OK, back to school kids ....

I said:
That must have been a warm day, i can see heat waves....

Jerry Said:
"Heat waves" Ha! Fooled you, too. It was 40°F that day (yesterday). Those "heat rays" were the stabilization artifacts.

I Said:
"Jerry - ha! you got me again with your [post] stabilization! That really looks like heat waves, maybe repackage this as a heat wave plugin effect :)
And then it dawned on me, you use high shutter speeds to get better stabilization too, Doh!" [that was with reference to the strobing issue]

YES these are stabilisation artifacts, but not in the camera, its in Marcalli plugin during post.
repeat: * Please read posts before slamming *

Moving along::
My personal theory is, this is due to rolling shutter or 'jello' artifacts. Remember the camera is at x20, which is telephoto about 600mm, on a 35mm equivalent frame. Thats a LOT of wobble hand held or even with a pillow. Jerry's test includes not just testing the camera, this is also about seeing if it can be stabilised enough to get good footage, without a tripod. So during the post stabilisation process, imagine the rolling shutter in the frame, the frame is rock steady yes, but the small bends are visable in places. I believe this is the 'heat wave' effect we see. Its nothing to do with the camera stabilisation, you see no heat wave effect during his other shots from the tripod- thats totally clear.
The bottom line is, yes and Jerry has already agreed with this, his camera needs a tripod! no one is arguing about that. So what? Its good to push the limits to see what equipment can do and not just 'accept' what is current practice. Jerry is testing his workflow, not just his camera. These ARE stabilisation (post) aftifacts. As for the camera itself; compare the footage from the Tm700 and the AC130 - its night and day!! Jerry already showed a comparison very early on.

Gentlemen, this thread has been de-railed. And as a result, i have reported a certain user as a Report Abuse. Its quite possible this will go no further, but if this de-railment persists, then i will report it again or even call SCS to take action.
That said, can we simply be allowed to continue our conversation regarding this post. Lets move on in a positive manner. And if anyone does not like the content of this thread, you are of course allowed to choose not to read or participate in it.

Paul.

Paul,

You pretty much "nailed it". Thanks for attempting to make this forum a place for more civil discourse.

I'm walking somewhat of a fine line by replying in this thread as my normal philosophy is to just let the flamers have their say. It's better to let them have the last word than for me to exacerbate a flame war. I did have a weak moment when I saw the post, "Jerry, my biggest concern here is YOU don't seem to be learning."

This is probably my last post to this thread. I am considering one final post, but need to mull it over for a day or so.

...Jerry

Thanks Jerry I see an improvement in the exposure. A pity we didn’t see what set the birds off, a quick cut to the fox would have been appropriate.
I tend to shoot very hot and overexpose a lot because that’s how I see things .To help myself with exposure I wear a hat and shoot a lot from the shadows.
long shadows can be overcome by moving into the image and shooting into the shadow = shadows runs z axis can be very attractive. Keep testing.

I did some more shots Sunday trying different exposures and shutter speeds on the NEX VG-20 …also got some eye wobble. Look you can get so technical over this stuff that you stop enjoying it and the only time you film stuff is because it’s a paid gig and your mental approach is same…. day in.. day out.
So experiment and enjoy.

The hornbill bird at the end of the clip I swear its feet missed the lens by mm.


The only guy who can shoot hand held steady 600 35 zoom is popeye.

"The bottom line is, yes and Jerry has already agreed with this, his camera needs a tripod! no one is arguing about that. So what? Its good to push the limits to see what equipment can do and not just 'accept' what is current practice. Jerry is testing his workflow, not just his camera. These ARE stabilisation (post) aftifacts. As for the camera itself; compare the footage from the Tm700 and the AC130 - its night and day!! Jerry already showed a comparison very early on."

I think the whole one camera compared to another thing is a bit pointless and no doubt annoying to Jerry. He's made his choice and we should be doing our best to help him enjoy what he's bought, especially as he's made major contributions here, he isn't trying to make money, just enjoy his hobby.

I agree it's good to push the limits just to see where it takes you. My concern here is the process he's using seems from his posts a bit random and it's hard to tell what's what. I assume the point of his posting is to elicit comments and advice. Problem I've found with many of these kinds of things is one small change in one thing can have a profound impact on another so it's hard to know what's really causing what. As you've hinted at small issues with rolling shutter artifacts made a little worse by fast shutter speeds could cause some post stabilization software to make matters worse...or not. Unless you control as many variables as possible when running tests you can get misled.
The other thing we all need to keep in mind is it can all come down to "what works for you". Over the years I've taken on board lots of advice. All of it no doubt good and well intentioned but some of it just didn't work for me, maybe I just never understood it or my scenarios were different and the advice just wasn't going to work.

Bob.

Rory - love it.
Really liking your feel with the focus pulls and disolves. Out of focus water droplets. Nicely put together.
Music fits nicely too.

Its easy to pull things apart - we could talk about rolling shutter or white balance, but the feel of this is so nice. I think thats more important than anything.
Thanks for sharing.

Paul.

Thanks Paul, I hope that more folks just get out and enjoy filming and editing. This thing we do is so complex and difficult to get right, it can become frustrating and uncreative. So enjoy your new cam Jerry and keep posting.

"I think the whole one camera compared to another thing is a bit pointless and no doubt annoying to Jerry. He's made his choice and we should be doing our best to help him enjoy what he's bought, especially as he's made major contributions here, he isn't trying to make money, just enjoy his hobby"Bingo!

...Jerry (okay, maybe one more post after this)

"Just checking in case maybe i'm loosing my mind here (possible!), but, errrmm, all 4 of the nature videos get progressively better? Mainly in the exposure area. I see an improvement. Its not just staying the same or getting worse or anything... Do i need an eye check?"

Paul,
no I think your eyes are fine. The closeups have too many blown out highlights for my taste.
The later shots might well be exactly the same exposure but the white birds each take up less of the frame so even thought they might be blown out it's less noticeable. For the wide shots at a guess I think if Jerry had closed the iris a bit hm, maybe he'd loose the shoreline in the shadows and that wouldn't look too good.

Bob.

Gentlemen, this thread has been de-railed. And as a result, i have reported a certain user as a Report Abuse. Its quite possible this will go no further, but if this de-railment persists, then i will report it again or even call SCS to take action.

I didn't read anything in this thread to warrant, in my opinion, an official abuse report. It would be a disaster to lose another of the most valuable members of the forum.

In 1972, I was filming a sea otter show for Wild Kingdom in Monterey, California and happened to be staying at the same hotel as the crew of Jonathan Livingston Seagull. I notices a .marvelous 4WD pickup truck with a sun roof and mounted on the roof and on the driver side were hihats. The owner showed up and turned out to be Jack Couffer the DP of JLS. We had a nice chat and later a dinner or two. Jack was the Disney cinematographer responsible for many of the early nature films. He also wrote a great book about his wartime effort in the Army. He worked on a project that would use bats to carry small incendiary devices to be dropped over Japan.

As a guy whose boss didn't like hand holding I would like to commend Jerry's work on the fox..

As for Bob, I'd love to buy him a Wisconsin bratwurst if he ever gets to Chicago.

Ralph

Ralph, were those Vam-pyrotechnic bats? :)

Peter

Nice anecdote Ralph I am wondering how many Japanese caves the bats distroyed?

"As for Bob, I'd love to buy him a Wisconsin bratwurst if he ever gets to Chicago. "

Thanks Ralph,
I'll keep that in mind, I might get back to the USA this year, I really want to see more of the country.

I really take my hat off to those who shoot wildlife. The technical skills, maybe if I had my life over again I could acquire, the patience, not in 100 lifetimes of meditation.

Bob.

I've come to this thread mercifully late (c'mon, guys, lighten up), but as for the wobbly top and bottom of the bird video, I'd have to go back to the raw video to be sure.

Rolling shutter does weird things (as you can see and ).

But stabilizing can also do strange stuff. On my FX1 (CCD, so no shutter effects) I've noticed that if I stabilize handheld footage shot through the excellent .8 Sony wide-angle lens made for these models, the DeShaker footage will often show subtle "pumping" artifacts out by the edges, caused by nonlinearities in the image map.

As for the birds, I'd hate to be standing under their takeoff flight path. I saw something similar years ago at the St. Francis yacht club in San Francisco when a thousand birds took flight from a pretty little grove of trees at the sound of a starting cannon. A hundred unsuspecting visitors enjoying the shade of the trees were just clobbered with white splats.

Okay, here's my absolute last post to this thread.

The "Heat Wave" effect mentioned earlier is a result of the inability of Mercalli V2 to adequately correct the Rolling Shutter effect at 29.97 fps.

What initially confused me (and why I had to take a couple days to test) is "Why haven't I seen the same problem with my TM700 tests with stabilization?" (hint: all my TM700 stabization tests were done at 1080 60p). Here's an example of what I consider outstanding stabilization with great Rolling Shutter correction:



Well, the answer is that the 59.94 fps footage stabilizes much, much better than 29.97 fps footage. As I lamented early on in this thread, the AC130 does not record in 1080 60p (bummer!), but it will record in 720 60p. The following test compares 29.97 fps vs 59.97 fps shot in the AC130. There's lots of wobble in the 29.97 fps, but I need to look very closely to see any wobble in the 59.97 fps stabilization.



I did similar testing with the TM700 and the results are the same. I didn't consolidate those into a Vegas Project and upload to YouTube as I'm frankly getting weary of this whole process - just trust me on this one.

...Jerry

PS: Also, ignore the color grading differences between the AC130 29.97 fps & 59.94 fps (I used a different "scene" file on each shot, and I didn't want to redo everything just to get the color grading to match).

Good tests.
I'd say thats quite conclusive. 60fps stabilises way better than 30.
Now i am trying to think why.... more frames, less rolling shutter? hmm.

But anyway, i thought the test looked great and i am always blown away by your 'before' and 'after' stabilisation shots! 60 being the winner of course, goodbye heat wave. :)

thanks Jerry, i know you must be getting fed up of all this, but i can certainly say its been very interesting. And keep having fun with that honkin big camera! hehe.

Paul.