Quote:
Originally Posted by Nautilus
I never blamed it on encoding - as I've stated two times already, even raw unencoded footage didn't look as great as I had hoped for. I blame it mostly on camera (1/3" matrix against 35mm on film or similar sized matrixes of high end digital cameras), and lower dynamic range (7 stops against 11 of high end digital cameras and 13-14 on film). And lower resolution of course - 1280x720 against 4K .
Don't know why I hoped our new camera will produce footage that will look close to high end production to begin with  That was silly I guess.
I understand what you're saying about the the lightning though. Yes, that's part of the problem, but no lighting will give you the same results you get with 4K resolution, 1 inch matrix and 12 stops of dynamic range cameras.
I directed several shoots myself when we started shooting with the new HD camera couple of months ago, check this one for example:
http://media.ferrocash.com/video/ero...eland_g701.wmv
(no action, just girl changing several pairs of pantyhose of different colors to check how camera will handle different colors, textures, details etc)
To rule lights out of equation I lit the scene enough, and still image is not good enough imo to view at full HD. After downresing to about 900 pixels it looks fine but not at 1280. I've even intentionally overlit some other scenes to check if that will reduce grain, but no. Still a bit grainy and not crisp enough at full HD.
Again, maybe I'm just being overly critical. |
Jesus dude... I clicked on that clip like 10 minutes ago, surfed all my myspace profiles and came back and it was only @ 45% buffered.
Listen man - Subject, lighting, format. In that order.
Translation to the oposite: Ugly overshot drugged out girl with bad skin, with 1/10th the light as an industrial film, with a consumer quality 1 chip HD camera = not worthy of HD. Or SD for that matter. No offense to your clip, it just came up after 10 minutes of buffering. She's a little muffin-top chunkster!!! Her boobs are good and she's actually kinda cute. Good casting.
I think your lighting is very good - nice an even and alot of Ambient which I love. But... it's still 1/10th the amount of light of a mainstream set. I like the mirror, I have one in my studio too - perfect for conserving and bouncing the light if you can keep the models from staring at themselves all day long. I'm guessing that you are at about 3.1 f-stop just think how good it would look @ f-8!!!
Hey EB - post an HD clip of some of that stuff I shot for you in Hawaii in 1440 X 1080i to show something with enough light worthy of HD. I was using two 4x4 gold reflectors in full sun and part-cloudy. If I was a mainstream shooter I would have used two 12 foot X 12 foot reflectors and a 10K on a high scaffold for fill depending on where the sun was. But, since I was tucked behind a rock and our lookout yelled "Nice Tushy!!!" whenever someone came strolling by... I did what I could.
Anyways... this is almost off subject here but - Talent, lighting, format, delivery and marketing. In that order. That's what I think will make or break a paysite these days. DRM sounds like the wave of the future too. But, I try not to think about all this too much - worry just gives me a headache. It will be safe to jerk off again I'm sure of it. Heck, I'm back up to 85% of my normal sales today. Every day thousands of girls turn 18 and looking to make a quick legal $100 Grand or more - and every day thousands of guys get sick of jerking off to the same old porno. My job is connect the 2, everything else is just entertainment.