Test of my stereo shot gun mic set up – handholding the shotgun mic array in my left hand and holding my Canon HV30 and Beachtek audio mixer in my right hand. Not ideal, but an amusing little test clip. These birds were about 30 feet away from me, with a several hundred foot cliff just beyond. Pointing the long shotguns in that direction picks up some background noise – just noise – that is the city, miles away, bouncing off the cliffs. There is also a good sized stream behind me – they call it a river – which creates some background noise too.
I’ll try to eventually get a photo of the shotgun array set up. It’s two AT835b, 18 inch long shotguns, mounted in the crossed XY configuration. The mount is made from some PVC plumbing hardware, a piece of wood, and a paint roller handle – super high tech, the latest bit of Hollywood gadgetry, for sure. Or may be not. But its cheap and it works!
As I have decided to pay much more attention to the sounds in my environment, today I took a pleasant hike along a meandering river – more of a big wide stream, really.
From a sound perspective it had great potential – burbling water, crickets, frogs, squirrels and chipmunks chirping, ducks and birds. Now that I pay attention to sound, I begin to hear interesting things everywhere.
But as my luck would have it, being a Sunday afternoon, I managed to time my hike in between several groups of screaming children. They had only one volume – FULL. A full quarter mile away and I could hear them fine with my own ears.
Twice I stopped to set up for sound recording – with a shotgun mic, a Canon HV30 camcorder, a Beachtek audio mixer, and an 18 inch shotgun mic. And twice I had to give up. If my ears could hear the screaming, imagine what that sounded like in a sensitive mic.
I learned something today – if trying to record natural environment sounds, I need to so so on weekday mornings, free of screaming kids. I had not planned today’s hike out very well, from an audio standpoint.
NeatVideo.com has introduced version 3 of their fantastic noise reduction application and plug in for various video editing systems.
Version 3 is available as a half price upgrade for most version 1 and 2 users; recent purchases of version 2 in 2011 may be eligible for an even greater discount. Contact them for information if you fall into that latter group.
From my first quick tests version 3, on my quad core editing system, seems to run about 4x faster than version 2. Prior to this upgrade, NeatVideo required almost an hour per minute of HD video. With version 3, this now runs in just over 15 minutes. Of course, for any lengthy video noise clean up, I let the process run overnight.
NeatVideo examines the noise characteristics of your camera (as reflected in a noise sample of the video) and uses that information to produce excellent noise reduction on most scenes. My own experience is that it works best on film-like grain, the very fine bits that dance around and are especially noticeable in dark areas or in broad areas of contant color (like the sky).
Most noise reduction techniques are primitive in comparison to NeatVideo. Most NR methods just average pixels together within a frame or between frames, which tends to reduce the resolution, turning images to a seemingly plastic look. NeatVideo does not work that way and does a far better job.
I have not used NeatVideo on high ISO (high video gain) images. I know that some use it this way and are pleased with the results. Regardless, if you need to clean up some image noise or, like me, you like clean video whenever possible, I very much recommend use of NeatVideo, with the caveat that for HD, in particular, a multi-core processor (and now supporting GPUs too) and plenty of time is needed for best results.
Usage suggestion: Because NeatVideo takes a lot of time, and editing can require cleaned up video clips to be re-rendered and cleaned up again, I do all my editing first. And then typically apply NeatVideo to the final video just prior to output.
If I only apply NeatVideo to selected short clips, I do not worry about this. But when lengthy clips or an entire video could use some cleanup, I apply NeatVideo as my very last step in the editing workflow, before I produce my output files.
The Canon XH A1 is not very old, but it is tape-based, which today seems quaint and dated!
However, the camera shoots excellent images and its 20x zoom lens remains amazing. Even at 1440×1080 HDV, it shoots sharper and lower noise images than most of the consumer 1920×1080 camcorders.
But when comparing to my Lumix GH-2 in daylight, the XH-A1 has some image noise that resembles film graininess. Some people actually like that – I do not. I like clean and smooth images and prefer clean over sharp.
Some tips that I have discovered may be helpful to others.
If you shoot using the default camera options, the camera applies no noise reduction strategies “out of the box”. Not surprisingly, there will be some image noise. While each scene is going to be different, I have found that by configuring the custom presets with some noise reduction options, I get very clean imagery.
I am using the following as a starting point:
SHP set to -3
Sky Detail to set to smooth/soft
NR2 set to “Low”.
Coring set to +9
Noise reduction can be improved a bit more by setting NR2 to its medium setting, or reducing the sharpness setting a bit more. These modest changes make a very large and noticeable reduction in noise. The NR1 noise reduction option only works on imagery that is not moving or barely moving, otherwise you get “ghost trails” in the video.
You can also manually set the lowest gain setting to -3db (instead of 0 db). For DSLR shooters, the video gain setting on a video camera is the same idea as setting the ISO level. More gain is the same as higher ISO, which also implies, more noise.
I remain unconvinced that the -3db setting makes any difference in noise. It does buy an addition 2x neutral density equivalent, which can be useful in broad daylight.
For maximum sharpness, I have found (as have others) that the sharpest images occur at an aperture of around f/4.0 plus or minus.
I shoot virtually everything in manual modes, usually shutter priority Tv mode, which means I adjust the neutral density filter settings and the shutter speed to get close to around f/4.0. Much above f/5.6 and sharpness starts to degrade. You can manually set the aperture to f/9.5 and the camera’s automatic features will go as high as f/22! Images at those aperture settings produce garbage! Incredibly soft, grainy and ugly looking – don’t do that! This is the cause of widely reported and unexplained “grainy” footage captured with the XH A1 – using far too high an f-stop for the lens and sensor. The solution is to use ND filters and shutter speed to keep the f-stop in a low range.
Using these tips you can produce some very clean and very sharp video on the XH A1. I recently did some shooting using both the XH A1 and the Lumix GH-2. If you tweak your XH A1 well, it is very difficult to tell the difference between the XH A1 and the GH-2, unless you have a gigantic HDTV. The XH-A1 shoots at 1440×1080 while the GH-2 can shoot at 1920×1080/24p and /30p, or also 1280×720/60p.
1080/24p is 49,766,600 pixels per second.
720/60p is 55,296,000 pixels per second.
Because of how our eyes process images over time, the higher resolution image might not appear as high to our eyes. Weird, huh?
Finally, if you have noisy images already on tape that you would like to clean up, get Neat Video (http://neatvideo.com). This product is fantastic. On my quad core processor, it can take nearly one hour to clean up a minute or two of HD video, but the results are stunning. (I think they just released a new version that may drop the time to 20 to 30 minutes per minute of HD video on my configuration but I have not installed the update yet.)
“Rolling shutter” is a video image distortion that commonly appears when using modern CMOS-basedDSLRs – and also CMOS-based consumer camcorders. It manifests as a wobbly or skewed image. In the simple case, a fast pan left or right causes vertical lines to become slanted and bent. In a more typical case, portions of the image can appear wobbly if the camera – or the subject – are moving left or right.
I’ve elevated the following to its own blog post; it first appeared within the following post about the new Canon SX40IS. I also wrote about rolling shutter before.
I’ve been discovering some issues with rolling shutter on my LumixGH-2 when using long telephoto settings that are, for me, more problematic than fast pans. Specifically, if I use the 45-200mm zoom at the 200mm setting (think 400mm full frame equivalent lens), and then switch into the ETC extended digital teleconverter mode where it isolates just 1920×1080 pixels (multiply by 2.6 times) giving a 1040mm (full frame) effective lens, the very slightest motion produces skew and wobble in the image.
Last week I shot a scene using this feature – since a 1040mm equivalent lens is compressing a huge amount of atmosphere, the thermal refraction occurring in the image made the image wobble. And sure enough, that resulted in rolling shutter issues even though the camera was locked down securely on a tripod!
Some day … an electronic global shutter will be added to CMOS sensors, I suppose. Until then, for long range video shooting, I prefer CCD imagers.
Is rolling shutter a problem? Some claim its not if you merely plan your images in advance. For those who can plan their images, this strategy may work fine.
But I shoot a lot of live events that I do not control and or which there can be only minimal planning. I am finding that DSLRs are great for shooting video:
For wide angle views, including handheld shots
For producing narrow depth of field
For convenience and small size (relative to a prosumer camcorder like the XH A1 or HMC-150)
Where you do not need real time audio monitoring and audio controls
Where you do not need a motor controlled zoom
For excellent low noise video images (especially at low ISOs)
For long telephoto shots, I find myself fighting rolling shutter far too often. I cannot control the wind. I cannot control the air temperature that causes thermals and refractions, making the image move around. As you can see in the linked articles, below, some people like all the wobbliness! I don’t!
On a typical modest screen HDTV (mine is 42 inches) it is very difficult to tell the difference between GH-2 video and XH A1 (once the A1’s noise issues are addressed – I’ll add that item to another post).
DSLRs are a fantastic tool for video, but they are not yet the be-all solution for video. But they are a wonderful additional tool to have for video shooting.
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