Frederic -"Amen Alex! on all your points"
but just two posts previous you discribe Alex's shots,
"the three shots you showed us are badly lit."

Ken

Ken,

I still think that Alex's shot were badly lit but it doens't negate the fact that I agree with most of what he said especially >> -- "I'd rather have less replies to my thread, but of higher quality each. Thank you for being considerate and for posting your own images that show how did you reduce chroma noise in your own setting." -- <<

Let's get to the bottom of this with examples. Here's a good one I found:

http://pro.jvc.com/pro/attributes/HDTV/enduser/4lanes.htm

Go to his site to view the footage.

It's always taken me at least a couple of hours per setup in studio. I don't think this camera will change that.

Because if they had had, then:

a) they'd know that the camera does NOT display its exposure settings... neither during, nor after the shoot... so you can't tell what was the camera-chosen aperture with your setting of shutter speed in shutter-priority mode;


You can the see the F stop (exposure) if you choose to see it when you record. As you can see the shutter speed. You can't see them both at the same time, but you can toggle between them, and while you can't set them both, you can lock one or the other.

The camera is best used in Manual mode, and in my opinion, you choose the shutter spoeed and let the camera choose the F stop, adjusting it with filters if you need to.

My DVD will show this clearly.

hope this helps

DBK

Here's some interesting stuff.

If you have QTPro, download this MPEG4 which was shot with the HD10U:

http://www.4lanes.com/reel_523.htm

Then using your right arrow, take a look at the footage. Now, for the most part it looks great. It is MPEG4 at 104 Kb/sec so it's heavily compressed of course.

Take a look at 00:26 and you will see lots of green noise in the skin tone. It's hard to say because this video has gone through so many processes.

Interesting editing too,...could he be hiding something? like Chroma Noise?...just kidding. I bet you he color corrected the hell out of that footage.

<<<-- Originally posted by Frederic Haubrich : Hey, did you have the camera on battery or power supply when you shot the examples? -->>>


The camera was powered by the battery, not connected to any power cables at the time of shoot.


<<<--The reason I ask is that I just realized that my camera came with many noise reducers for cabling!? and I never thought of using them while shooting (DC powered) or while capturing.-->>>


I'm quite sure that power line noise would reveal itself very *differently* than in form of chroma noise. My guess is that power line noise would probably show itself in unexpected camera shutdowns, mode changes, signal dropouts and other failures on more general level rather than actual video noise.


4lanes.com: this spec commercial was advertised by its creator on other forums, so I did see it before and it looks very good... in its small size as presented on Web.

The name of the game is LARGE screen viewing - that's why we all need HD in the first place, right? :)

I cannot really judge chroma noise levels (or *anything* for this matter) without seeing 1:1 scaled video or at least stills.

My page:

http://fancyflix.com/hd10.htm

...shows you chroma noise area stills in 1:1 scale.

Originally posted by Alex Raskin:
"*Moving* images actually make this chroma noise *more*, and not less apparent, to my eye. Therefore posting *stills* makes much sense"

Once again the question has to be asked, on what material do you visualise those shots. I have (a few weeks ago) posted sequences (not stills), some of them do display those yellowish artefacts. You can download them and extract a frame if you want to see for yourself, they are located at: http://static.dvinfo.net/ericb/ . two of the shots that displays the most artefacts where not lighted (not artificially or in a controlled manner), it is the EBil_V1 and V2. When I look at these images on a computer screen or using VLC the noise looks like crap, but I had the chance to look at it on two HD monitors (a JVC 20" and a Sony 24") and a IDLA projector and the noise is nowhere near as apparent, the sequence is in fact gorgeous. It is IMPERATIVE that you see those images in a format by witch you want to distribute them before judging on these issues.

Of course the camera does not (as you stated) display in a professional manner the iris/shutter settings, but then again, it has been discussed over and over again on this forum, no need to get back on that. The level of noise in your 3 pictures is not the same, the third one (the best lit of the three) displays much less noise.

I have posted a picture at this adress: http://www.fictis.net/HD10expic.html . It shows the difference between a well lit surface and an uneven one.

Now, this is helpful.

http://www.fictis.net/HD10expic.html

Eric, so your point is this: chroma noise shows not in the badly lit areas, but rather at the border between the lighter and darker areas.

This makes a lot of sense to me.

So it's not a question of lighting per se. There obviously will always be areas between the lighter and darker lit parts :)

Your other point is that it matters what screen to monitor the video on.

I have 22" LCD HD monitor. I obviously screened on both that and on my 19" CRT PC monitor. Chroma noise looked the same - except 22" one shows it larger and thus better :)

My intended viewership is people with large screen HDTVs, like 42" and up. And hopefully people who can see the video projected on theater-size screen, like in Landmark theaters that play WMP9 files.

Have you had a chance to see HD10's footage projected on either?

What was your impression?

Darren,

For the life of me, I can't figure out how to lock the exposure and change the shutter speed. As soon as I change the shutter speed the locked exposure unlocks.

Frederic, you can't.

That's probably the # 1 complaint about this camera right now.

Well, my point is that the noise shows in borders between good lighting and bad lighting the most in the face, the skintones. But a bad exposure will expand it throughout the face. A lot of brown, orange areas, when unsufficiently lit, do display this annoying noise as well.

I've seen video on a fairly little screen compared to theaters (about 10 feet) with an IDLA HD projector and it looked great, but you could still notice a bit of these artefacts (nowhere as much as on a computer screen). Of course not all of my test footage displayed these artefacts in the first place. On the shots displaying light artefacting, it was totally unnoticeable without pausing the image or getting your nose to the screen (witch I did... one has to know right?), on those displaying heavier artefacting, it depended on the amount of artefacts and the zones displaying them.

Remember that there are focus areas concerning the eye's points of interrest regarding moving images. I was looking at the footage in a tech's point of view so I noticed the artefacting, but most of the artefacting would probably go unnoticed by the general public since it was displayed in unsufficiently lit areas, mostly bachgrounds and shadows, thus not being the point of the focal's interrest (example, the roof over the jeep in Frederic's example pics). We are filmmakers, thus, by definition, nitpickers (witch is not bad of course), but our intended public is not at all aware of all this.

For example when I saw 28 days later, the second it started I could see all the noise moving in the image and the lack of definition inherent to DV transfered to film (especially the XL1, because of it's low CCD pixel count). Than, in the end, the image suddently becomes crystal clear, in 35mm for the end sequence. To me it was more than obvious it was shot in video. I got out of the theater first and asked about 20 people (i don't recall exactly) of different ages if they knew the film was shot in video. No one did. No one noticed anything. And I was not really surprised. We see a lot of the glitches but we are probably less than 3% or so of the people looking at films.

As for your LCD HD monitor, my experience with LCD has not been pleasant. I have not found a LCD as good as a CRT yet because of an important factor, LCD has an ideal resolution (depending on it's physical resolution), most other resolution will not display an optimal image. Most LCD HD monitors do not have a true 720p resolution so it is difficult to evaluate clearly on those monitors. LCD is also much crisper in pixels than CRT so noise is generally more apparent. But than again I do not know, maybe your monitor is a true 1280X720 LCD.

I would not worry too much about that noise If I where you, you can minimise it, even without an incredible amount of light. The image I posted was lit with 1 600K side (right) from about 10 feets and a sinle tube balanced thungstene neon from about 3 feets left. The screen was lit with two 4 tubes balanced neons. Nothing fancy really. I have problems with chroma artefacting in DV too, those formats are, indeed very compressed. But you can use them, even for features. You just have to get used to them, comprehend their strenghts and weaknesses and work with those basis.

My opinion is that this camera still is a very good alternative to pricey HD.

Thanks Eric!

10' screen is pretty decent. I'm glad you liked what you saw. Do you know if the projector had true WXGA resolution?

Anecdotal evidence is that the video also held up after projecting on a large theatrical screen.

My LCD HD monitor is 1280x720, I purposedly *rejected* 1280x768 model because I never wanted any resolution conversions going on, just plain 1280x720p30 (my monitor is actually capable of 720p60).

Oh, that should be a handy monitor indeed. What make and model? I have a friend who wanted one, maybe he still does :)

The projector could display true HD 720p.

Exposure Lock
 

This may be stating the obvious, but one way I've found to lock both the exposure and shutter speed is to lock the exposure then turn on the "sports mode". Of course this will lock the shutter speed at 250 or higher, and will proabably be useless for most applications, but I thought I'd bring it up because someone might find it usefull.

Eric, that's Samsung LTM225W.

B&H has it for $1.2K.

It has 2 Component, one S-Video, one Composite, and one DVI input. (It also has audio, but I don't care about it. Also has TV receiver with PiP etc.)

I have my D-VHS recorder connected via Component. This allows me to monitor both D-VHS tapes and HD10's output when I connect it to HD30K recorder via firewire.

I used to have the cam connected separately, but there's no difference in quality while watching via firewire/HD30K, just 1 second delay while 30K decodes MPEG stream... so I now have an extra Component input available...

S-Video I used to have to monitor PC's video overlay via Matrox Parhelia, but now I just use Parhelia's DVI out to my HD monitor.

This allows me to move the application's monitor window onto my HD display, and watch playback in full-rez HD. (Video overlay seems to be visibly lower in quality, probably just SD NTSC, even when played over DVI.)

Hope this helps.

Thanks Alex.

If I am correct, the Matrox DVI is SD, not HD, so you are right about the lower res output.

Is the input of the monitor HD SDI or just SDI?

Actually, Parhelia pumps HD signal out of both of its DVI outputs.

One DVI output has an adapter that converts it to feed the standard PC monitor.

The other DVI output can accept a bunch of other adapters, including S-Video etc.

I use that 2nd DVI output straight-up, no adapter - just connecting it to the DVI-in on the HD monitor via the DVI to DVI cable.

Note that Parhelia cannot recognize my HD monitor because 1280x720 is *not* one of the resolutions supported by Parhelia. Therefore I have PowerStrip software installed that translates between the monitor and the video card just fine.


<<< Matrox DVI is SD, not HD >>>

Actually, Parhelia does *not* actually have an inherent SD limitation of its DVI outputs.

It's just what you run software-wise that matters.

For instance, if you use video overlay, then this software-driven solution does seem to be SD or at least visibly worse than HD.

All this sounds very convoluted... probably because it is :)

But in the end, I'm happy to have a large HD monitor with high-def real-time video on it, beside my main PC monitor.

Now if only there was a software that allowed to capture/process/output HD the same way we do now with DV (procedure-wise, I don't mean down-rezing), that'd be the day.

One of the things i did, which worked was using my Laptop for Aspect HD editing, I connected an HD LCD from Samsung to the VGA out on the back of the laptop.

Then I expanded the desktop and put my program windo on it. The color was good and the resolution was excellent.

If you can, give it a try. It's an inexpensive way to see this in a color that is closer to real on an screen that is also pretty useful.

Hope this helps

Correct, this is what I recommend - instead of video overlay, just ise the second monitor as an extension of your desktop, then Ctrl-Maximize your application onto the second window (HD monitor) and put your application's Monitor Window there.

Voila - you are looking at the full-rez HD playback.

I do this in both Premiere Pro and AfterEffects.

Darren, QUESTION: Premiere Pro has "Fit" setting in its Monitor Window, while AfterEffects 5.5 Production Bundle does *not*.

As a result, 100% setting cuts the bottom of the video in AE, while the next step - 50% - makes the video way too small.

Steve Mullen said that AE for Mac doesn't have such problem. I have Windows. Any suggestions? Thanks.