| On Alex Lipsitz and John Gulager’s project “Show Me” the Sony V1U presented challenges and some surprises during the post production process here at FILMLOOK Inc. The short was edited by John with Sony Vegas at his home and because of Vegas’ unique ability to capture 24P HDV that the camera records, it was easy for John to edit on a 24P timeline. The finished movie was then brought to FILMLOOK to be imported to our Final Cut Pro system for output onto HDCAM. But there was an issue; namely the codec is currently exclusive only to Vegas. Due to the 24P HDV format, the files had to be converted to 10 bit uncompressed HD before Final Cut could lay the project to tape in HDCAM at 23.98 PsF. Although it was rendered as a Quicktime file the camera’s 24P codec was not natively supported by FCP, although we expect Sony to provide an update for this soon.
Once on HDCAM tape, “Show Me” was brought into color correction using the da Vinci 2K Plus. The camera had surprisingly good exposure range, providing high amounts of detail in both light and dark scenes and good color separation throughout. Alex and John purposely selected various scenes to challenge the camera’s ability to operate in low light, high light and virtually no light, and the camera performed extremely well. In particular, the indoor café scenes and the twilight street scenes toward the end of the feature looked outstanding. Although the HDV footage at 24P looks far better than the 3:2 pulldown that the Sony Z1-U creates to simulate 24P, there are still some issues with compression artifacts, particularly on bright, flashing colors. When stepped through frame by frame, the picture revealed some compression blockiness between extreme flashes of color. Also, during the black and white portion of the project, there was some noise in the blacks, but by simply compressing the grayscale slightly downward, the noise was minimized.
Overall, we were impressed by this camera’s ability to deliver high definition 24P imagery onto an HDV tape. Once output to HDCAM with full color correction, “Show Me” looks quite comparable to Super 16mm in exposure range, color and texture.
Ben Edwards, Editor
Allen Kelly, Colorist
FILMLOOK Inc. |
