Digital Video - January 2009 - (Page 10)

FIRST LOOK NIKON D90 2 3 4 The D90 offers an exceptional LCD screen and impressive low-light capabilities. LCD is sharp enough to pull focus without too much squinting. You may want a hood or shade when shooting outdoors, however. Another area of concern is the D90’s CMOS rolling shutter. Its readout is quite slow, and the shutter creates skew issues on moving shots. Rolling shutter means that the sensor is read from top to bottom, so the top of the video frame has been recorded a moment earlier than the bottom. Vertical lines moving quickly through the frame are therefore often rendered as diagonals. This includes panning across vertical lines. They lean, in effect, in the direction of the movement. There is another side effect to the rolling shutter, and that is the aptly-named “jello effect.” Shooting handheld with the D90 reveals this instantly. It’s worth noting that these issues are not limited to the D90. All current CMOS-based cameras are susceptible to rolling shutter artifacts. The Canon HV20 exhibits both skew and jello quite clearly. It’s not hard to make the Sony EX1 show skew with a fast pan. Even the RED One has skew issues, seen in whip pans and quick dolly moves. The difference is that the D90 exhibits these artifacts significantly more than the aforementioned cameras. All is not lost, however. There are a number of things that the shooter and editor can do to improve the D90’s shortcomings. Here they are, in no particular order. 5 6 7 Use the Auto-Exposure Lock function. Religiously. This is the little button next to the viewfinder marked AE-L. You cannot avoid this camera’s auto-exposure, but this button is your ace in the hole that allows you to lock in exposure settings on a scene. Now you can keep the camera from auto-adjusting the shutter and ISO in the middle of recording. I recommend that you set this button to act as a continuous on/off toggle under Timers in the Custom Menu. Turn the in-camera sharpening settings all the way down to zero. This will eliminate some of the excessive jaggies in your footage. This is easily accomplished with the Set Picture Control function under the Shooting Menu. Note that you cannot be in Auto mode to modify presets, so switch to M for this task. Pick up a handful of fast manual lenses. The 18-105mm kit lens for this camera is abysmally slow at f/3.5-5.6. Avoid it like the plague. Buy the camera body by itself and put your lens money into fast primes or a good zoom. An f/1.4 50mm, f/2.8 24mm, and f/2 85mm or 105mm will cover most shooting situations. The faster your lens, the less the camera will have to rely on noisy ISO. Ultimately you’ll have a cleaner image. Manual lenses also tend to offer an honest-to-goodness aperture ring, so adjustments are possible while shooting. And because autofocus is not available when shooting video with the D90, there’s no real disadvantage to shopping for used manual glass. Set the +/- exposure compensation settings to between +.03 and +2.0. The idea is that this range tends to guide the D90 into choosing slower shutter speeds, somewhere in the 1⁄30 to 1⁄60 range. This (in theory) helps keep the ISO settings low and noise at a minimum. Shoot HD but deliver in SD. This camera is a far better SD camera than it is an HD camera. This is not to say that the D90 cannot deliver HD, but the downconvert hides some of the codec compression and the camera’s aliasing sins. As a good friend of mine often says, “It’ll clear up in the downconvert.” In post, use the D90 Rescaler plug-in for Final Cut Pro on all your footage. This freebie from the Too Much Too Soon plug-in pack automatically fixes harsh horizontal lines in D90 footage due to its poor scaling algorithm. Get it at www.mattias.nu/plugins/ (and consider leaving a donation for the developer). There is also a plug-in for more intelligent up/downscaling. CONCLUSION The D90 is an odd bird. It is clearly a still image camera with a video mode tacked on as an afterthought. While there are a number of issues and limitations, it only takes a few minutes of shooting with the camera to realize the beautiful images you can create. With a little planning and care, you can minimize these limitations and maximize what this sub-$1,000 tool can do. It’s nowhere close to replacing my own 35mm lens-adapter rig, but the D90 may well have earned a place in my shooting toolkit. DV Matt Jeppsen is the founder of FreshDV and a ProVideoCoalition contributor. You’ll find his reel at clearcreekproductions.com. www.dv.com WORKAROUNDS 1 Don’t shoot handheld. Seriously. Just don’t. I don’t care if your onset nickname is Steadi-Eddie — you cannot hold this camera still enough to completely avoid its jello issues. Put it on a tripod, or at least a monopod, and your footage will look 100 percent better. That also solves another problem with this camera, namely, that its ergonomics are not designed for handheld video shooters. If you absolutely need handheld, third-party manufacturers — including Redrock Microsystems and Zacuto — are already offering support rigs for the D90. dv january 2009 10 http://www.mattias.nu/plugins/ http://www.clearcreekproductions.com http://www.dv.com

Table of Contents Feed for the Digital Edition of Digital Video - January 2009

Digital Video - January 2009 Contents First Look: D90 Camera Sonicfire Pro 5 You Pod Instant Expert Muse 2.0 FXFactory Pro 2.0.5 Motype Fxpack DV Product Directory All Powered Up Creating Your Own Sun DV101 Production Diary

Digital Video - January 2009

For optimal viewing of this digital publication, please enable JavaScript and then refresh the page. If you would like to try to load the digital publication without using Flash Player detection, please click here.