According to the Canon manual for the VL-10Li light:

With fully charged Canon battery packs:

BP-915 = 60 minutes (approximate)
BP-930 = 120 minutes
BP-945 = 170 minutes

Note that some non-Canon brand batteries have a higher capacity than the Canon BP-945. Your mileage may vary.

need decent sound on tight budget
 

Wanting to make a documentary and strapped for cash. Most of the audio will most likely be interviews. could I make a professional sounding product by putting the factory xl1s mic on a boom pole or should I definately invest in a 300-400 dollar shotgun mic such as the me66 or ar835b, also is the at835b any good? Don't have the money now, woud probably have to rent. Should I try to rent or would the factory xl1s mic do the job?

The higher you set the shutter speed the smoother your images will be when slowed down in Vegas. Although even at 50fps slow motion footage is normally acceptable.
Be careful as higher shutter speeds create more noise in your footage (the 'static' squares) if they are not well lit.
If you are shooting outside try keeping the shutter speed at 50-150fps. Just try playing around with different speeds and seeing how Vegas handles them when slowed down.

Hope this helps

Getting the factory XL1s mic away from the camera will make some difference, and if the interviews are in mostly quiet places you may find the mic will do the job. Obviously for the best sound consider renting some high end equipment for your shoot.
You could always try shooting some tests and see how much better a rented mic will be for you before you actually rent it out for days on end.

Are all your lights etc sorted out already or are you looking into renting those as well?

Your PAL XL1s will only film at 25 fps (50 interlaced fields per second), so there's no way you can change the frame rate as Ben suggests.

I've not used Vegas, but for all my slow motion footage I use the Canopus Speed Controller and find the smoothest, most fluid motion comes from processing video shot at 1/50th sec shutter speed. When you shoot at this default shutter speed you capture everything that happens in front of the camera, but because of this you will get subject blur when there's movement within the frame.

When you slow to 50% you effectively end up with each individual field forming a frame. Vertical resolution is reduced to half of course, but each field carries on from the next, with no info missing.

If you set your camera at 1/150th sec (say) you only capture a third of everything that happens in front of the camera. When such footage is slowed down the missing info becomes much more apparent, and interpolation has to come to the rescue. Some are good, but lots are so-so and make the slo-mo look horribly jerky.

So do as Ben suggests - experiment. If you can film the same moving object at various shutter speeds so much the better - you'll have a direct comparison on your TV and will be able to come to a useful judgenment.

tom.

horizontal frame size?
 

I used an XL-1 for several years but never noticed this before - when cutting some of my XL-1 footage with video from other cameras (i.e. XL-2, GL-2), the horizontal frame size does not seem to match these other cameras!? Using Final Cut Pro, the video claims to be 720 X 480 in all cases - however the XL-1 footage has small black bars on the sides of the frame where the other video goes right to the edge. Does this mean the XL-1 does not have a full 720 active pixel frame size?? Not an issue for use on TV but shows up when played as a web-video file.

You see correctly. The black bands are in th overscan area and not visible on a TV screen, although you will see them on a computer screen or frame grab thanks to no overscan.

The visible image size is more like 704x480. This is one of the Digital Video standards, and dates to 1995 when the XL1 was being designed. Visit: http://www.digitaltelevision.com/dtv...ppendixa.shtml
for an interesting discussion of this.

thanks!
 

I'v enoticed this on footage from some other older cameras too (EZ-1, analog video digitized with a Canopus ADVC100, etc). Guess the best things to do for web-video files is crop to the video with the smallest dimensions.

Doug Knutson
Windswept Productions

ef or xl extenders?
 

Does anyone know if there is a difference in the quality of glass on the ef extenders and the xl extenders. I already have an xl 1.6 that I use with the ef adapter and a canon 100-400 ef lense. I do alot of wildlife video and I need the best zoom and video quality I can get. would getting the extra power of the 2x ef extender effect my video quality. I know the lighting should be effected but I can work around that. If anyone knows anything on this subject please let me know thanks.

I need an FD to XL-1 adapter
 

Can anybody help me locate this adapter?
Thanks for your time,
Brett

Hi Brett, did you check out the Alternative forum?
Is this help?
http://www.dvinfo.net/conf/showthrea...FD+XL1+adapter

www.adapterplace.com you can either get the letus which will maintain focal length of the lens etc.. or the xl family fd adapter which will give you the multiplication effect turning all your fd lenses into telephoto lenses

film look from XL1S
 

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Okay pros out there - what is a good way to get a film look on the XL1S..I have had other opinions, but I want a few more. Most are saying move the slider to the green a few notches - reduce the setup level about 2 notches to darken - the color gain down a bit to take out the color....
Is it better to shoot the footage with no corrections - and then do a film look in post??

I prefer to do it in post. I love a more 'warm' look while shooting, which you mostly get by default with an xl1s, and I love to do the rest in post.

But you'll loose some quality, as is known with digital video, and especially dv.

Dean,

Using the Advanced Search feature and cross-referencing "XL-1s" with the "Film Look" forum, I got 21 hit here.

Several of the threads had a good number of posts and literally dozens of tips, worth the effort to review to achieve the look you want.