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.
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.
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:
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:
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.
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!
DSLRs are capable of narrow depth of field in a way that most video cameras cannot do – except for extremely expensive professional cameras.
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.
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.
I previously played my own HD videos (videos that I created) at 1920×1080 by streaming them off a slightly older Windows XP PC over a network to an Xbox 360 connected to an HDTV.
Two things happened that killed that solution:
The Xbox 360 eventually died completely (already been down the “red ring of death” problem in the past).
My youngest child is now old enough that she did not care if we replaced the 360.
Looking for a low cost solution I re-assigned my old 3.06 Ghz single processor machine still running XP to play videos through the VGA connector on the HDTV. I still used that machine for some software development but spent today transferring over the last files and programs I needed on to my much newer multi-core desktop that I use for development and video editing.
The good news is that this all went well.
The bad news is that any time I tried to play a 1920×1080 MPEG4 video (most of mine are encoded at 4 to 8 Mbps depending on the content), the images stuttered badly. One in particular looked like I was watching a slide show, not a video!
I tried using Quicktime, VLC and the Media Player Classic Home Cinema software and all had various kinds of problems from stuttering to false colors (VLC).
Looking around I discovered that the problem is due to H.264 decoders that are too slow and can not keep up with full frame video.
But there is a solution – CoreAVC 2.0 and CoreAAC codecs. They have optimized their H.264 decoders for far faster performance than all the others.
Once I bought and installed those codecs, I can now play the 1920×1080 H.264 videos in Windows Media Player and get smooth video. No frame drops that I could see. Plus, the fan on the PC only kicked up half way to keep the CPU cool – so the fan noise was lower too.
For the $18 cost of the software, I’ve replaced the parts of the Xbox 360 that we really wanted – streaming our own videos. Plus we can now watch YouTube, Hulu, Vimeo and eventually Netflix videos too. And I’m going to have give Flight Simulator or X-Plane a whirl soon too 🙂
The CoreAVC and AAC codecs are working well for me. You might take a look at them if you are having trouble playing 1920×1080 videos on an older computer.
Update: If you are having trouble playing 1920×1080 videos on Youtube … it is probably because your computer cannot keep up. Decoding and displaying an H.264 1920×1080 video image, at 30 times per second, seems to be beyond the capacity of most computers. My quad core computer seems to be able to just keep up. It might work better for you if you first wait for the entire video to download, and then try playing again. Alternatively, just use the 720p version. Most people cannot tell the difference between 1080p and 720p, especially after it was encoded once for upload to Youtube, and then transcoded at Youtube, downloaded and decoded to play on your computer.
For a software project, I had to recently update my old Windows XP machine to a newer machine running Windows 7.
I decided to also look at the free demo version of Sony Vegas Movie Studio Platinum 10 editing software.
Update: The following review is not quite correct. My original test footage was inadequate to test this out. Here’s the scoop: Vegas Movie Studio Platinum 10 will work with true 24P video. You can set a timeline to 23.976 and import video clips that are true 23.976. However, video recorded in the 2:3 24p “pulldown” mode which involves mapping 24p images into a 60i interleaved stream, will not work unless you use a separate program like Voltaic HD or CineForm’s NeoScene to remove the pulldown prior to editing.
I still really like Sony Vegas Movie Studio Platinum 10 – in fact I have ordered a copy – but it does not do pulldown removal. But once I had everything in some form of 24p – including a combination of HDV, SD and AVCHD transcoded to remove the pulldown – I was able to edit the entire mix just fine in Vegas.
For a test, I gave it what I thought would be a difficult challenge – I combined 24PF video from an Canon HG10 in AVCHD format, with 24PF from a Canon HV30 in HDV format, with a 24P DV video stream. For those not familiar with those terms, 24PF is a 24 frames per second video stream embedded into a conventional 60i (interleaved) set of frames. To edit a 24PF video requires removing extra frames used to fit the 24 full frames into a 60 half frame (60i) video stream used by conventional video recording.
Incredibly – it worked!
I set the Project Properties to 23.97 IVTC (inverse telecine) option. I then imported the media – in the case of the AVCHD video clips, these were already on the system hard disk. The HDV was imported from tape using the Sony Vegas video capture function. The 24P DV video was actually shot as 60i on a Panasonic DV camera, imported and converted to 24p using DVFilm Maker.
And it just worked! I didn’t have to do any futzing around – it just worked.
I output the result to an MP4 file at 1440×1080 and the results are excellent.
Since the DV video was shot outdoors at an evening concert, the colors were muted. I used some Vegas filters to slightly increase the contrast and saturation, and added a bit of sharpening. This was then scaled up to the AVCHD/HDV frame size, producing an excellent result.
I’m still using the demo/trial version but I think Sony Vegas Movie Studio HD Platinum 10 is a keeper. I’m pleased so far.
Each year, Spokane, Wa holds an annual Lilac Festival and Armed Forces Day Parade. This is the largest evening Armed Forces Day Parade in the country, and one of the larger parades of any type on the west coast.
This year, 211 units participated in the parade, with 46 high school marching bands from throughout the state (and some from out of state). The parade typically has around 50 + or – bands. If you like marching bands, this is a neat parade!
Over the years, I have followed the West Valley High School Eagle Marching Band since my own kids previously went through that band program. While I no longer have any of my own kids in the band, I still run their web sites and some IT functions behind the scenes, and do some media work for them, all as a volunteer.
Video taping a marching band in a night time parade is difficult. If you stand on the curb and shoot video, the band goes by once and its all over with in 20 seconds.
The only solution is to march with the band. But that adds a lot of challenges, even more so at night. I cannot use auto exposure in the camera since the camera tries to add 36 db of gain to make the night time look like daylight and covering everything in awful noisy graininess. Similarly, audio levels can not use the ALC to adjust audio level automatically – that makes the entire band and crowd noise come across as loud mess.
The opening scene of the following video is shot near the TV coverage area. I set the gain to 0 db and shot at 1/60th of a second in 30p mode, Tv exposure mode, on the Canon XH A1. Once the band passes the TV lighting, I manually switch to 12 db gain and the XH A1 has sufficient aperture to automatically set the f-stop the rest of the parade.
Why not use 1/30th of a second rather than 1/60th, considering shooting at night? Two reasons. One, 1/30th of a second produces some blurring, but does enable using +6 db gain instead of +12 db gain. But the second reason is that motion stabilizing software (see below) does not work well with blurred images. Sharp images work much better and that requires at least the 1/60th of a second shutter speed (based on some experiments I did).
I also use both a short shot gun and the on camera mic during the parade. For the long shot at the beginning, I used the shot gun mic to cut down the crowd noise. But once I start moving with the band, I switch to the internal stereo mic to get better coverage (less directivity) of the sound pattern of the entire band.
At about 1 minute 35 seconds into the video, you’ll see my fake “Steadicam” in action. You’ll see this type of shot throughout the entire video.
How do I do this?
1. I use a monopod and attach a 3 pound weight to the bottom of the monopod. This creates a simple dynamic stabilizer. Imagine holding a stick with a weight at the bottom. As you move the stick around, gravity naturally pulls the weight back towards the center. The amount of weight and the length of the monopod influence the dampening effect. I use only a 3 pound weight because I have to carry the camera gear for several miles (the parade itself is 3 miles long, plus I usually walk 2 or 3 additional miles before and after the event).
2. Learn how to walk smoothly. Watch marching band performers – they “roll step” as they walk. This means rolling your feet in a smooth motion rather than stepping, greatly reducing your vertical motion. Surprisingly, you can learn to walk backwards for an even smoother effect which has to do with how your body mechanics works out. Add a slight crouch and slightly bent knees and with practice, this technique combined with the weighted monopod can product surprisingly smooth walking shots.
3. In post, use motion stabilizing software. There are several applications available today that do a good job of analyzing images for motion and then shift your images around to create the appearance of stability. Since they has the effect of adding black edges to your video after shifting, most also slightly enlarge your original video to eliminate the black edges. For this video, I just used the built in motion stabilizing feature in Apple’s iMovie 8. It took about 3 hours to analyze the HD video I had shot.
Even with motion stabilizing software, you will achieve the best results if you also use the tricks outlined in (1) and (2). You can see the effects of this fake “Steadicam” throughout the videos, but if you are in a hurry, you can see it in the first scene in Part 2, below.
Other tricks I use during the parade are to use the monopod for overhead shots, including walking shots. Sometimes I take a video clip standing in the midst of the band but did not do that this year. It would also be nice to take some low level shots from near ground level, but there is never enough time.
By the end of the parade, I am drenched in sweat and exhausted. In order to get many shots of both the front and back of the band, I have to shoot while the band marches by, then run back up to the front of the band.
This was shot using the Canon XH A1. I have shot daytime parades using an HV30, external BeachTek audio mixer, and a short shot gun XLR mic, plus wide angle lens (always go wide angle for these things). I use the XH A1 for the night parade because of its better light gathering capacity of the big lens and larger imagers. But it does weigh a bit more!
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