So I'm using a Canon XL2 to make short demo videos of products, which really are mostly still shots but filming the product live. The room does not have the best light, but I compensated with a makeshift spotlight. Anyway, I made sure I set everything right in iMovie for high quality import, and it has all these artifacts in the video even at closeups (not zoomed closeups) that should not be there providing the quality of the camera. But worse even, is that in Final Cut Pro or using Quicktime to just make a new movie recording with the device native setting it just looks bad right from the start. Tape or tapeless it always has like a pixelated blur to it. I did not try the camera on a TV to see if it's the camera itself, but I'm really led to believe it's something I'm doing on the import. Because even in dim light, I expect some grain but no pixels as if I already compressed the video...
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Horrible quality importing from camera / tapeless capture
- Thread starter whinylittlerunt
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Can you post some screenshots?
Also the preview monitor in iMovie and FCP don't show the full quality, but an exported QT .mov with the right codec might.
But to be honest, the XL 2 has some issues anyway, I used it over 15 months ago and lots of scenes where quite out of focus. Not all, but lots, even though the EVF showed them in focus.
Also the preview monitor in iMovie and FCP don't show the full quality, but an exported QT .mov with the right codec might.
But to be honest, the XL 2 has some issues anyway, I used it over 15 months ago and lots of scenes where quite out of focus. Not all, but lots, even though the EVF showed them in focus.
Wait, I take that back. I think the Quicktime device native setting was fine, just grainy, which I now know is ok...
this makes no sense...
a) you don't have grain with video, you get noisy pixels, but I'm being picky... and in dim light you're going to get a LOT of it.
b) the video is compressed, a lot. Doesn't matter if you've recorded to tape or done a live recording over FW. It will still be compressed to DV.
what I suspect is going on is that you are seeing some saturated color fall victim to blocky chroma sampling. throw a 4:1:1 chroma smoothing filter on it and see if that helps.
Well, I'll explain it better...
First of all, what I meant by "tapeless" was that I am just using the camera to capture directly to the hard drive, using Quicktime and setting it to "Device Native" so there is no compression going in. But I think when I started playing around with different lighting/camera positioning, I started using the capture function in iMovie and FCP and completely forgot to try capturing with Quicktime using my better lighting. Kind of a *duh* moment.
The funny thing is that even though I'm being overly anal retentive about the quality, these videos are gonna wind up on youtube eventually anyway...
First of all, what I meant by "tapeless" was that I am just using the camera to capture directly to the hard drive, using Quicktime and setting it to "Device Native" so there is no compression going in. But I think when I started playing around with different lighting/camera positioning, I started using the capture function in iMovie and FCP and completely forgot to try capturing with Quicktime using my better lighting. Kind of a *duh* moment.
The funny thing is that even though I'm being overly anal retentive about the quality, these videos are gonna wind up on youtube eventually anyway...
If you are connected via FW the signal is being compressed into DV. The only way to capture w/o having it compressed into DV is to capture via the analog outs from the camera.
Lethal