Field of View - What the @%$! is this?
 

Have been on a shoot in Texas where I fitted a Sennheiser rifle onto my FX1. It stuck quite far forward and I was worried it'd end up in my field of view. I was shooting in DV 16:9 mode and hey, it did not appear on the 16:9 viewfinder. So no problems then? Er not quite!!

The tip of mike can be seen in shots where the lens is full open when viewing the tape on FCP. But I can't see this on my monitor or the camera. So what they hell is going on.

Does FCP display the fullscreen 16:9 resolution, the borders of which you can't see onscreen because it is out of range? Somebody please set my mind at ease...

What picture exactly does 16:9 DV on the FX1 capture?

It's video underscan that creates this trouble for you. TV sets do not display the full video, but skips a frame of about 5% all around due to how they are constructed.

The viewfinder of the FX1 only shows what presumably will be visible on a TV-set. My experiments show that the viewfinder actually shows even less. Unfortunately the FX1 doesn't have a setting where the complete video can be viewed, so you you have to be extra aware of how you compose the shots.

In your case there's a good chance the mic will not be viewable on a TV-set, it only shows on a computer monitor.

http://www.dvinfo.net/conf/showthread.php?t=44137

You're seeing the overscan area that most wouldn't see on a TV. The FX1 doesn't have an overscan mode like the Z1 to check these things. To avoid this you can either plug in to a production monitor that shows the overscan region or use DV rack out of your firewire, it's software monitor has that capability as well.

Depending on what you're doing with the footage, you may get away with it, but if you're compressing for computer or internet use, forget it, you'll have to digitally remove it.

thanks for replys. I guess I'll ignore it on FCP, it'll be OK for broadcast then in that it won't be visible.

When this happened to me (with my GL2) the final output was for TV viewing so I wasn't real concerned. However, I went ahead and cropped the image from the top just enough to lose the mic and then did the same at the bottom to match it up.

This little area should never be visable with TV viewing, but should it be (maybe on an LCD or such) I'd rather have a tiny crop of black there than a mic.

many of the newer (5 years or so) tv's show almost the full image, so it may be visible during broadcast. You may want to crop it or scale the image up if you can. This would be one of those times when shooting in HD and posting in SD would be nice...you could scale the image and not lose the quality like you will when you resize an image to make it larger.


Good Luck

Yep makes sense, I think I'll settle for mild top crop in this case to be safe. Fortunately the problem is only on a few sequences, my homade mounting was damaged in the vehicle at one point (we had to brake for a cow) and this seems to have created the problem on one particular day. Fantastic to have been in Texas and OK, I've never seen so much of this states before, friendly people. Great light for shooting as well. Not like rainy Kent where I am now.

If you have After Effects you can take it out with the clone tool. The overscan view with the Z1 is handy. I have it set one one of prgrammable buttons.

I really like that feature on my Z-1 also. BUT... I carefully framed something a couple weeks ago with the Z-1 set to show the whole frame. When I brought it into FCP I swear I saw a few more lines though. I need to check this out more carefully.

A minor nitpick is that (AFAIK) you can only set the full screen display while in CAMERA mode; VCR playback is always on an overscanned screen unfortunately.