Ah, it is there, shows how much I check these things.
Yes, that's what I was referring to. This is good news indeed. It'd now be a reasonable assumption that Vegas will read 10bit YUV, process it through its 32bit FP pipeline and output that as 10bit YUV, BRAVO!
However unfortunately unless you've got uber deep pockets none of your HD delivery options support 10bit YUV. If you're outputing for SD broadcast different story. Then you just need deep pockets!

Thanks for finding that for me, I've got an upcoming project that requires output to Digital Betacam for SD broadcast, it may come in very handy...or not. Keep in mind that even in SD 10bit YUV eats up a lot of disk space.

Bob.

Reading any of the standard books on lighting for video is perhaps the worst thing you could do. Film is typically lit the opposite way around to video.

I'm in the twilight zone right now after surgery, but what makes sense here?

Is somebody shooting film on their HC7???

Lighting film vs. video is no longer what it used to be. Today's $200,000 Sony F35 CineAlta is still a video camera, as are the 4K Dalsa Origin and the Viper, etc.

The lighting is no longer necessarily different based on if you shoot film or video, it is more a matter of what your workflow looks like and what look you are seeking for each scene.

Film is typically lit to a stop, not the other way around.

I'm sorry, but while this may be true for most event videographers, it is not true for "video" based drama shooting or even much modern documentary. You choose an f/stop for aestethic reasons or because you need to stop down your lens for maximum sharpness or enough DOF.

Probably also worth mentioning that the "10bit" used in film is 10bit Log which is a very different beast to the 10bit YUV used in video land.

Oh, by film you mean "drama?" That would explain what you said above. I'm so used to actually shooting with film that I didn't connect with this kind of terminology.

Much of the advantages of the 10bit YUV DB cameras comes from the 2/3" CCDs. Even truncating the 10bit to 8bit and using Vegas's 8bit pipeline they'll still give a stunning image compared to the 1/3" DV cameras.

No doubt, but this doesn't negate the differences between 8-bit, 10-bit, and 32-bit in post.

unless you've got uber deep pockets none of your HD delivery options support 10bit YUV. If you're outputing for SD broadcast different story. Then you just need deep pockets!

Bob, I think you are living in a world of very high margin overpriced "decks" which I think has been many manufacturers' main livelihood.

Looking around here in Hollywood, I see more and more hard drive delivery.

D5-SD decks that cost $150,000 new now sell in good condition for $3,000 used.

Who wants the hassle if you can avoid it?

Many of the cheaper Panny DVCPRO- HD decks are garbage, even when you fork over tens of thousands of dollars. I guess they're not expensive enough.

Trust me, I sure as heck don't live in that world. If I had anything remotely like that kind of money I'd be on a boat in the Bahamas instead of freezing my butt off down here.

Yes indeed, HDD delivery is the way of the future. I could deliver a movie using Prospect2K for a film out on a $100 USB drive instead of HDCAM SR. But here's the rub. The post house will charge a fee to transcode it back to SR and then most likely want me to sign off on it.

That's the problem at the moment. Tape formats are known entities, files on HDD drives aren't. You can check what's being sent to a VCR with scopes and monitors, not so simple with files on a disk unless you test, test and test again. Even then I've seen some amazingly off prints at premiers down here and this is from top flight post facilites. That said one local did say he was blown away by the new baselight system, finally what you see is exactly how the print will look.

The other way of course is digital projection. Down here we have eCinema in over 150 cinemas. Whole system cost under $10K per screen. A projector and a PC. Plays out 720p mpeg-2 straight out of Vegas. Plenty good enough for art house cinema sized screens.

On the other hand we have a few cinemas with DCI 2K projection. That's a very expensive road to go down in prepping the digital print, thankfully we have one of the few certified labs locally but still.
There's a twist to 2K projection that I'd predicted would happen.
Current Sydney Film Festival is using a number of cinemas fitted with 2K projectors. Would seem easy enough to feed a JH3 into that projector except the cinemas don't own the projector, the distributor does and he wants serious money for you to use his projector, more than the festival can afford. Worse still, the 35mm projector is still in place so now there's not too many portholes left to poke your own projector through.

Bob.

Vegas still uses VFW rather than the more modern Directshow approach which most other NLEs use. VFW only does 8 bits. Yeah you can read a 10 bit video in Vegas, but it truncates to 8 bits. You can also write to Cineform 10 bit... yeah it's 8 bits of data with two empty bits added on.

I work in HDV so it's no big deal to me, but I can see where it would be pretty important to someone using a 10 bit format camera like http://digitalcontentproducer.com/cameras/revfeat/video_panasonic_ajhpx/this one.[/link].

Good article on 10bit Log and how to use / unlock it in AE:

http://library.creativecow.net/articles/oconnell_pete/cineon.php

However I think we're drifting way off what Cliff was asking about.
My point about lighting was that it has more impact than anything on the results you can get from the HDV cameras. I've shot a bit with the V1E and it's none too shabby except from in the shadows and blacks. The blocky noise is horrid. That can have a significant impact if you're encoding back to mpeg-2. You could avoid this problem with lighting. Maybe the camera doesn't have any manual controls. Fine so make certain the camera is getting enough light so it isn't winding the gain up, a light meter would seem a cheap way to check this. Watch your background, keep it well lit. The use of dramatic high key lighting whilst it might look good could work against you, you might have to limit your creative choices based on what your camera is capable of. As you said, take your cheap camera and shoot the heck out of it. I'd suggest taking some readings while doing that. Then you know what light levels you need to achieve an optimal outcome. That's where I was coming from regarding lighting to a stop. Most of the afforable optics work better at around a certain range of f stops.


As I understand Cliff's project he's shooting interviews with a consummer HDV camera. A small fluro lighting kit would seem affordable and easy enough to use with the kind of camera he can afford. So long as he's got enough light so the camera isn't upping the gain and has the camera locked off he should be do pretty well. Perhaps better still if the iris isn't wide open or fully closed. I doubt he'll be doing any heavy compositing either, the existing Vegas 8 bit pipeline should be adequate for this project.

Bob.