My high def video file doesn't look high def... Certainly operator error on this

May 31, 2011
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I'm not video'ing anything important... just my daughter's basketball games. Here's the techinque I'm using... and I want to know if yall thinking going in the right direction or am I using too much of my still technique and ruining the video.

I'm using a 5D mkiii and a 24-105L with the IS on. I set in the middle, but closer to one side of the court than the other... so I wind up shooting around 35mm because it is wide enough to capture the action in the close half-court.

I try and manually focus using live view and 10x magnifying to get a player in the middle of the court in focus... then I rely on a relatively expansive depth of field to get the rest of the players in focus. I shot at f/8... but I'm not married to f/8... and I think f5.6 would probably work for what I'm doing. ISO was automatic.

Shutter speed is 30 fps, and the capture settings are 1080p @ 30 fps.

I have the camera on a monopod with a fluid pan and I move the camera back and forth. That was probably the best part of my video... the panning...

In post, I'm cropping the video to create highlights, so the basket is towards the left/right of the screen and then the the action is visible in the rest of the screen.

So the blah video pixelation could be me cropping too heavily and then exporting in h262 (or whatever it is) @ 1080p... So I'll take the blame on that one... but I don't think I cropped THAT MUCH... And the uncropped video wasn't overly impressive either.

So suggestions would be appreciated. It's little girls basketball... so i don't want to buy a new lens for little girls basketball... but maybe a suggestion here or there would be most welcome.
 
sounds to me more like an editing issue, you could have a stanard definition template set up, final cut and premiere will rescale automatically to fit your 1080 footage into sd resolution..

you don't mention what you are cutting on, but just make sure your timeline is also set to 1080p 30fps.

The P bit is very very important in this application where theres lots of panning and subject movement.
 
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May 31, 2011
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ReggieABrown said:
Two things I noticed you did wrong. One was having IS on your lens turned on while it's mounted to a fluid head monopod. Having the IS on-on a stable platform will cause jerkiness. Second, your shutter speed should be 2x your fps. I.e. 24fps shutter speed 48, 30fps shutter speed 60.

That's true about the IS... I mostly forgot to turn it off but I'll make a point to do so next time.

And I have heard about the 2x shutter rate... though wouldn't that just increase the iso? In my mind... I not not sure why double the shutter rate would affect the smoothness of the video especially since the the capture rate is 30fps.

Though this is the 2nd time I've heard that bit of advice... so I'm going to just take it for granted that it is true...
 
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May 31, 2011
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Tinky said:
sounds to me more like an editing issue, you could have a stanard definition template set up, final cut and premiere will rescale automatically to fit your 1080 footage into sd resolution..

you don't mention what you are cutting on, but just make sure your timeline is also set to 1080p 30fps.

The P bit is very very important in this application where theres lots of panning and subject movement.

I kinda wish there weren't so many exporting options with premiere. I would like there to be just 4... 480, 720p, 1080i, and 1080p... and then maybe a 2nd column that has the file format, .avi, .mp4, etc.

But no....
 
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for advice on shutter speeds look up the 180 shutter angle rule, in very basic terms it means that the interval between each frame last exactly the same time as a frame, so if you have a 25fps frame rate, you want a 1/50th exposure
duration FOR MOST SCENARIOS. This assists the perception of fluidity of motion.

For some subjects it can pay to go faster, certainly with sports I would try and be up at 1/100 or 1/125, the the same principals of motion blur apply as it stills. If you go way high the motion will strobe, and you need to be careful with certain types of lighting (flouro tubes have a cycle that fast shutters in video can clash with)

Yep, post options can be a pain, try and keeo everything as shot and that avoids scaling or field order issues.
 
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ReggieABrown said:
Two things I noticed you did wrong. One was having IS on your lens turned on while it's mounted to a fluid head monopod. Having the IS on-on a stable platform will cause jerkiness. Second, your shutter speed should be 2x your fps. I.e. 24fps shutter speed 48, 30fps shutter speed 60.

IS isn't taboo on a monopod, I use it often with great success. Try it on and off and see what you like better.

I think that cropping 1080 video and then exporting at 1080 will result in low-def-looking video. I would try to avoid cropping in post as much as possible.

Lastly, your shutter speed can be a great tool to change the look of your movies and accentuate motion. You also may need to dial it in to prevent flicker if you are in a fluorescent-lit gym.
 
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May 31, 2011
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I'm an assistant coach... not a videographer. If I was just videoing... I could and would zoom in and out... and adjust focus... and all that... but I'm at the end of a bench looking at the action, yelling at girls telling them to set picks, go up hard for a rebound, etc. So i basically angle the camera so I can get much of the shot in the frame, so I can pay attention to the action on the court.

So this might just be what I have to deal with.

sjschall said:
IS isn't taboo on a monopod, I use it often with great success. Try it on and off and see what you like better.

I think that cropping 1080 video and then exporting at 1080 will result in low-def-looking video. I would try to avoid cropping in post as much as possible.

Lastly, your shutter speed can be a great tool to change the look of your movies and accentuate motion. You also may need to dial it in to prevent flicker if you are in a fluorescent-lit gym.
 
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To edit video H264 without losing too much image quality, it would be ideal to decompress the video before editing. This can be done using additional hardware such as external card "Matrox MXO2 Mini," which will make the tripling in size files (or quintuple) but will save a lot of preocessamento Core I7.

Making crop in the native resolution of 1080p video will throw away a lot of resolution. Using the zoom lens will avoid losing resolution. In full frame cameras, the depth of field with F8 may be small to fit all players who appear in the frame.

Videos with fast moving require shutter to 1/100 or more to a acceptable motion blur.

Believe me. ::)
The wonderful 5D Mark iii is inadequate for this type of video. :-X

For this type of video, you will have better results using a real video camera. :-X Even the modest Panasonic AG-AC8, or AG-AC90 would make a sharper image with fast moving sports. These cameras will provide sufficient depth of field to have all team players in focus, and allow you to record 1080 60P to a real slow motion in moments of replay.
 
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May 31, 2011
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So the video does look clearer at 1/80 of a second... So thanks a bunch for that tip, but I swear to god, if it isn't one thing it's another.

I think my computer is just too slow for video editing in hd. I have 6 gb of ram and a ssd, but when I play the video to be edited in premiere, it jutts along... Though I do have the video file on an external hard drive connected via usb 2... So maybe if I load the files into the ssd... I'll give that a try before I scrap the whole Damn computer.
 
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May 31, 2011
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you rember how I said it was most likely operator error... it totes was!

I was using the dv setting in Adobe premiere (widescreen) and NOT the HDV... for high definition digital video... so even though I was exporting in 1080p, I was exporting what was 480 video. So I'm stupid... but I'm glad I figured it out before I kept doing more.
 
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jdramirez said:
ReggieABrown said:
Two things I noticed you did wrong. One was having IS on your lens turned on while it's mounted to a fluid head monopod. Having the IS on-on a stable platform will cause jerkiness. Second, your shutter speed should be 2x your fps. I.e. 24fps shutter speed 48, 30fps shutter speed 60.

That's true about the IS... I mostly forgot to turn it off but I'll make a point to do so next time.

And I have heard about the 2x shutter rate... though wouldn't that just increase the iso? In my mind... I not not sure why double the shutter rate would affect the smoothness of the video especially since the the capture rate is 30fps.

Though this is the 2nd time I've heard that bit of advice... so I'm going to just take it for granted that it is true...

If the shutter speed is not twice the frame rate then it looks weird to the eye. If the shutter speed is less than that then you'd get more blur than the eye would see and things look dreamy and smeary compared to how the eye saw it. If you go to a higher shutter speed, things look staccato, choppy and frantic, if crisper. Sometimes the latter is does by movie makers when they want to give a frantic sense of someone in the middle of a fight or battle or such and they reduce the steadycam and crank up the shutter speed and it gives that sort of weird feeling that time has been altered and you are hyper focused and everything is crazy.
 
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The 5D3 in cam footage is a bit on the soft side and it tends to mush low contrast and shadow details.
If you could shoot ML RAW you'd get a lot crisper quality, but that would probably be rough for sports, you are taking so much footage non-stop and RAW eats up card and disk space like crazy so it's probably not realistic. If Canon dares to go 4k that would help a ton for your crops. If they had put in a zoomed mode that would help a ton too, not sure why they are so stingy with zoomed modes. ML does give you zoomed modes, but only for RAW again.

Make sure, at all costs, to turn NR down to off when shooting video, regardless of the ISO. Even off, it still applies way too much NR.

If you are panning around and getting every frame of video almost entirely different than the others then you want to set the shooting mode to ALL-I mode.

Also, you might want to slightly break the shutter speed twice the frame rate and go a bit higher, see if you can away with say 1/125th not looking too weird or something.

jdramirez said:
I'm an assistant coach... not a videographer. If I was just videoing... I could and would zoom in and out... and adjust focus... and all that... but I'm at the end of a bench looking at the action, yelling at girls telling them to set picks, go up hard for a rebound, etc. So i basically angle the camera so I can get much of the shot in the frame, so I can pay attention to the action on the court.

So this might just be what I have to deal with.

sjschall said:
IS isn't taboo on a monopod, I use it often with great success. Try it on and off and see what you like better.

I think that cropping 1080 video and then exporting at 1080 will result in low-def-looking video. I would try to avoid cropping in post as much as possible.

Lastly, your shutter speed can be a great tool to change the look of your movies and accentuate motion. You also may need to dial it in to prevent flicker if you are in a fluorescent-lit gym.
 
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jdramirez said:
So the video does look clearer at 1/80 of a second... So thanks a bunch for that tip, but I swear to god, if it isn't one thing it's another.

I think my computer is just too slow for video editing in hd. I have 6 gb of ram and a ssd, but when I play the video to be edited in premiere, it jutts along... Though I do have the video file on an external hard drive connected via usb 2... So maybe if I load the files into the ssd... I'll give that a try before I scrap the whole Damn computer.

Premiere should be able to handle it at full speed. It used to require that you re-wrapped it so it wasn't .mov (since .mov triggered very slow Apple QuickTime handlers) but I think it hasn't done that for some years. Do you have the special GPU Mercury engine turned on? Adobe actually turns that off for most video cards even though most Nvidia cards would help. You need to go in and find the text file that lists the approved video cards and simply type the name of your graphics card there and then re-start. (although if it is a realllly old or really low end card it might help or even be worse).

USB 2 would be too slow for RAW ML and maybe even 4k, but I thought OK for 1080P from 5D3 native, maybe not though. Disk speed can matter.
 
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