Today I picked up the DVX100A, and performed about 10 minutes of test shots. The purpose of this was mostly to make sure that motion looked okay in 24p advanced pulldown mode, as Ben Stein was somewhat disparaging towards the capabilities of 24p.
Having performed initial experiments, I can say that it looks beautiful compared to normal interlaced 60i video footage! There is more motion blur in 24p mode contributing much less to that “video feel”, and the results definitely look more film-like than video.
During the process of my “Diary Film” project back at the beginning of winter quarter, I shot about 20 frames just of blurred tree branches and foliage. This looked amazing on film with the motion blur and contrast. I decided that for my test, I would capture a bit more than 20 frames of this same thing. Being suddenly completely giddy with the sudden capability to capture real progressive frames, without the lengthy process of 24p conversion, as well as with pulsing brainial dopamine from the recent release of the new Tool single, Vicarious, I decided to (finally) whip out a bit of musical sound with all of the software knowledge I have been accumulating over the last few weeks, and synch it to the footage I took. This is all very rough, but hopefully it will give you good folk an idea of how good the footage from this camera looks. (check out some of the still frames!).
I realize that in all likelihood at this resolution, you can’t really tell the difference between this footage and something shot with a palmcorder. If this is the case, you must take my word for it and believe me that it looks amaazing (if you know how to properly manipulate pulldowns/interlacing/fields/framerates &c.).
2 Comments
no dude, you can tell that looks amazing. Tho I think on some of the tree shots I notice some weird distortion that I don’t know the name for, but I think it might be related to the V DETAIL FREQ. In the scene menu, right above where you can switch to 24p. When it’s on THIN, the DVX is doing a vertical resolution higher than what “interlaced television can safely display” to quote that one DVX book. I think that might be the distortion I saw. You may want to try experimenting with it set to MID (I dunno about THICK, seems like that’ll lower the resolution too much).
But even still I only noticed this during one bit of the moving trees in the beginning, otherwise I thought it looked great and am excited to see what you’re going to do with 24p.
this was a very cool little test video… the fence bit was great… i love how movement can help to highlight the repetitive patterns of an object… like the chain link fence…