I have been looking at some other picture profiles claiming to offer a log style curve or the maximum dynamic range from the camera. One in particular caught my eye as the creator advocates the use of a very high black level setting. Normally the black level setting does nothing more than set the zero reference point (called the pedestal) for the black level, it does not  normally affect dynamic range. So I decided to investigate the claim that a high black level on a FS700 improves shadow performance, at the same time coming up with my own settings for maximum dynamic range.

To establish whether the black level setting made any difference to the dynamic range I performed a very simple test using a greyscale chart and a waveform monitor. I exposed the grey scale so that one of the mid scale grey bars was just fractionally below the zero, black level on the waveform monitor. Now, IF the black level is changing the dynamic range, then raising the black level should allow me to bring that now just invisible grey scale bar back up above the black level so that I can see it on the waveform monitor as a discreet bar. Well, it didn’t. The overall black level comes up as expected, but the grey bar does not make an appearance, it stays firmly below the black level. This proves that the black level control is actually working as expected, i.e. just changing the zero point. Now you can decrease the dynamic range by using a high negative value as this will push dark parts of the scene into clipping, but raising the level does nothing more than raising the black pedestal level. Raising the pedestal level may make the image look flatter on a monitor because it will look greyer due to blacks that no longer look black on the monitor, but the dynamic range is not in fact being increased and your wasting recording data.

The next thing to look at is the Black Gamma setting. Now as this is a gain setting (as opposed to just a level setting) I did expect to see some changes in dynamic range. What’s interesting with this setting is that it operates over 3 ranges, low, mid and high. High range operates over the greatest range, but has the least effect on deep shadows. Low Range has the greatest effect on deep shadows and by using Low Range and the maximum +7 level setting I was able to gain almost a half stop increase in low end dynamic range. +7 with the High range setting made almost no difference to the darkest parts of the image. From previous testing and experimentation I know that cinegamma 4 offers the greatest dynamic range, so by combining Cinegamma 4 with black gamma, low range at +7, I believe you are getting the absolute maximum dynamic range from the camera. You should note that set like this the camera records to 109%.

I have created a complete flat look, maximum dynamic range picture profile for the FS700 and you can find the settings by clicking here.

Well this didn’t really start as a review project, but as I spent a few days shooting with an EA50 in Hong Kong and everyone want’s to know what it is like, I thought I should write down my thoughts in a little more depth.

 First of all what is the EA50? Well it’s a shoulder mount camcorder that uses the APS-C sized sensor from a stills photo camera, that shoots video and takes photos. It records on to a single SD card or memory stick as well as an optional 128gb flash memory unit (FMU). The recordings are encoded using now ubiquitous AVCHD codec at up to 24Mb/s.

Now while I and Sony call it a shoulder mount camera I think you do have to differentiate between the EA50 and an old school full size broadcast camera. A heavy old school camera normally sits completely on your shoulder, some of the camera sticking out behind you, some in front and this gives the camera excellent balance and stability. All the weight, or at least 80% is supported by your shoulder. The EA50 is different. For a start the camera is actually quite compact, it looks bigger in photos than it is in real life. On the rear of the camera there is an extending shoulder pad, that when in the extended position sits on the users shoulder. This supports the rear end of the camera, but most of the weight is forwards of your shoulder so your left hand and arm end up supporting a significant portion of the weight. Fortunately the camera itself is not heavy, but put a heavy lens on the camera and it will get tiring to use for long periods. There are a couple of 1/4” screw holes on the top of the shoulder pad, so it would be quite easy to construct a counterbalance bracket if you are going to do a lot of shoulder mount work. In many respects holding the EA-50 on my shoulder reminds me of the PMW-EX3. It is more stable than a handycam style camera and it is quite nice to use, but it isn’t really a true shoulder mount camera. The plus side of this is that because it is quite light you can still easily use it as a handycam for lower level shots with ease and you don’t need a particularly big or heavy tripod which helps keep the budget under control.

The large viewfinder is again very similar to the one on the PMW-EX3. It has a very high resolution LCD with excellent, accurate colour reproduction so judging exposure and colour balance is easy. Resolution is good, but for accurate focussing I found that I needed to use the colour peaking function to accentuate when things were in or out of focus.

I think one of the biggest surprises with this camera for me is the build quality. Lets face it, this is a low cost camcorder, but you know what, it really doesn’t feel low cost. It is made primarily of plastic, but it’s a really nice plastic that feels like it will take the bumps on knocks that come from professional use. The handle is robust and feels solid in your hand and the switches, buttons and knobs all feel like that come from a more expensive camcorder. Talking of which, there are conventional pro camcorder style switches for white balance and gain as well as rotary controls for the audio record levels. This really is a pro camcorder and it feels and behaves like one.

The NEX-EA50 uses Sony’s now familiar E-Mount for it’s lens. The beauty of this mount is that the distance between the mount face and the sensor itself is very short. As a result it’s easy to add adapters to go from the E-Mount fitting to almost any other lens fitting you desire. This opens up a massive range of lens possibilities, via the La-EA2 you can use Sony’s Alpha lenses, via a metabones adapter you can use Canon EF lenses, via a MTF Nikon adapter you can use…. err… well… Nikon lenses and so on. So lots and lots of lens choices from ebay DSLR lenses to PL Mount Ultra Primes.

The camera is supplied with the new Sony 18-200mm f/3.5-6.3 E-Mount power zoom lens ( SELP18200 ) In Asia there is also the option to buy the camera with the non servo 18-200mm lens. The power zoom allows you to zoom in and out using a zoom rocker built in to the camera. The power zoom is based on the 18-200mm stills lens found on the FS100 and FS700. It has optical image stabilization and can operate in auto focus or manual focus modes. The fastest zoom speed is a little slow and the lens does extend as you zoom, so adding a matte box would be difficult. The pre-production unit I played with had a tendency to shift the image left and right as you alternated between zooming in and zooming out and if you used manual focus there would be some small shifts in the focus through the zoom range. I’ve had quite a few discussions with Sony about this lens and I think you do need to be realistic. This lens has been built to meet the demand from end users for a cheap servo zoom for large sensor cameras. A PL mount servo zoom lens will cost you around $50K (and is much bigger and heavier), this lens is about 1/48th of that price, it’s a bargain and I want one for my FS700. Production units should have near zero image shift and the focus shifts should be minimal, but don’t expect then to be zero. The best way to use this lens while zooming is with the auto focus switched on. Use it like this and provided the camera stays focussed on the same target, you won’t see any focus shifts as you zoom. Just don’t expect to be able to zoom in and out with the lens wide open and not see any changes in the image.

Zoom without a zoom! The EA50 also has the ability to electronically zoom in and out even with a fixed focal length lens. This option is selected in the camera menu and gives a 2x zoom controlled by the zoom rocker. It’s a really useful feature that allows you some flexibility in framing when using a non servo zoom. I didn’t notice any appreciable loss in image quality when I used this function and the zooms were smooth and easy to control.

In use, shooting around Hong Kong thanks largely to the servo zoom the EA50 did feel more like a traditional news camcorder than a big sensor camera. The ability to zoom in and out to re-frame shots quickly and simply, as well as using the zoom during a shot was nice. Although looking back through the footage I think I did overuse the zoom, probably because I’ve been shooting with prime lenses so much lately that I got a bit carried away having a servo zoom again! This isn’t a fast lens at f3.5 – f6.3 so don’t expect super shallow depth of field, especially at the wide end. It’s reasonably sharp and contrast is pretty good considering the 10x zoom range. A good prime lens will easily out perform the zoom but, for versatility and quick re-framing etc it’s hard to better. My biggest gripe is the way the focus ring works, it appears to have two speeds, at first the focus changes rapidly and then as you fine tune the focus the change in focus requires a lot more twisting of the focus ring and I find this tricky as there is also some lag in the lenses response to your focus input. Despite its little annoyances the lens is overall pretty good and it does make the EA50 very useable for run and gun. As I said I want to get one of these lenses for my FS700 as soon as possible.

The camera menus have the same layout and style as the FS100 and FS700, so clean and simple and easy enough to find your way around. There are no slow motion or timelapse options on the EA50, but you can shoot at 50p/60p and then slow things down in post to 25p/30p if you need slow mo. For time-lapse, just let the camera roll and speed it up in post. It’s not as though AVCHD files take up a lot of storage space and SD cards are cheap as chips. You can have full manual control over exposure, there is a large thumb wheel at the front of the camera body to control the aperture and buttons that select the auto/manual modes for each of the shutter, iris, and gain functions. In addition there is a “full auto” switch that puts everything to automatic for simple point and shoot filming. As well as video the EA50 can also take still photographs, but you do have to switch between stills photo mode and video mode depending on which you want, so no taking photos while your shooting video. The EA50 has the full suite of picture profile options including adjustable colour, detail and gamma settings. It uses the cinematone gammas found on the FS100 if you want a more filmic look.

There are XLR audio inputs with phantom power and lots of outputs including HDMI, component and composite, so something there for everyone. I really don’t think you can complain too much about not having HDSDI at this price point.

But what about the image quality? Well as this camera is using an APS-C sensor designed for stills it isn’t as optimized for video as a dedicated video camera like the FS100 or FS700. However the pictures are pretty good. They are a little softer than I get from my FS700 but in a not unpleasant way. They don’t look blurred or anything like that, they just lack that final crispness that makes the FS700 look so nice. The images are well rounded, they don’t look over enhanced or electronic and colour reproduction is good and accurate. I did find the images to be more contrasty than I’ve become used to recently with blacks and deep shadows looking just a tiny bit crushed. It handled bright skies very well but did struggle a little with very high latitude scenes. Being a DSLR sensor I did expect to see evidence of aliasing and other jaggies, but I was pleasantly surprised by how well controlled this were. I didn’t find any shots that I could do and there are no nasty surprises in the rushes I shot. You can see a few jaggies here and there and a little bit of aliasing every now and again, but overall for a stills sensor I think the EA50 does a pretty good job as a video camera. I did do some shooting at night at the Monk Kok ladies market and on the waterfront at Kowloon and there is quite a difference in sensitivity between the EA50 and a dedicated video large sensor camera like the FS100, the EA50 is much less sensitive. But don’t panic, it’s no worse than most video cameras with normal sized sensors, I felt it actually had similar sensitivity to the Sony PMW-200, so that puts about 1.5 stops slower than an FS100.

So what do i think overall? Actually I’m quite impressed. Would I buy one? No, I would not, but then I already have a FS700 and PMW-F3. What I do think is that it offers a very good price/performance ratio in an interesting form factor. I can see this camera being very popular for wedding videographers, schools and other training organizations. In the right hands this camera will produce nice pictures, pictures that are certainly good enough for online HD videos and with careful use you could even shoot a film that would hold up to projection on a big screen. If you need to have a low cost, versatile camera that looks like a pro camera and you want shallow depth of field the EA50 has to be considered.

I’ve created a picture profile for my friends in Asia. This gives accurate but vivid colour reproduction with a nice contrasty look. It uses Hypergamm 3 so handles highlights and over exposure well, but by using some black gamma tweaks the picture still has a nice rich look. You’ll find the full details by clicking here.

Been out and about in Hong Kong shooting with a pre-production EA50 and I really quite like it. It is not an FS700 or FS100, the image quality is not quite that good.

The pictures are contrasty and it’s not as sensitive. It’s really nice to have the same familiar menu’s as the FS100 including the same picture profiles so you can dial in a look to suit your needs. The servo zoom is OK. It’s not perfect, there is a picture shift when you change zoom direction and some small focus shifts (these should be significantly reduced in production units).

It was really nice to have a functioning zoom on a big sensor camera. But even if you don’t have a zoom lens the EA50’s 2x electronic zoom works really well and I didn’t notice any significant change in image quality when using the digital zoom. The camera is front heavy, but it’s not a heavy weight camera so I didn’t find it too bad to use.

The buttons and switches are easy to access when it’s on your shoulder. I missed having builtin ND filters and had to resort to using the shutter to deal with brighter scenes and there are no special functions like S&Q so no time-lapse or slow motion other than by shooting at 50p/60p and slowing it down in post.

I did shoot some time lapse by just letting the camera roll and then speeding it up in post. It does have a few slow shutter speeds so I was able to use these in some of the night sequences I shot for a blurry effect. I’ll be writing a longer more detailed review in due course and posting some sample clips and frame grabs.

This really is quite incredible. For some time now Litepanels have held an number of very broad and vague patents on the use of semiconductor (includes LED) lighting in photography and video production. The patents are vague, rambling and deliberately unspecific. Most of these are not patents on new technology, new ideas, new or innovative designs. These patents exist purely to try to prevent anyone else from putting LED’s into lights for use in photography and video production.

Now following a lengthy court case on the 11th of Sept a USITC Judge upheld Litepanels complaint that the only way to prevent abuse of their patent was an import ban on any type of LED lamp designed for photo or video use that may infringe on their patents. Because the patents are so ridiculously broad and basically cover any use of any fixture designed for film and video production that uses LED’s, an import ban would in effect be a total ban on the import of all photographic and video lighting devices that use LED’s. The final determination of the case is expected by January.

The problem is not so much the upholding of the patents, but that the patents were issued in the first place. There have been attempts to get the patents nullified, most of these involve showing that the patents lack “Novelty”.  A patent is supposed to demonstrate a novel, new design or concept never seen before. If it can be shown that LED video lights were sold prior to litepanels patent was issued then it may be nullified, but all this costs money. There are examples of people using LED flashlights as lights for video well before Litepanels came on the scene so they can hardly claim that using LED’s for video is a new or novel idea.

I don’t have a problem with inventors or designers protecting their research and development, but come on, you shouldn’t be able to patent something as vague as the use of LED’s in a frame as a light for photographic applications. That’s like having a patent on the use of lightbulbs in a socket to illuminate a home! Let them patent specific designs like the Sola or specific layouts of LED’s and specific housing designs, but having patents on the general concepts isn’t right.

Litepanels didn’t invent the LED, they didn’t invent the video light and I don’t think they can legitimately claim that they alone came up with the idea of using LED’s to light a scene for photo or video. This is the US patent office at it’s worst. I didn’t think you could patent a concept. You can patent a specific design or an invention but surely not a the vague concept of putting LED’s in a frame for use in photography.  The Litepanels patents make amusing reading as they include lots of “maybe” or “might” statements and are as vague as you can get. If this ban goes ahead then Litepanels will effectively have a monopoly on the sale LED video lights in the USA. This will prevent competition which in turn reduces innovation and new product development.

I’m running a couple of half day FS100 and FS700 workshops in Bangkok, Thailand on Wednesday the 3rd of October. There will be a morning session and an afternoon session. Both will cover camera setup, lens choices, picture settings and include a hands on session for you to try the cameras. These are free workshops. If you would like a place please contact me.

While chatting to a few people at IBC it was brought to my attention that some people find my blog a little too advanced and intimidating. So in order to try to address that I’m going to go back to basics and write about some of the basic principles of digital video. The plan is to look at some basic concepts and then expand on these so that even beginners will gain a deeper understanding of these topics.

To kick off I’m going to look at White Balance.

What Does it Do?

Accurate white balance ensures that white objects in your video appear white, in addition it ensures that colours look natural and similar to the colours you see with your own eyes while shooting the scene.

How do I set it?

You can use the cameras auto mode, often called ATW (auto tracing white balance), a preset white balance, calibrate the white balance using a white or grey object or manually dial in the white balance.

Background:

Different light sources have different colour temperatures. For example an incandescent light bulb, the type with a glowing filament has a low colour temperature while an arc lamp which is much hotter will have a higher colour temperature. Low colour temperature light sources like a filament light bulb are at the red or orange end of the visible light spectrum while hotter light sources like an arc lamp or the sun are at the blue end of the light spectrum. Our own visual system will adapt to these varying colour temperatures but a video camera needs to be set to the correct colour temperature to reproduce colours correctly. The colour temperature of a light source is measured in “degrees Kelvin” or “K”. Lower numbers will be at the red end and higher numbers at the blue end. So a filament light bulb will glow orange at typically 2,300k while the mid day sun will be around 5,500k and the light from a clear blue sky is around 9,000k. If you shoot with a camera set for a low colour temperature i.e. 3,200k outside on a sunny day your pictures will be very blue. If you shoot with a camera set for a higher temperature like daylight, typically 5,600k under filament lamps the pictures will be very orange.

Different Types of White Balance Setting.

Full Auto, ATW, Auto Tracking White, Auto White: This is generally a fully automatic mode that tries to guess the correct white balance. It normally works by assuming that the brightest parts of the scene are white objects and will try to correct these objects so that they appear white. As a result ATW is often easily fooled especially by bright slightly off white walls. As ATW is always active if the scene you are shooting changes then so may the white balance and this can be seen as a colour shift during the shot. ATW can be a little unpredictable and trying to later correct a shot where the white balance changes part way through can be very difficult. One advantage with ATW is that if you move from one place with one colour temperature to a place with a different colour temperature, for example moving from an interior room lit by filament lights to outside daylight then the ATW should compensate for the change in colour temperature automatically. On many pro  cameras ATW can be assigned to the white balance “preset, A, B” switch “B” position.

Preset White: Preset White allows you to pre set the colour temperature manually. Normally this preset will be for 3,200K (Tungsten filament lamps) or 5,600K (average daytime exterior). Many more recent Sony cameras will have a switch to select preset white and then a further button to alternate between 3,200 and 5,600K.  Preset white is useful when you have a multi camera shoot to get all cameras matching or for setting the white balance when shooting under coloured lights such as stage or concert lighting where ATW would really struggle or manual white balancing may give an incorrect colour balance. It’s is also often the white balance method of choice on projects that will be colour graded in post production as it gives a constant setting from shot to shot, scene to scene which colourists often find easier and faster to work with.

Manual White Balance: This is sometimes misunderstood, but when done correctly will give the most accurate results. This is where you have a 3 way switch marked “Prst” (preset) “A” and “B”. When in the “A” or “B” position (assuming ATW has not been assigned to the “B” position) a white balance memory is used to determine the colour balance of the camera. To get the correct colour balance the camera needs to be sample and memorise the colour temperature of the light in the scene you want to shoot. This is done using a white or grey card or object. It doesn’t really matter which you use provided the card or object is not coloured in any way and can be correctly exposed. Be careful what you use, a lot of paper is dyed slightly blue to make it appear brighter. If you have a choice the best thing to use is a grey card designed for photography or video exposure and white balance. Place the card at the center of your shot, you want the primary light source for your scene to be falling on the card. Point the camera at the card, it should fill at least 50% of the frame and expose it so that it is around the middle of your exposure range, not bright white and not dark grey, right in the middle. Then with the white balance switch in the “A” or “B” position press the “white balance” button (often found on the front of the camera under the lens or close to the white balance switch). The camera will then adjust the gain of the red, blue and green channels so that the grey/white card shows no colour and will often display the measured colour temperature in the viewfinder or a simple “OK” message. If you get a “NG” or error message you may need to adjust your exposure up or down a little. Look at the pictures on a colour screen and check that they look OK. If not, check that the grey/white card is in the centre of your frame again and try repeating the process. You can store two manual white balance settings one in the “A” memory and one in the “B” memory and switch between them as needed.

Advanced White Balance Techniques: Sometimes it can be useful to use a white balance colour temperature that may be different from the actual colour temperature of the scene. For example if you are shooting a sunset the colour temperature of the actual light might be around 2,000 to 3,000K. If you were to white balance the camera to match this it would neutralise the orange glow of the sunset making it much less colourful. So to shoot a sunset you might want to have the camera set to a higher colour temperature to accentuate the orange sunset light. Setting the camera to preset 5,600k might work, but perhaps this takes things too far and makes it too orange. In this case you might want to dial in an in between value for your white balance like 4,400K. Some cameras will allow you to do this by changing the preset white value (in picture profiles or scene files on most Sony cameras). Alternately some cameras will allow you to add an offset to your manually set white balance, but do remember if you do this to remove it again once your done with it.

Another way to white balance the camera with a warmer or cooler white balance than the actual lighting conditions is to use a coloured card instead of a white/grey card. If you use a card with a slight blue tint then the camera will think the scene is bluer than it really is. This results in a final image that is warmer (more orange) than if you had used a white/grey card. If you use a card with a slight orange tint then the camera will think the ambient light is warmer resulting in a final image that looks cooler (more blue).  Instead of using coloured cards (often called warming or cooling cards) you can achieve exactly the same effect by doing your white balance through a blue or orange lighting gel or filter.

What to avoid: Try to avoid mixing different light sources with different colour temperatures. For example a person sat close to a window, lit by a filament light will be illuminated by the orange 3,200K light from the lamp as well as the blue 5,600K light from outside. This can result in some strange colours and the scene may look odd (of course you may deliberately choose to have this colour contrast to enhance your scene). Some light sources contain peaks and gaps in the light spectrum that they emit and this can result in odd colour reproduction. A common example of this is fluorescent lights used in homes and offices that often have a pronounced green tint to them that white balancing alone will not remove.

This is not entirely unexpected. Digital production of movies is common place now and rapidly taking over from film. As a result Fujifilm has decided to concentrate on other key business areas and will stop making positive and negative film stocks for movie production from March next year. The end of an era!

See the Fujifilm press release for the full details.

Before I went to Arizona to shoot the monsoon thunderstorms and Grand Canyon I felt that I would need a nice fast wide angle lens to help capture some of the panoramas and vistas that I would see. A little while ago my friends at Alphatron told me about an E-Mount wide angle lens that was soon to be launched. So after a couple of phone calls I managed to secure the loan of one of the SWV-E11-16 cine style E-Mount lenses. Even before opening the box I knew this was something a bit special as the box was pretty heavy, no lightweight plastic lens in this box. On opening the box I was not disappointed. Inside was a very solid looking cine style lens with substantial gears on the focus, zoom and iris rings. This isn’t really a zoom lens, more of a variable focal length lens. The difference between the field of view at 11mm and 16mm isn’t all that great, but it does allow you to vary the framing.

As this is an E-Mount lens, not only does it work on the FS100 and FS700 but it also fits on any other E-mount camera such as my NEX5N.

This isn’t a lightweight lens, it is a substantial, beautifully constructed lens that is a real pleasure to use. Compared to a typical DSLR lens the focus ring has a much greater travel which makes accurate focus much easier to achieve. The 0.8 mod gear rings allow the use of standard follow focus systems so no need to use add-on adapters. I can’t stress enough how nice this lens feels to use. But the feel of a lens is only a small part of the story, of course it’s the image performance that is what’s really important and again the Zunow does not disappoint.

I used it in various light conditions from bright desert sun to after dark. The wide f2.8 aperture makes this quite a fast lens considering it’s wide field of view. Most ultra wide lenses tend not to be as fast as this. When set to 11mm there is some noticeable barrel distortion which is really surprising and it’s not particularly objectionable as you zoom in to 16mm this distortion decreases to very low levels. This is one sharp lens. The images from this lens, both stills and HD video show huge amounts of crisp clear details.

The best performance was from f4, but even fully open a f2.8 the centre of the image remains sharp and with good contrast. There is some slight softening in the corners at very wide apertures but this is not severe and I felt that the lens was perfectly useable even at f2.8 unlike some other wide angle lenses I have used. Colour fringing and chromatic aberrations are well controlled and I didn’t observe anything objectionable.

I really liked using this lens. It has the feel of a high end PL mount lens and performance to match. It looks the part and looks like it will last a very long time. I was very sad to have to hand it back after the shoot. The European distributor, Alphatron, tell me that as well as this E-Mount lens, Zunow are planning on producing PL mount versions as well as  additional similar lenses of different focal lengths.