Friday, August 25, 2006

HVX200 Tip: Crush Big Black

I'm not sure if I'll be posting before sometime next week, but I've read about a little tweak inside the camera that can give you a richer black level, and that will be first priority for my next shoot.

The setting is the Master Ped, which is another way to set the black levels for shooting. I've always shot my stuff with MP at zero, but I have read that a better yield for richer tones (beyond setting some good color settings including white balance) would result if you notch the MP level down to around "minus one" or -2. I would have wanted to shoot some footage today, but I needed to shoot the first of a recurring project on a basketball player. Since I want to be able to shoot video and grab frames at the same time, I will want to wait until we get that 100GB writeable drive, otherwise my HD shooting in 1080 or even 720 will yield me only around 8 minutes shoot time.

I've also created a cheat sheet, because I've been setting my camera on different resolutions that wind up resulting in some jaggies (those frames that look like they've been shot with a video camera). The blur looks like a bunch of jagged lines, not simple motion blur. I will keep it right near the front seat so that I can quickly thumb through and see which settings yield film-like qualities (those settings are highlighted green) and which ones yield the jaggies (they're in red).

If someone wants me to post the color cheat sheet, or simply rewrite the info down, I'll try to get to it next week. Right now, I need a haircut, and I'm exhausted. I normally am sleeping at 8am, not shooting, like I did this morning!

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