Category Archives: Cameras

Cameras, Editing, Techniques

Recording video direct to Mac hard disk (updated)

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I have re-written this original post. I discovered that upgrading to Snow Leopard destroyed my ability to record from a Firewire HDV camera direct to the Macbook.  Apple has buried in a support note on their web site that this, apparently, previously relied on Final Cut Pro native HDV support. As of Snow Leopard, support for Final Cut Pro 5.1 was terminated and all users, especially those using HDV, must upgrade to FCP 6 or the newest version 7.

However, it appears there is still a work around to make this work, without any version of Final Cut needed for basic HDV capture live from the camera. And it even works with the new Quicktime X installed by Snow Leopard. (FYI – the older version of Quicktime Pro, if you had it, is moved to the Applications / Utilities folder so you can still use that too).

What you need to do

Go to Perian.org and download and install Perian on your system.

Go to this university web site and download the Perian HDV and MPEG2 components. These are ZIP files. Double click to unzip the PerianHDV.component file and the PerianMPEG2.component file.

Using Finder, navigate to the Library / Quicktime folder. Move the above two component files into the Quicktime folder.

Launch Quicktime X.

Choose File / New Movie Recording

When it starts, it shows the view from the built in iSight camera (if on a Macbook notebook). On the bottom of the screen are the video record controls. At the right hand side there is an inverted triangle. Click on that. This shows a pop up menu with a selection for Camera, Microphone and Quality. Select your camera, then select your camera also for the Microphone, and then set Quality to High. In “High”, Quicktime will capture your video in the HDV native format. Captured video will be saved to the folder listed in the “Save to” pop up menu item; you can change that if you want.

Then select the Red record button to record your video.

After capturing the video clips, I imported them into Final Cut Pro 5.1, which I have on my notebook. FCP gave a warning about these clips not being optimized for FCP, what ever that means, but I was able to drag them into the project timeline and edit without any problems. I assume this would likely work in FCP 3.5 HD also, if you don’t have version 4.

Sure wish I could have figured this out before last Saturday. Then, I did do some recording direct to disk using a work around of importing through iMovie. But this was gawd awful. I fed the live Firewire video into iMovie and captured the video. If you turn off the camera before stopping the iMovie capture, iMovie crashes. If you do it right, iMovie than starts creating “thumbnail” images. Which took 4 to 7 minutes for each clip! I didn’t have that much time before I had to start recording the next event!

I had to use Force Quit to kill iMovie, then restart iMovie and set up the capture all over again.

iMovie does not capture in native format either – it transcodes to AIC format and your 13 GB/hour HDV video grows to about 40 or more GB/hour, quickly using up your hard disk space.

While this work around using Perian will let you capture native HDV on your Mac notebook, you will still need either Final Cut to edit the native HDV file, or you can import to iMovie – which will then transcode in to AIC and make the file bigger.

Apple’s success seems to be causing them to turn into Microsoft in terms of their deleting functionality during upgrades and not adequately testing software, like iMovie.

Cameras, Lighting, Techniques

Disabling automatic gain control on consumer cameras

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Lower cost consumer level cameras do not provide a switch to turn off automatic video gain. When the scene gets dark, the automatic exposure opens up the aperture as much as it can – and if that does not let in sufficient light, then the camera starts amplifying the heck out of the video signal as the automatic exposure tries to make everything look like daylight.

The result is that interior scenes and anything shot at night end up looking horribly grainy due to the video amplification.

There are a number of tricks in use to over ride the video gain.

  1. The slightly hard one, in practice, is to point the camera at something bright enough, and then select the exposure lock feature, if the camera has that capability. Then point the camera back at whatever it is you want to look dark without tons of amplification noise. This is impractical for most “live” recording but works well for static subjects and short scenes.
  2. Another is to try one of the camera’s automatic settings – such as “fireworks” or “spotlight”. I’ve had excellent results using the fireworks setting for outdoor night time scenes that did not involve fireworks. The spotlight mode is for such things as stage lighting – where the subject is brightly lit but the background is typically dark. Most cameras mess up the exposure turn the subject into a bright white smudge in order to expose the background. Where I can, I usually set exposure manually, but you might also try the spotlight automatic setting if your camera as that ability.

I attended the 2010 Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas in January.  The only camera I took along was an older Canon HG10. I set the camera to record in its 24p mode and selected, usually, the fireworks setting, to get some excellent results with outdoor night time shots using what ever lighting was there.

Example – you can watch this in full screen mode to see how clean the video looks – and yeah, this is an inexpensive consumer grade camcorder, the Canon HG10.

You’ll get much higher quality on the video if you go directly to the Vimeo page itself rather than using the embedded player. Go to:

Canon HG10 night time video shot sample from coldstreams on Vimeo.

Cameras, Techniques

Achieving Depth of Field with the Canon XH A1

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This past year as seen the phenomenal growth of the Digital SLR (DSLR) market for cameras that now also shoot HD video – either 1280 x 720 or 1920 x 1080, depending on the camera. This market is about to take a huge leap forward over the next few months as all the camera makers introduce new products that begin to support video needs much better than their first or second generation cameras.

DSLRs are becoming popular for video photography because:

  1. Many still photographers have quite a collection of lenses that are a much larger investment than the camera body! Now they can put those to use for video too.
  2. Having the combined function of both high quality still and video in one camera is very convenient. In a national park in Canada recently, I was carrying a non-video DSLR, an extra lens, extra battery, a Canon HV30 video camera, a wide angle lens, extra tapes and extra batteries – plus a video tripod – on an 8.5 mile challenging hike. That hike convinced me that next year, I’d like to have a video capable DSLR! Less stuff to carry!
  3. DSLRs are capable of narrow depth of field in a way that most video cameras cannot do – except for extremely expensive professional cameras.
  4. DSLRs can use special effect lenses to create unusual optical effects, such as making the real world look like miniature models! (My wife thinks that is funny since so many in the movie making world work very hard to make their models look like the real world – now we try to make the real look like a model!) For example, see this.
  5. DSLRs can be used less obtrusively to shoot video than using larger cameras like the XH A1 or Sony EX-3.

To video photographers, DSLRs have their drawbacks – so far. Typically their audio feature set is limited.  They display video only on exterior LCD panels, which may not be tiltable (this is changing for the new models) and which is hard to see in daylight. They limit maximum clip length to 12 minutes or similar. They often do not auto focus in video mode and there is no such thing as a motor driven slow zoom – they are all manually operated.

But the one feature that stands out in videos shot on DSLRs is their depth of field capabilities. They can achieve narrow depth of field because their image sensors are much larger than typical video cameras. The larger the sensor size relative to the lens, the easier it is to have that narrow focus range.

The good news is that you can kinda sorta achieve some DoF capabilities with the XH A1. At the wide angle setting the lens opens up to f1.8. It stops down a bit on telephoto. If you manually control the aperture (set to the Av setting) you can achieve some nice DoF effects. Its not the same as a DSLR, but there are some decent views that you can obtain this way. I’ve done some experiments to get some effects I wanted – and its okay.

A possible problem is when you open up to f1.8 in bright sunlight, the shutter speed may drop to 1/600 or worse. For moving subjects or pans, this may create too much of a strobe effect at 24f or 30f frames per second.

An alternative is to use neutral density filters. I have not yet tried this – but with external ND filters (in addition to those built in to the camera) it should be possible to shoot at wide apertures with a lower shutter speed like 1/30th to 1/100th of a second.

Anyone try this yet?

Cameras, Techniques

Recording direct to disk from a Firewire equipped camcorder

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There are mini-disk products that you can connect directly to your Firewire equipped camcorder to record direct to disk. But then tend to range in price from about $600 to $1800 depending on used vs new, capacity and vendor.

An alternative is to record direct to your notebook computer.

If you have a Macbook or Macbook Pro, a very easy way to record direct to disk is to connect the Firewire output of your camcorder to the notebook computer and then run iMovie and import from the camera.

The camera should be in its “camera” mode but does not need to be recording to tape. Whatever the camera sees will be recorded direct to disk.

This works with my Canon HV30 in HD mode and I’ve done it using both iMovie 8 and the older iMovie HD (version 6) connected to a Macbook.

On Windows, there are several software utilities available that will enable you to do the same thing. While I am typing this on a Windows desktop, I do not have a Windows notebook on which to test this out!

The main advantage to doing this is to overcome the occasional tape dropout problem that tends to plague HDV format.By recording direct to your notebook computer disk, who cares about tape dropouts! (Caution – you may want to use a longer Firewire cable to keep the notebook away from your camera mic, especially if the fan kicks on to keep the CPU cool. Not all cameras have sufficient drive signal to use a longer cable, though. So be sure to test out your configuration first!)

On SD recordings, a video dropout typically lost a single 1/30th of a second frame. If you even noticed, you could always copy an adjacent frame and no one would notice.

With HDV you can lose up to 1/2 second per dropout – and I guarantee, everyone will notice!

Two other steps to avoiding dropouts are to clean your video heads in the camera every 5 to 10 hours of recording – I use a Canon cleaning tape for about 10 seconds but I’m told most any cleaning tape is fine. The other important step is tape quality – I used to use TDK tape all the time on my SD camera with excellent results – but the SD tapes always had dropouts when recording HDV on standard TDK tape.

I switched to Panasonic AMQ (HDVM63AMQ) tapes and have now recorded probably 75 hours with excellent results on that tape. I buy mine from TapeStockOnline.com. They have consistently quick order fulfillment and decent prices. If you are used to buying standard miniDV tapes at the local discount store  you’ll find that high quality tapes for HDV are more expensive – currently $5.25 in a minimum order of 10 units.

There are other brands that cost both more or less than these but I’m sticking with what has worked well for me. Hopefully this note provides some idea for you to try if you are plagued by video dropouts!