Tag Archives: PMW-F3

Uncategorized

PMW F3 Picture Profile Smorgasbord.

26 Comments

I’ve been working some more on picture profiles for the PMW-F3, mainly matrix settings. You can download the full set by clicking here: ac-profiles. Download the zip file, unzip and place the “Sony” folder in the root of an SxS card or SD card in an adapter. Place the card in the camera and go into the “picture profiles” menu and select a picture profile and then “ppdata” and “recall” to load the data into your camera. This will overwrite any PP’s you already have.

Here’s the latest settings I have:

ALL use Detail level -17, Frequency +20, Aperture +25 unless otherwise stated.

AC Warm1: Warm look, less blue/yellow

Cinegamma 1, Black Gamma -25, Black Level -2.

Matrix: Standard, level +8, R-G +14, R-B +12, G-R +4, G-B +8, B-R +4, B-G -18

AC Cool1: Stark cool look, maybe day for night.

Cinegamma 1, Black Gamma -25, Black Level -2.

Matrix: Standard, level +22, R-G -44, R-B -24, G-R -34, G-B =28, B-R -7, B-G -69

AC Elec1:  Electronic, vivid look.

Gamma STD1, Black Gamma -20, black level -3, Detail Level -10, Frequency -40

Matrix Hi-Sat,

NAT1CG-1: Neutral Look, natural colors, less yellow/green.

Cinegamma 1, Black Level -2

Matrix FL-Light, Level +3, R-G +2, R-B +2, G-R +8, G-B +8, B-R -8, B-G -6

Note that for most of these I have used a cinegamma, that is because I would assume that post work will be done on the footage. If your not planning on doing any grading or post work you should consider using a standard gamma which will give a richer looking image or cinegamma 2 which is broadcast safe.

Uncategorized

Genus Matte Box, Rails and Shoulder mount on PMW-F3

16 Comments
Genus kit fitted to an F3

So here is my current set up. As you may know Genus are making the 3D rig that I designed, so I get to play with the latest Genus bits and pieces. This is my F3 with a pre-production universal riser and base plate. The base plate will fit most camcorders and incorporates mounts for a pair of 15mm rails. Up front I have a Genus Wide 4×4 matte box. I’m really pleased with this light weight matte box with added top flag, it is a good match for the Nikon DSLR lenses that I will be using and is much, much lighter than my old Petroff matte box. It fits lenses up to 105mm  diameter so I will need a bigger matte box for many PL mount lenses (and bigger filters) perhaps I’ll get one of those nice TLS Raven Matte Boxes. For smaller lenses though the Genus 4×4 is really nice. Behind the matte box I have a Genus Superior follow focus. This is a silky smooth FF unit and on this lens it’s driving one of Genus’s clever flexible lens gears. This is a little bit like a hose clip, a thumb screw tightens it up so that it fastens snuggly around the lens. It will fit a much larger range of lenses than a traditional rigid lens gear.  The lens in the pictures is a Tokina ATX-Pro 28-70mm parfocal zoom. This is a great lens, plenty sharp enough for HD video and it doesn’t telescope when you zoom. Breathing is minimal. To match the lens to the camera there is one of Mike Tapas (MTF) excellent Nikon to F3 adapters.

Genus hand grips and Follow Focus

Underneath the lens I have a pair of hand grips from the Genus shoulder mount kit. The shoulder pad is right at the back behind the camera. For a little bit of extra convenience I have a Genus GAP adapter plate that allows me to use a quick release VCT-14 tripod plate.

The only thing left to sort is a loupe for the LCD screen. I’ve experimented with a Hoodman DSLR loupe that I have and this almost works. It doesn’t cover the full width of the LCD, but does allow me to use the LCD as a viewfinder when using this shoulder rig. I guess I need to get the Hoodman Hood Riser and Hood Strap to make the loupe fit the LCD correctly. I’ve read elsewhere that it does not fit the F3, but my experiments with the loupe alone suggests it will fit. Anyone else tried it yet? I’d rather go this route than getting a Cineroid viewfinder.

The tripod is a Manfrotto 509. This one of their new silky smooth “bridge” style heads. The 509 is a mid weight head with a pretty high payload capability, true fluid action and variable counter balance. I’m going do a separate write up on the tripod, it’s really rather good, especially considering the price!

Uncategorized

PMW-F3 Aliasing Update: Not the issue I feared it might be!

7 Comments

A further update. Sony have requested the original clips with the moire, and I have provided them with these. I have not been able to reproduce the effect with any other brickwork, roof tiles or other repeating patterns other than charts. There seems to be something about the particularly dark shade of bricks with very bright mortar (cement) that the F3 doesn’t like. In addition I have not heard from anyone else using an F3 out in the wild that is having any issues. At least now I know what to watch out for. The moire was only slight and my wife didn’t spot it until I pointed it out to her.

I am very pleased with the images I’m getting from my F3 having just finished my first paying job with it. It was nothing exciting, just a corporate shoot, but the shallow DoF and reduced amount of lighting required has resulted in some really nice footage of an otherwise dull subject. I can’t show you the clips due to client confidentiality, but the client likes the look a lot and it was easier to achieve than it would have been with a DSLR thanks to the proper video camera ergonomics.

Uncategorized

PMW-F3 Aliasing Update: Not the issue I feared it might be!

7 Comments

A further update. Sony have requested the original clips with the moire, and I have provided them with these. I have not been able to reproduce the effect with any other brickwork, roof tiles or other repeating patterns other than charts. There seems to be something about the particularly dark shade of bricks with very bright mortar (cement) that the F3 doesn’t like. In addition I have not heard from anyone else using an F3 out in the wild that is having any issues. At least now I know what to watch out for. The moire was only slight and my wife didn’t spot it until I pointed it out to her.

I am very pleased with the images I’m getting from my F3 having just finished my first paying job with it. It was nothing exciting, just a corporate shoot, but the shallow DoF and reduced amount of lighting required has resulted in some really nice footage of an otherwise dull subject. I can’t show you the clips due to client confidentiality, but the client likes the look a lot and it was easier to achieve than it would have been with a DSLR thanks to the proper video camera ergonomics.

Uncategorized

PMW-F3 Aliasing and Moire.

2 Comments

I’ve been testing and playing with my F3 and first off let me say this… I love this camera, it produces amazing images and I can play with lots of lenses!

But, it’s not all roses. The F3 suffers from aliasing. A zone plate shows extensive aliasing. Until today this had not caused any concerns as I had seen little evidence of it in actual footage, but when shooting some brick houses this afternoon I came across some coloured moire patterns appearing as faint coloured stripes across the brickwork in the footage. It’s not anywhere near as bad as a DSLR, my wife looked at the footage and didn’t notice it until I pointed it out to her, but it’s certainly there. This is disappointing on a camera at this price level, my EX1 doesn’t do this. Now the zone plate shows this to be an issue with the cut off of the optical low pass filter, so I doubt that there is much that can be done in the firmware, but then Sony have done some clever stuff in the past with firmware updates. When working on my picture profile settings I did find that increasing detail above -15 would increase the visibility of the aliases on the zone plate, however when I tested various detail settings with the brickwork there was little difference. I think Nigel Cooper has also seen this, but I’ve not seen it mentioned anywhere else. Has anyone else observed this?

Uncategorized

PMW-F3 Picture Profiles. First Batch.

3 Comments

OK here we go. Here are some notes from testing my PMW-F3. First thing is… aliasing… a zone plate looks pretty bad with a fair amount of aliasing. I had heard rumours of this from others with pre-production units, but in the field I had not seen anything that would worry me. While the zone plate is not pretty, real world aliasing looks acceptable. I usually use brickwork and roof tiles to test for moire and these look clean on my F3. I think a fine patterned shirt could cause concern and I need to look into this further. I am surprised that there is not more about this on the web!

Excessive detail correction does increase the aliasing, however turning detail and aperture off does not reduce the aliasing significantly. Keep the detail level below -15 to avoid increasing the strength of the aliases. Above -15 the aliasing artefacts are more noticeable. Detail “Off” appears to be the same as Detail -25. Below -25 the image softens, below -45 very noticeably and there are some strange increases in aliasing below -50. For the moment I will be using detail at -17 or off.

The aperture setting can be used to add a little sharpness to the image to compensate for not using detail or a low detail setting. Aperture does not increase the appearance of the aliasing artefacts as strongly as the detail correction. I like the added crispness I can get with Aperture set to +30 combined with detail at -17. I would strongly recommend against using a raised aperture setting if you have detail higher than -15 as this will add sharpness to any detail corrected aliases and lead to twittering edges on horizontal and vertical lines.

Colours have that usual Sony look. Not bad and pretty natural looking, but for me a little on the green side. For a more natural 1:1 look I quite like these Matrix settings:
R-G +10, R-B +4, G-R 0, G-B +14, B-R +3, B-G -3, Std Matrix.

For a more Canon like look with Rec-709 Matrix I came up with these:
R-G -2, R-B +9, G-R -11, G-B +2, B-R -16, B-G -10, Std Matrix, level +14, Blk Gamma -20

For use with Cinegamma 1 I use the above with Matrix Level +25, Blk Gamma -36. Highlights are a little washy, but as with any Cinegamma the best results are obtained by grading in post production.

Uncategorized

Can you use a 2/3″ Zoom on a 35mm camera??

Leave a comment

Can you use a 2/3″ B4 broadcast zoom on a 35mm camera. Well yesterday I would have said “no”, but having seen this video on the AbelCine web site, now I’m not so sure. UPDATE: OK Should have read the specs…. it’s only suitable for smaller sensors as it has a 22mm image circle, the F3 has a 27mm diagonal. It’s still a viable option for the AF100 however.

http://blog.abelcine.com/2011/02/11/using-23-lenses-on-the-panasonic-af100/

The HDx2 adapter magnifies the image to fill a 35mm sensor, doubling the focal length at the same time. This is very intriguing as 35mm zooms are few and far between and very expensive. There is a 2 stop light loss (well if you expand the image 2 times that’s what happens) but most broadcast zooms are pretty fast lenses to start with. I can’t help but think that the pictures might be a little soft, but if you already have decent 2/3″ glass then the $5,500 for the adapter might make a lot of sense. Anyone out there with experience of one of these? I’d love to know how it performs.

Uncategorized

Can you use a 2/3″ Zoom on a 35mm camera??

Leave a comment

Can you use a 2/3″ B4 broadcast zoom on a 35mm camera. Well yesterday I would have said “no”, but having seen this video on the AbelCine web site, now I’m not so sure. UPDATE: OK Should have read the specs…. it’s only suitable for smaller sensors as it has a 22mm image circle, the F3 has a 27mm diagonal. It’s still a viable option for the AF100 however.

http://blog.abelcine.com/2011/02/11/using-23-lenses-on-the-panasonic-af100/

The HDx2 adapter magnifies the image to fill a 35mm sensor, doubling the focal length at the same time. This is very intriguing as 35mm zooms are few and far between and very expensive. There is a 2 stop light loss (well if you expand the image 2 times that’s what happens) but most broadcast zooms are pretty fast lenses to start with. I can’t help but think that the pictures might be a little soft, but if you already have decent 2/3″ glass then the $5,500 for the adapter might make a lot of sense. Anyone out there with experience of one of these? I’d love to know how it performs.

Uncategorized

When is 4:4:4 not really 4:4:4.

2 Comments

The new Sony F3 will be landing in end users hands very soon. One of the cameras upgrade options is a 4:4:4 RGB output, but is it really 4:4:4 or is it something else?

4:4:4 should mean no chroma sub-sampling, so the same amount of samples for the R, G and B channels. This would be quite easy to get with a 3 chip camera as each of the 3 chips has the same number of pixels, but what about a bayer sensor as used on the F3 and other bayer cameras too for that matter?

If the sensor is subsampling the aerial image B and R compared to G (Bayer matrix, 2x G samples for each R and B) then no matter how you interpolate those samples, the B and R are still sub sampled and data is missing. Potentially depending on the resolution of the sensor even the G may be sub sampled compared to the frame size. In my mind a true 4:4:4 system means one pixel sample for each colour at every point within the image. So for 2k that’s 2k R, 2K G and 2K B. For a Bayer sensor that would imply a sensor with twice as many horizontal and vertical pixels as the desired resolution or a 3 chip design with a pixel for each sample on each of the R,G and B sensors. It appears that the F3’s sensor has nowhere near this number of pixels, rumour has it at around 2.5k x 1.5k.

If it’s anything less than 1 pixel per colour sample, while the signal coming down the cable may have an even number of RGB data streams the data streams won’t contain even amounts of picture information for each colour, the resolution of the B and R channels will be lower than the Green, so while the signal might be 4:4:4, the system is not truly 4:4:4. Up-converting the 4:2:2 output from a camera to 4:4:4 does not make it a 4:4:4 camera. This is no different to the situation seen with some cameras with 10 bit HDSDI outputs that only contain 8 bits of data. It might be a 10 bit stream, but the data is only 8 bit. It’s like a TV station transmitting an SD TV show on an HD channel. The channel might call itself an HD channel, but the content is still SD even if it has been upscaled to fill in all the missing bits.

Now don’t get me wrong, I’m not saying that there won’t be advantages to getting the 4:4:4 output option. By reading as much information as possible from the sensor, prior to compression there should be an improvement over the 4:2:2 HDSDi output, but it won’t be the same as the 4:4:4 output from an F35 where there is a pixel for every colour sample, but then the price of the F3 isn’t the same as the F35 either!

Uncategorized

MTF services to produce Nikon adapter for F3

Leave a comment


Well no surprises here to be honest but Mike Tapa of MTF has already finalised the design of an adapter that will allow users of Sony’s still to be released PMW-F3 to use low cost (compared to PL) Nikon DSLR lenses. This open up a huge range of lens options and I’m quite sure that with good high end lenses the results will be very good. It’s certainly the way  I will be going.

http://www.lensadaptor.com/