image quality of different video camcorders

[redonnemoi]

hello,

i would like to ask a few things about professional videocamcorders

when i look at a movie, the image quality and color balance is absolutely astounding, and i am wondering: did the videocamcorder directly take an image of such high quality. or was it cleaned up in Adobe Premiere?

i have got the impression that there are no videocamcorders available for sale to the general public that can take videos of such high quality. why not? is there a videocamcorder available for sale that the public can afford, that can take videos of the same quality as on DVD movies. maybe its because i have not seen very much but 100% of the movies taken with home camcorders have a lot of static noise, grainy image quality, and bad color balance. compared to DVD stuff.

finally, why is the sound quality on home videocamcorders so bad compared to movie sound quality? both were done using videocamcorders, no? what difference is there between the microphones used. why in DVDs is this static 100% eliminated.

many thanks

redonnemoi

[Skyman]

There are literally hundreds of reasons why your home movie doesn't look like a hollywood dvd, the first is that most Hollywood productions record to film and no video camera can exactly replicate the "feel" or film. second is that they will employ teams of people to control the lighting so it is precisely how the director or the director of photography wants it. then they will spend a lot of time cleaning up the footage and applying what is known as a colour grading to the film. the sound from professional productions almost never comes from the on camera microphone. at the most basic level the camera may be fitted with a directional or gunshot microphone to eliminate as much ambient noise as possible, but this mic is more likely to be placed on a boom and held as close to the speaker as possible so the gain on the mic can be turned down to further eliminate ambient noise. often lapel or levalier microphones are used as are a whole array of microphones for each individual sound element in the film (the diagetic sound like a door creaking). mostly this wouldn't be recorded to a video camera but rather to a very high quality dat recorder to preserve the tonal range of the sound (remember the video camera is supposed to record great video so even the 16 bit that is most comonly used is not as good as the 64 or 128 bit sound of a dat tape) then when the rendering process happens, you are not rellying on your home computer to do the mpg conversion and burn to dvd, final grading and rendering will be done on a very powerful server and the finished sequence including dvd menus etc will be exported to a digital linear tape as a master before it is pressed onto dvd. that is the 5 minute version of why "pro" stuff looks and sounds so much better. as a starting point a good 3ccd camera with the full array of manual controls, a solid understanding of lighting exposure and colour balancing and some great sound engineering skills and some very directional microphones and your work will start to show the difference. with access to all of the above techniques and enough experience even the cheapest digital video camera will create a film that looks great. incidentally many dvds show bloopers and out takes in there raw state so you can compare the "raw" video to the cleaned and graded video which will give you a little insight into what is done in post production.

[kkolbo]

I have to second most of what was said. Most of what you are seeing on DVD was shot with film and it reacts very differently. That said, the last Star Wars was shot on video, so we can get a pleasing look with video. First, Good video not only requires good sensors, but great glass. That takes money. The lenses used for a feature film are often $100K prime lenses. The camera though is not really where the quality that you seek is found. It is what is in front of the camera. The grain in your picture means that you don't have enough light. If you have ever seen a video production, we even use artificial light when in full sunlight! Once in enough light it comes down to properly balancing the light. I love it when a young was asked about how much he spend on the camera of his great looking feature that he did. He laughed and said $3,000. He then reminded us that he didn't mention the 100K worth of lighting gear that was in the grip truck he rented etc. It really is about the light until you can spend a fortune on the glass.

A feature film uses a lot of people doing a lot of detailed work to make it look and sound as good as it does. One film I made (on HD Video) involved the biblical characters of Abraham and Issac on the mountain. For that scene of the two of them at the altar, we had two cast members and 30 crew. Some of them were bearers to get equipment up the mountain, but you can not forget the generator operators, the gaffers, the makeup, the sound, the dolly operators, the DP, the director, the camera engineer, the set decorators, the props team, the costumer, the script supervisor, the production photographer, the SPFX for the fire, the animal wrangler for the goat, and don't forget the craft service folks who kept us all fed on a 14 hour day. Did I mention you have to include me, the executive producer in the count. Each of us were looking at the thing and making sure that our part was perfect. (it had better be for what I was spending that day!)

Here is a quick clip that you should see. It comes from a high school team. Yes it is web video so it is not great, but it was shot with a $2,700 prosumer camera, some home made lights, and foam core. I white balanced using a slightly magenta surface to get the creative color look. No color grading was done in post. Student Code of Conduct

Audio for a feature film is seldom recorded on location except as reference. The last large film that I did arrived in to post with zero sound. The dialog was all replaced in post and all of the sounds and ambiances were created in post. Dialog shot on a sound stage is often recorded during shooting, but it is recorded to a different recorder. Film does not have sound

I have had very good success with getting the dialog live to video. (I always record all other sound separately.) The use of a good mic boom is essential. We have made them out of broom sticks and duct tape, but the Rode boom is only $99. The key to good dialog is getting the mic as close to the sound as possible. That way the dialog is louder than background noises etc. Even the motor on your camcorder makes noise. Using the mic on the camcorder is good for home video, but beyond that, audio is a separate task.

Yes, great video takes a lot of work, but you can learn to do it even in a small way with today's great inexpensive tools. What took tens of thousands of dollars ten years a go, is available at Circuit City today. Hang out here and you will learn more over time.

[redonnemoi]

i took some videos in MiniDV, and im at school now with access to Adobe Premiere Pro 2, is it possible for you to tell me how to run colour grading on it

[MJS]

Skyman is the reigning Premier expert, I'll have to defer to his judgement on this one.

[Skyman]

bummer, with the work i do at the moment i rarely have need of colour grading. give me a little time to get my head around it again and i will get back to you. (incidentally i am running premier pro 2.0 at work)