I'm aware of the problem but it's not in the original footage. I'm going to check it later.

Ambassador of XLH1
 

Fair Dinkum Steven, if Canon wants to start moving this camera like hotcakes, they should pick you up. Good work, really loved the Cottonwood Tree piece, I know when eventually I pick up my JVC at the end of the year that I'll be doing a lot of nature work. I always check dvinfo and dvxuser every day in hope of new footage, and know if I see your name on some footage that it's worth the download!
Cheers

Steven,

Your images look great, as usual.
Is it straigth from the camcorder, or color corrected ?

Ok Steven, great footage. So good in fact, next time I take a vacation, I may just swing by and see the falls for myself.
I showed the falls footage to another filmmaker friend of mine, (Scott Cooper) and he said "I know that place, my daughter had her resception there". Small world.
Keep up the good work.
Darrell
FIRST CINEMA PICTURES

Disjecta, the serial killer
 

I shot this with my LetusXL35 just before I went out on one of my hits.

I have resorted to being a hitman to make some money to support my filmmaking habit. You know how it is...

http://media.dvinfo.net/xlh1/disjecta/letuslight.wmv

I don't know you. But God! Do I hope you're joking!

Okay, I'm just kidding.

Jeep Grand Cherokee
 

Here's a taste of the fun I had on monday with the XL-H1. It was downconverted to 720p @ 24fps for bandwidth purposes, as well as some cropping and stabilization with After Effects. It has been color corrected and post processed, and it was originally shot using the modified terra preset. I did the lighting setup with the help of a very talented gaffer and I think it came out very nice so I wanted to share it.

Link below.

Now available through DV Info Net (thanks Luis!)

The link is http://media.dvinfo.net/xlh1/gc.wmvx

Download that file and rename the extension from .wmvx to .wmv

WOW Looks good!

That's impressive, good job. I also like the lighting, looks like it belongs in a Jeep ad!

Just out of curiosity... do you have a copy of the unedited clip by any chance?

Thanx Chris! I'm taking it off my website.

*wow* ... just ... wow.

Stephen Dempsey, can't find your post
 

I, for the life of me can't find your "harbor.wmv" I downloaded it at work but I'm home now and can't find it in the forums. Can you direct me to the harbor shots wmv? Love your work. Very inspiring. Jason

Thanks Jason, it's a few posts below called "San Juan Islands"

A Day in the Life...
 

This is a 720p clip from back in January of a 3 minute mini-doc I did of a filmmaker at the Sundance FF.

It's an extremely simple piece with merely available light and all handheld shots (true run-and-gun) but it will give you an impression of how well the H1 performs in fairly adverse conditions.

This is one of the first projects I had with the camera and since then I've learned to tweak it better but I've come to appreciate how easy it was, in general, to get decent footage without a whole lot of knowledge at the time.

The H1 makes a nice 720p camera too. :)

http://media.dvinfo.net/xlh1/Elton/CarlosSundance.mov (143 MB h.264 QT)

I'm so stupid
 

found it thanks. Jason

It was shoot well. I wished there were more images than scoring to carry the tension, something like Brahkage. Was that 16:9? How did you get the widescreen?

Capturing 24f Video in Final Cut
 

I had been told that the newest Final Cut Update would support importing 24f video. I would like to know if you have any preferences for setting up with 1080i60 or 1080p24 when capturing into FC Studio

Music Videos Shot on XL H1?
 

was wondering if anyone knew of any music videos online that has been shot on the xl h1, thanks-ramon

Dodge Nitro
 

How can anyone not love this camera? :)

The clip was originally shot at 60i, deinterlaced and slowed down 50%, stabilized and downrezed to 720p. Enjoy.

http://www.js-films.com/nitro.wmv

I'll share some new settings I worked on for this project as soon as I can.

Sebring
 

This is a shot of the new Chrysler Sebring, same preset, 35mm adapter. It looks a bit soft because of this, and there appears to be some problem with the adapter or lens, because inexplicably some of the background trees to the far right appear in focus and they shouldn't be. In any case, the shots were meant for SD and they look fantastic at the lower res.

http://www.js-films.com/sebring.wmv

Btw, if DVinfo could host these to keep my bandwidth at bay, I would appreciate it :)

Luis;
The Nitro looks fantastic. Could you be more specific on your work flow? Deinterlaced with what software? Stabilized with which software?
Thanks, Barry

Hello again. It was stabilized in Adobe After Effects. I can't really tell you much about my workflow yet, but as soon as I can I will :) I will also share my new camera preset which I think looks fantastic. I'm not sure if I should share it as is or if I should modify it a bit further, since it is designed to leave shadows a bit washed out to deal with shadow detail in post.

Ok, as promised, here's my new camera preset...

Gamma Normal
Knee Low
Black Stretch
Pedestal 9
Setup -9
Sharpness 2
H DTL FRQ HIGH
DTL HV BAL 0
Coring -4
NR1 off
NR2 Medium
Color Matrix Cine 2
Color Gain 6
CPH 0
RGN 0
GGN 0
BGN 0
RGM 0
RBM 0
GRM 0
GBM 0
BRM 0
BGM 0

We could call this preset Nitro.

Shadows will be a bit grayish, so you can tweak shadow contrast in post. If you want darker shadows all you need is to tweak the Pedestal Level until your blacks hit 0, but depending on available light condition this value could vary. I also recommend setting white balance manually as the camera tends to balance a bit on the blue side of things. I usually set my balance around 200°K warmer than current light conditions. If light is very dim and you need to boost your gain, you can also tweak NR1 to Low, but do not go higher than this because ghosting will appear.

What 35mm adapter did you use and with which lens?

New xlh1 redrock footage w. nikon 1.4
 

New footage here.

http://jeffmccutcheon.com/moses_002.htm

enjoy!

Jeff. Looked at the lo res. Seems like you have the system working pretty well. Of great interest to me because I'm just tuning up a self built Micro35 based on Redrock plans I bought last year.

I did notice a kind of washed out appearance (lack of saturation), maybe due to your actual artistic approach or encoding to lo res (I've had that issue before.)

Hi Jeff,

It was great to see some H1 footage through an adapter! I've been keeping my eye out for such!

Don't take any of this the wrong way but most of the footage seemed soft and it seemed as if it might have been difficult for you to "find" the focus during your test shoot. The footage is only sharp in only some places for very brief moments.

A suggestion would be to use a f-stop higher than 1.4. Somewhere perhaps between f4 and f5.6. This will make it a little easier to focus since a completely wide open iris gives you a very small range of focus (usually within inches). This makes it really hard to keep focus on a subject who may be standing still but leaning left to right or forward etc.. Also if you are using the Canon ViewFinder (like I do when I shoot with a Canon and adapter) it can be very difficult to know if you really "have" focus. Again increasing your f-stop gives you more room to work with by increasing your focal range.

I would love to see more footage of your system, keep posting it and try a little bit higher f-stop. Also if you can do some indoor stuff that would be great to see too.

As for the comments regarding a "washed out appearance" this could be due to shooting wide open. The sweet spot of most lenses is somewhere in the middle between f1.4 or f2.8 to f11.

I also played around with some sample frames and tried a few different color corrections - check this out, it's quite impressive what the camera/adapter can do with a bit of post:

Original Frame

Example 1
Example 2
Example 3
Example 4
Example 5
Example 6

Got my new Canon XL H1 today
 

It's a huge step from my Panasonic DVX 100, wich I still got, and there's a lot to learn. I "shot" our cat last evening :-) I had to try the camera at once. Though I had some problems with the codec, when exported the clip. I use Avid Liquid for editing. Anybody with experience in that matter in the forum?

Canoncat