Vehicle Mounted F350
 

We just posted two small clips of some outdoor footage involving a couple of Hummers. Most of the footage was shot with the F350 mounted on the hood of one of the Hummers (we used a CineKinetic Cinesaddle strapped to the hood of the Hummer). The rest was shot from a tripod. You can find the footage at the bottom of this page:

http://www.redhawk-development.com/Seirra's.htm

We recorded this using XDCAM HD HQ (35mbps) and then captured playback HDSDI into Avid. All this footage is 60i, shutter off, gain zero, Cine4 gamma curve, DCC on, auto iris. We should have turned down the gain on the iris, it struggles with the constantly changing light.

The goal in posting these clips was to let people see how motion was handled by the XDCAM HD in a "real world" setting. Unfortunately exporting to .m2t seems to degrade the picture a bit compared to the original. In particular, when there is a bump in the road the .m2t file turns that into a bad jerk as if it takes a couple frames for the codec to recover. On the original footage (before export) the XDCAM HD looks great even on severe bumps in the road. I am not sure if the problem is the export from Avid or the VLC player, but it also seems to amplify interlace artifacts and generally not look as sharp as the original.

Try playing it back on the fastest machine you have. We found it looked a little better on a dual 3.8GHz HP than it did on a dual 3.4GHz IBM.
Where the original XDCAM HD footage seemed to break down was when the vehicle was making a sharp turn with foliage close to the front of the vehicle. This is a bit like a whip pan, and the picture softens considerably.

We will try other export options to see if we can make these look better on the web.

Also, if you have the processing power, you might try turning on VLC's deinterlace option. We may deinterlace these in Avid and repost if it helps more than it hurts.

We have not had much luck exporting from Avid to Quicktime or Windows Media player. Image quality drops even more. Has anyone else had better luck?

Thanks for posting those clips. Great to see the camera in action.

Sure thing Alex. Next month we are heading up to Alaska for the summer. If time permits we will post some clips from there.

Michael, great footage.
If you need to hire anyone in Alaska, let me know, I have a friend who lives there and has been in the biz for more than 20 yrs.
Darrell
FIRST CINEMA PICTURES