Category Archives: Lighting

Copyright scammers issue false copyright claims on Youtube videos

Read the whole thread: Help! I got a falsely accused Copyright Strike! – Google Product Forums.

Anyone can make a copyright claim against others on Youtube, and start earning ad revenue off of your videos. This has turned into a cottage industry for scammers. If you contest their claims, they come right back and make bogus claims on other videos.

The entire Youtube copyright mechanism is broken.

Continue reading Copyright scammers issue false copyright claims on Youtube videos

Question on how to expose for greatest dynamic range on GH2

Question on how to expose for greatest dynamic range on GH2 – Personal View Talks.

This question was posted on Personal-View.com, the web site for micro four thirds (run by the author of the GH-1 and GH-2 hacks) and specifically the high end Lumix cameras.

Suggestion is made to consider using graduated neutral density filters or polarizing filters to help reduce the highlights in photographs. The same could be said for video, and that this tip applies not just to Lumix cameras but all kinds of still and video cameras.

I shot something recently, on video, using a Canon camera, where the subjects were in the shade but enough else was in direct sunlight. There was nothing I could do but allow the highlights to blow out on the limited dynamic range of 4:2:0 HDV video. But the suggestion to use a graduated ND is a good one that I thought worth sharing with others.

Is a 10-bit video codec always way better than an 8-bit codec?

It depends:

“As long as you have the right 8-bit, youre fine." DSLRs like the 5D Mark III have 14-bit sensors, but for video capture, they’re converted down to 8-bit. Its this 8-bit “secret sauce” that the experienced engineers are able to pull off.  “If the engineers are getting the right 8-bit in that final codec, its visibly lossless,”

via Misinformation: The Right 8 Bits | HDVideoPro.com.

It also depends on the lighting in the scene. If the scene has a high dynamic range, more bits are better. If the scene’s dynamic range is shallow, fewer bits are needed to capture the full range. And, like the above, it also depends on how the codec itself works to capture in 14-bits but mix down to 8-bits.

Disabling automatic gain control on consumer cameras

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.