BINGO!!! Rob,

Thanks much.

Jerry

New Guy
 

Hey Guys

I just wanted to say that I am now a proud member of the xl1s club. I picked it up monday and I couldn't be more happier.

Any tips or tricks you guys might have would greatly appreciated.

Welcome aboard. Read a lot here and get the most expierence
with the camera as you can. The more the better.

Take off that cover on the front of the lens, hit that red button on the side and move your arms around ;)

Seriously though, congratulations John! What are you going to be doing with your new camera? Shorts? Home stuff? News?

If I were you, one thing I'd recommend playing with is frame mode. It was something that I didn't really do when I first got my XM2 and when I actually came to having a project that might have benefitted (In hindsight it would have) I didn't know enough about it to risk shooting in it. In the end I deinterlaced. I would have preferred frame mode fooage to save the render times.

Cheers
Aaron

Discovered technique
 

For all you “old hands” this probably isn’t anything you have already discovered. However, I thought I would pass this on to others, like myself, that are gaining experience with the XL1s.

There are times when a zoom in to a subject is needed or appropriate. The shot I required was a “zoom in” to a set of church doors and when the zoom was complete, have the door open (with no one opening the door). Typically, there are two possible ways to do this with the stock lens. Put the camera in auto focus and pray it doesn’t start hunting for focus on the zoom (then have an assistant open the door out of shot) or put it manual and adjust or follow through focus on the zoom…problematic at best with the stock lens.

I discovered a third and successful way (by accident). Instead of shooting the shot with a zoom in, start the shot with the door open and just release it to close on its own and then zoom out. Then in post simply reverse the clip in your NLE program. It works fantastic and…importantly…the camera stays focused on the zoom “in” shot.

Mark

The actual tip behind this is to zoom in to your subject (doors
in this case), focus on that and then zoom out again. The subject
should be in clear focus (and you should be able to do a zoom
in, if you need/want to). This way you will better set your focus
than when you do it zoomed out.

Ofcourse doing this typical shot the way you did is an excellent
way of doing it indeed. A lot of punching shots etc. are shot in
such ways as well.

XL1s as a transcoder?
 

I think I already know the answer to this question ("No") but is there a way to make the XL1s act as a transcoder, taking S-Video in the back and spitting it out DV so I can record directly into the computer?

I have some external video I'd like to dig but don't want to spend the time and headwear dumping it to a tape and then playing it back off the camera into the computer. I'd ideally like to pipe the vid into the XL1s via S-Video and then free-digitize it into the computer over firewire.. but it doesn't appear this is possible, even if you record to a tape at the same time, as having the DV cable plugged in makes the XL think it's supposed to be getting it's input from there.

home-made XL1S wideangle..
 

i was playing around tonight and shot some test footage with a kindof ghetto wideangle i made.

works nicely for fixed shots or zooming through the first 50% of the zoom range on the stock canon lens. not the greatest thing in the world.. but hey i made it for free. also, i didn't center it properly in the mount i made so you can see some shadowing at the top versus the bottom.. this falls into the overscan area i suspect though so not much of a problem, but i'll still recenter it :D

not sure if image tags are enabled on this board..

(copy and paste the image address if it doesnt appear)

http://www.adamgeek.com/wide1.jpg

I think you can with the av insert button on the top handle. havnt tried it myself, but thats what the canon site says.

http://www.canondv.com/xl1s/f_av_inputs.html

I have a dazzle, so i just use that for bringing footage from other sources into my cpu. but if the av insert works then u should be set.

Rich

hehehe....thats cool man. How did u do it? how about a home made anamorphic next?

<<<-- Originally posted by Rich Lee : hehehe....thats cool man. How did u do it? how about a home made anamorphic next? -->>>

i took apart an old lens i had (for photography) and mounted one of the elements on the canon lens.

i have been thinking a lot lately about trying to build an anamorphic adapter.. there are a lot of older 16mm lenses for sale on ebay for very cheap (bolex, etc) and i am pretty sure i could rig one of these up pretty easily.. but i am thinking maybe i will just buy a mini35 and get it over with haha.

Rob is right.

also, another useful technique is if you are doing a dolly shot on an object for instance, where you want it to go from very out of focus, to a perfectly crisp focus as the dolly approaches a certain mark/point.. you can shoot the scene backwards (from the mark, prefect focus, roll dolly backwards, and lbur the focus) and then play it back in reverse in your NLE, and voila, you will neverhave to mess with many many takes of trying to pull the exact right focus as the dolly stops on the mark.

Zoom noise
 

Hmmm bit of a problem with the noise made by the zoom, I have isolated the senheiser mic by using O rings, but still a discernable amount of noise is picked up when zooming. I have soundsoap, peak 4.0 Pro and would like to know if anyone knows roughly what the frequency is of the zoom noise? Then hopefully I will be able to remove it. Have ordered the hotshoe adapter for the mic so it hopefully wont happen again, but the Christening footage I am working on is blighted by the noise

Thanks in advance

Jed

That's possible only if you go through tape. So you can record
the SVHS source on tape and then capture that to your computer.
This only works on the newer S model!

I had the same problem. Fixed it with a filter in FCP, I think it was the high pass filter. I wasn't able to find the exact frequency because I don't have sound soap. If you are using FCP, try the different filters, or try the different filters with whatever NLE you are using. Soundsoap should be able to locate the frequency now that I think about it....however, that may be a problem because as I remember the sound starts low and then gets a little higher as you zoom in or out? So, a general filter in your NLE should help. The hotshoe adapater will also help! Good Luck!

edit: you might also do a search if you haven't already as I know this topic has been covered before.