I have the Douglas Spotted DVD and the Masterworks DVD on the way from B&H. I figure its a great starting point with both, even though it appears the Masterworks covers more FX7.

Sharpness and Noise
 

Ok, here's my take on the relation between the sharpness setting and the noise in the image.

After this test I started using a maximum sharpness value of 4.

Notice on the mountain example how unnaturally sharpened the trees look when sharpness is set to 7 (camera default).

PS: I still have some doubts about color settings, like how should I set the PP so I have the largest headroom when Color Correcting?

I agree totally with your decision to use sharpness 4 and no more.

This is the figure I settled on some time ago for my V1E.

I would rather have a natural image, if you examine the top of the foliage on the hill on your sharpness 12 image there is a thin BLACK line edging everything, that is not natural.

You would not see that with your eyes when you are there.

Likewise if you examine the edge of the pale yellow or cream building at the left there is an unnatural WHITE line edging it and the blue sky.

I believe this is all that digital sharpening of images is, no more than applying black and white lines to the edge of everything, it's a trick to fool the eye into believing the images are sharper than they really are.

Love my V1E on sharpness 4! not to mention the extra resolution in 25P mode.

This BBC White Paper Addendum is worth a look:

http://www.bbc.co.uk/rd/pubs/whp/whp034-add23.shtml

Other similar cameras are covered in a long list of other addenda to the White Paper 034:

http://www.bbc.co.uk/rd/pubs/whp/whp034.shtml

Alan, thanks for posting those links. I followed the trail to this document:
http://www.bbc.co.uk/rd/pubs/whp/whp...ony-HVR-V1.pdf

A *great* engineer's summary of the camcorder, especially valuable for operators are the tables of menu settings.

If it were me, I'd add one more "BBC" setting - Focus Macro = Off. This is because the Macro setting defeats the backfocus, meaning you can't zoom in, focus, and zoom out with good results (in manual focus mode).

BBC's review of colorimetry - I wish we had a similar review for the NTSC version of the camera.

A great orientation for anyone looking to maximize the performance of their V1 through Picture Profiles.

Alan

Thanks for this. Someone told me a year that this information could be found on the BBC website, but I didn't really know what I was looking for, so didn't find it then. Now I've downloaded the papers for both the Sony A1e and the Canon XH A1 - how did I manage to end up with two cameras having the same A1 tag?

Very interesting read, that BBC paper. One of the things that most interested me is the mentioning of a softness in the image in apertures smaller than F5.6, suggesting that the neutral density filters be used rather than stopping down the lens. Has anyone else noticed this? This may explain the softness of many of the clips I took on a recent field trip. At first I thought my focusing must be really off, but I couldn't find anything in the soft images that was crisp, so it wasn't as though the focus was off by even a small margin. The image was just soft.

(I had sharpness set to 8 in picture profile).

The softness is not peculiar to the V1, it occurs with all cameras which use a small sensor. It is caused by diffraction, which is inevitable when any wave - including sound and water waves - passes through a gap whose width is comparable to the wavelength.

The small sensors used in video cameras necessitate very small iris diameters when the lens has to be stopped down in bright light, hence the incorporation of built-in ND filtration. The problem is much less acute with 35 mm cameras due to the larger sensors, which require a larger diameter iris for a given light transmission level.

Thanks for that explanation, Alan. There I was, aiming for the smallest possible aperture to maximise depth of field (I was shooting wildlife), when I would have been better off with the iris half open. It's not as though I needed the extra depth of field for the V1, anyway, because of the size of the sensor. Now if only I'd had this discussion before going overseas... :(

An update - turns out the video wasn't soft at all. When I captured the footage I had downconverted it from the camera into SD because my plan was to do a simple edit for DVD, then do a high definition version some other time (hopefully following a major computer upgrade). I had expected the SD version to be clear, but just lower resolution, when in fact it was of much poorer quality than my old SD PD150. After reading that downloading it as HDV and then downconverting it to SD DV in a video editing program gives better results, I tried downloading a few clips as HD. What a difference!