HDV shooting best practices and updated HDR-FX7 / HDR-FX7E tutorial

The updated HDR-FX7 / HDR-FX7E tutorial has gone through a major overhaul.

Check it out, now with comprehensive HDV video shooting best practices, detailed Do's & Don'ts...

High-quality voice-over with your camcorder microphone

I recently struggled to find a cheap voice-over solution with reasonable quality... My editing software has a voice-over feature which can take sound input from the PC sound card; all sound cards or motherboards have a microphone input; so I just figured I should buy a quality headset with a built-in microphone. The microphone, being closest to the mouth, would bring a beautifully sounding voice while rejecting side noise. Or so I thought -- the results were pathetic.

Microphones for PC sound cards have such a low signal, they require overamplification which brings signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) to about 35dB in voice recordings (YMMV). This results in a lot of digital noise contamination with a non-natural voice affected by digital artifacts. This could be due to the insufficient quality of motherboard chipsets naturally, so I replaced this with a full-featured sound card. Little improvement. This might be okay for Internet telephony (VoIP) such as Skype, but totally unacceptable for video productions.

I then found a very nice solution instead (at no additional cost) using my camcorder microphone for live voice recordings:

• You need a DV camcorder, or an HDV camcorder configured to record DV.
• Download and install River Past Audio Capture. The free trial allows for DV/Firewire recordings of up to 2 minutes in a row.
• Use your camcorder as is, or connect an external microphone -- in my case, HDR-FX7E with RØDE Stereo VideoMic. Be sure to remove any tape from the camcorder (to prevent noise from the tape mechanism) and connect it to your PC through Firewire (IEEE1394).
• Use River Past Audio Capture to record voice-over WAV files, with live audio recording through the Firewire interface. Again, note that with an HDV camcorder this will only work after you have configured the menu to record DV (not HDV).
• Drop the WAV files onto your editing timeline.

From there, a couple of tips for best quality:

• You need to speak close to the microphone (I found 10 cm / 3 inches to be adequate).
• Standard wind protection is most recommended to protect against sounds from breathing at the microphone.
• Whether you set the camcorder for automatic or manual audio gain is up to you. AUTO guarantees similar audio levels for all recordings, at the expense of some loudness artifacts as you start speaking sometimes (because of the abrupt change in volume, therefore gain). MANUAL will avoid such inconvenience, but you need extra care and control in your voice to avoid audio clipping.

Overall, although professionals might call this a substandard cheapo hack, I found it extremely satisfactory with near-professional quality -- more than enough for just any serious hobbyist.

Suppressing the blue cast from daylight or shadow

There's a dreaded situation regarding colors and lighting, which happens when you mix sunlight with other color temperatures. For example:

• Shooting indoors under incandescent lighting (using INDOOR White Balance) with some daylight flowing in at the same time through a window: daylight typically appears blue compared to artificial light.
• Shooting outdoors with both direct sunlight and some shaded areas: the shade may appear slightly blue compared to the warm sun.

Professionals would address such issue by color-balancing everything with 5500K-calibrated light sources, or setting some blue gel on the incandescent light source, or avoiding the situation altogether. That's not practical for the casual videographer / hobbyist as you just can't buy a whole set of lighting gear, let alone carry it around the world when travelling. Fortunately, there's a work-around solution only a few clicks away if you have higher-end editing software such as Apple Final Cut Studio, EDIUS Pro, or Adobe Premiere Pro.

Read full story...

Enters Secondary Color Correction. Secondary CC is color correction that you apply only on some part of the picture, based on some criteria.

For example in the following before/after comparison, the cars under the shadow have a slight blue cast which is effectively removed with secondary CC.

All that was needed was to qualify the incorrect parts of the picture with a HSL key (Hue Saturation Luminance) targeted at that specific blue hue, then desaturate the color away from blue.

Here is another example: daylight casts a strong blue color on the white walls around the paintings, because the camcorder's white balance was aligned to INDOOR (i.e. tungsten) temperature. Here the picture was a bit trickier to correct and two distinct corrections were needed: one for the blue cast on the upper half, one for the slightly purple cast on the bottom part.

There's still maybe a slight cyan tint on the upper right part, but this is as far as we can go without altering the paintings themselves and it is already a considerable improvement on the initial image.

You get the idea now... If you would like to further explore the techniques of color correction, read the splendid book by Steve Hullfish: The Art and Technique of Digital Color Correction.

White Balancing article by Art Adams

Art Adams at ProVideo Coalition wrote a nice short article about White Balancing.

Obviously I can't carry a chip chart and a vectorscope when going out there and shooting, let alone own them, so I'll essentially retain one simpler advice in Art's experience - quote:

"If the shot works on either daylight or tungsten preset, that’s where I stay--because those results are the most predictable without a monitor, as long as I’ve viewed them in advance and found them acceptable."

Okay! Sounds exactly like I did here! I checked the OUTDOOR WB preset in advance, determined what custom Picture Profile adjustment would make it closest to what I like best, and voilà - colors are much more predictable and gorgeous now with my FX7.

We often learn things the hard way (like ruined footage), and after that it's really nice to read one of the experts confirming this WB preset stuff.

Colors with the HDR-FX7 (wrap-up) - Shooting outdoors

Here comes the conclusion of my quest about getting colors right when shooting outdoors with the HDR-FX7E. After so many tests and color woes, the solution is so simple that - I think - it now calls for a comprehensive summary in one single post:

• First I had noticed that the green of trees and grass sometimes appears a bit yellow when shooting with default settings - that includes using Auto White Balance. So I studied the various color adjustments that are available in the FX7, and came up with a proposed picture profile tweak in Part 1 - Fixing the color green in AWB.
• Then I tested different picture profiles with AWB in Part 2 - Tweaking Auto White Balance. This showed that picture profiles like WB Shift -1 / Color Level +1 do improve the color green a bit with a color balance closer to neutral. As a side tip, I also showed how a Gray Scale can help equalize colors between shots in adverse conditions. But in the end, it appeared that picture profile tweaks are no match for the wild behavior of Auto White Balance, which can cause random yellow casts to various extents - sometimes slight, sometimes quite severe - and a nightmare when trying to match colors in post. A better, repeatable solution was needed.
• How about Manual White Balance? Part 3 - Inaccurate Manual WB showed that it also causes random color casts, and therefore cannot be trusted. Too bad for such a costly, sophisticated, 3-sensor camcorder.
• Part 4 - OUTDOOR WB preset finally showed that the OUTDOOR WB preset is the best candidate for securing faithful colors and a neutral outdoors color balance.
• On to a real-life test in the countryside: Part 5 - OUTDOOR vs. AWB comparison demonstrates the superiority of OUTDOOR WB over Auto WB. I also show that changing the 'AWB SENS' menu setting from the default 'Intelligent' to the value 'Low' seems to improve AWB behavior by reducing yellow color cast when that happens.
• And for anyone who would need further convincing, Part 6 - More AWB yellow evil examples!

Many thanks to klenkfilm and 2mnyHCs of Sony HDV Info .com who gave this OUTDOOR preset tip and warned against using AWB (thread: FX7 and white balance: what is your opinion?). After all, AWB did a fair job on the HDR-HC3, and choosing a fixed preset instead seemed to go against the very nature of outdoors shooting where the color of light always seems to change ever so subtly. So why try to outsmart the machine's auto program in the first place, that's what I had first thought!

Anyway, whatever the cause of this AWB behavior, whatever the reason for that wicked 'AWB SENS' feature, there's now a simple solution for best colors when shooting outdoors.

So here is my final complete recommendation for shooting outdoors with the HDR-FX7E (custom picture profile and other settings):

• Regarding colors: OUTDOOR WB preset, WB Shift -1, Color Level +1. Maybe also set 'AWB SENS' to 'Low' in case you would still need an emergency temporary switch to AWB.
• Regarding sharpness: Sharpness 6, 'AT IRIS LMT' set to f5.6 while trying to keep iris around f4 as much as possible, and avoid full zoom-out (keep a slight zoom-in instead).

End of this quest, summer is vacation time - everybody move out there and record great memories!