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.

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