Interesting...
 

Yesterday I had an opportunity to shot some video of my neighbor helping me get my cat out of a tree. Obviously the cat would be heavily backlit against the sky.

Toby is about 40' up in a pine tree. Lots of thin needles that moved around a bit. When I started looking at the footage later I realized how much of a struggle it was for the CODEC in the camera to handle these conditions. All these small objects moving around in a very high contrast setting seems to exceed the bandwidth available in HDV. I shot using the histogram and the AE bias enabled so I could bring up the foreground a bit. The camera was set in AUTO @ 1080p30. The gain was 0db for the whole time (as indicated on the VF).

Anyway, I didn't shoot this to be a demo piece but I think it does well to show what the camera does under certain conditions. I'm not posting it to bash the camera either. I'm quite happy with it. I didn't think at the time how much trouble these conditions might be. This goes into the file for later reference I assure you! :)

I'll post some RAW files when I can but if you check out the HD WMV file on my blip.tv page (link in sig) you can see what I'm talking about. The WMV encoder had fits with the pine needles in the tree and GREATLY magnified the problem. Obviously the RAW file looks better but even in the RAW file you can see a good bit of blocking and noise from running out of bandwidth.

Thats my take anyway. I'd certainly like to hear the thoughts of others.

Chris

2 minutes of 24p footage from V1U
 

I shot and cut this at 24p. There is no color correction or FX of any kind. It is only 1/2 resolution and there is a little web compression, but it does a nice job of showing off the camera, I think.

RIGHT CLICK AND DOWNLOAD THE LINKED FILE:

http://www.sharing.ramjetfilms.com/Rocky_Peak_540p.mov

^^

WOW, the image is very very detailed... and the harsh sunset shots are well handled by good dynamic range of the camera.

Impressive!

Great skin details! And I love the dirt on the specs :)

Hi Brian,

Nice work, I really enjoyed it. It makes me want Avid to release the update for Liquid that handles 24p ingest sooner than later.

Chris