Cameras

Shooting video with a still camera

Last summer, we were on a family camping trip in the Canadian Rockies.

I saw hardly anyone using a video camera and I was bewildered at no one using video cameras anymore?

I guess I can be a little dense – it hit me that everyone is now taking their videos with smart phones and still cameras. Hello? Duh!

I got religion and bought a factory refurbished Canon SX1 at a very deep discount. The good news is – the camera exceeds my expectations and cost a huge amount less than the fancy DSLRs. Its not the DSLR’s price that will kill you – its that you’ll soon need a $600 lens, and then a $1200 lens … and pretty soon you are broke.

The SX1 does everything those cameras do except – no interchangeable lens (which can be a good thing), no where near the narrow depth of field of DSLR, better low light performance and … well, unless you shoot professionally and need huge blow ups and narrow depth of field, the SX1 is just fine.

The bad news is that I’ve been much too busy to make much use of the SX1 yet 🙁

In good light, the camera’s 1920×1080/30p video is outstanding. I took the camera down to a nearby river and shot video of some geese and ducks and the images were stunning.

But in low light, not so good! Too noisy for me. Regardless, I bought this camera to replace carrying both a video camera and a still camera when I am out hiking or doing other activities. Its perfect for activities like these.

It won’t replace my video camera though. For controlling exposure, using external mics, recording long events, or shooting 24p – the video cameras still rule.

Link to sample video – available in 1920x1080p at the link. The compression artifacts you see are from YouTube, not from the original video.

… Oh, the SX1 is primarily a still image camera and takes very good still images. The main problem with any of these CMOS cameras is the noise (graininess) of the stills goes up rapidly and can be annoying at ISO 400 and up. This is true of all small imager cameras. Those images can be cleaned up remarkably well with noise removal software like NeatImage. ISO 400 and 800 images can end up looking near perfect after processing with NeatImage.

Do you need 1920x1080p? While I notice the difference between 1920×1080 and 1280×720, most people do not.  Many people do not even have a way to watch their own videos in full 1920x1080p.

Therefore, you can save a lot by buying a Canon SX20 or SX30, which shoot 1280×720/30p. Both run about 25 Mbps compressed video data rates, which is more bits per pixel than the 1920×1080 – but with fewer overall bits for disk storage and time spent editing on your computer. There are many camera choices available for taking 1280x720p video – and you may be just as pleased with those results as with 1920×1080/30p.

Editing

MAGIX Movie Edit Pro – video editing software

MAGIX Movie Edit Pro – video editing software.

I sprung for the “Plus” version of Magix Movie Edit Pro 17 Plus, from German software company, Magix. Runs on Windows.

I’ve only used it for a bit to do some “toy editing” of a mixed group of AVCHD files of different sizes and from different sources. Trying to make things hard for the program! Everything worked fine and was able to edit the AVCHD files natively on my $400 quad core Windows 7 box. I output to both 1280×720 and 1920×1080 MP4 files to watch on the computer and on a computer connected to the HDTV – excellent results.

The program has a unique user interface in that it can be operated in “movie clip” mode, like iMovie, or timeline mode, like Final Cut Pro, Sony Vegas or Adobe Premiere. I found this interface very slick – I could string together whole clips quickly in “clip” view then switch to the time line and do more precise edits, create cross dissolves, etc. Creating dissolves is very easy and, by default, is set to automatic: just drag the edge of one clip over the edge of another and Movie Edit Pro automatically sets up a dissovle.

I’ve used only a few features such as image stabilization (worked VERY well for my test clips – better than the similar feature in Vegas).

I have not yet done a lot with this program – there are tons of filters, effects, and titling options, including “3D titles”. Oh, and there is even 3D video editing too. If you have two video streams, say from identical side by side cameras, you can stitch them together to make a red/blue (glasses) 3D video to play on your computer or your TV. Can’t wait ’til have time to try that out.

Overall, so far, I am very pleased. The regular price is $99 for the “Pro” version. The program delivers capabilities costing far more than that from other vendors.

Magix merged with Xara, the UK company that makes several programs for graphic design, photo editing, web layout and more. I own the Xara Xtreme designer and like it quite a bit. It is inexpensive and does most everything the “really expensive” packages do.

Cameras, Editing, Techniques

Recording video direct to Mac hard disk (updated)

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

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

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?

Guide to 3D and Drones

Coldstreams 3D and Drones