FinFarenath's Diary - hobbies

Rolling at the keep...

nospam@example.com (FinFarenath) — Tue, 19 May 2009 12:38:28 +0200

This thursday we well be rolling for the next scenes at the Burg Kronberg again. Luckily we will have som efair weather and some good shooting conditions. I hope this time we will also have lighting in tact and not a crash again

Maybe I'll post some pictures of our roll again. I'll surely will keep you informed.

Too sad...

nospam@example.com (FinFarenath) — Sun, 05 Apr 2009 21:59:00 +0200

It is a sad truth, that most people treat their horses like they would treat a baby or their child... in fact - like a human would be treated. But they forget, that this is not a human they care for - it is a horse and has completely different needs and requirements for living then a human has. And even more sad is that - eigther because of excessive sloth or just forgetfulness people often just don't realy seem to care for their horses.

This weekend there was a great derby where for the 50th anniversary for the local club hey had a class S dressage tournament - also a lower level tournaments for children. And the sad images one could see all around were horses treated like sports instruments and where obviously the treatmend of a trophy was more important then caring for their horses. One example is this cure horse, left standing on the paddock. Still wearing a headstall ( so it can be easier grabbed when needed again ) also still wearing horse gaiters and hoove protection for jumping.

The horse stood there for a long time, without someone caring for to removing those things off his body for comfort. And maybe the poor one stood there the whole rest of the day wearing "sport gear" al the time. It seems around here that people think that once a horse doesn't wear its headstall noone can fetch it from a paddock anymore. So everyone leaves those things attached all the time and then wonder why the horses shy on heads and have rubbed off places in their face. Or... in some rare and even more tragic events the poor horse tries to eat form under the fence and shies up from something, hanging itself in the headstall that is set too loose and break its neck or other things like that... and sadly I've seen more then one incident where that happened...

... enough ranting... It just is so frustrating to see people seem to not learn from mistakes and continue to act in a way "because it was always done like that"

Camera Comparison

nospam@example.com (FinFarenath) — Sat, 14 Feb 2009 23:15:00 +0100

As promised in my last post, I will write some notes about the camera comparisioin I did last weekend....

Subject to testing were:

Sony HVR-A1

Sony HDR-FX1*)

Sony HDR-FX7*)

Sony HDR-FX1000*)

Canon XH A1s

Canon XL H1

Canon XL H1A

JVC GY-HD100

*) - Those cameras were not subject of test, but we tested them alongside, as we had them with us. But because of certain properties they didn't apply to the properties we needed. Wrong fromat, signal processing or simply other connectors we didn't use. Just as a sidenote - if you want comparison values or images of those not tested here explicitly - just ask. I also have them but didn't want to put them here as well.

Audio Properties

This is simply saied.... I haven't tested audio properties, as we did audio recording externally. Maybe I will compare them later the week if I should find the time. But one thing saied - use XLR with phantom powered condensers. It will make you happy with quality

General Differences

A few obvious technical differences, I want to mention first. Recording to tape was all the same with those camcorders. They record to standard miniDV tapes, which makes production easy and comfortable. The only drawback was on the JVC GY-HD100 because it records in ProHD format, which is only 19Mbit/s instead of the standardized 25Mbit/s of HDV. So we recorded for the JVC on a firestore external. Another drawback was that ProHD only has a 720p in the JVC, so all images were reconverted to 1080i HDV using the Philips reference encoder.

All cameras were able to do progressive instead of interlaced - save for the HVR-A1E. The real adventage of progressive versus interlaced is rather obvious when you start shooting on moving objects or move your camera around. To have the full quality of 1080 lines in interlaced is that you need a player medium that is also capable of interlaced displaying - meaning you need a line based display. CRTs, TFTs, Projectors and so on that create the image by more or less drawing single lines in a given frame of time. ( Which needs to be 50Hz frame frequency for PAL ) ( Just a sidenote... in HD/SD environment, using HDV - which basically is MPEG2 with other profiles, terms such as PAL and NTSC are rather wrong placed. But I will use them for the termini of frame and picture frequency, for distinguishing 25/50 and 24/30/60 Hz ) To be back to the topic about interlaced video, you have two frames that are taken in short distance after each other, meaning the first half (for example the even lines) of the 1080 lines is taken in slot 1/2 and then the second half (for example the odd lines) is taken in slot 2/2. It basically does a finer movement capturing of the scene (one can identify old televosion shows with that ) because of a higher fieldrate, but the disadventage is obvious. You have two images. And if the object you captured moves, you have two non coherent fields. Now if you want to process that to a non interlaced medium, you have to eigther blend the two fields, which creates two halftransparent images in one frame, or discard one field - effectively reducing the resolution to half. (Actually, interlaced, progressive, fields, frames and such in post processing and target media encoding is a case of its own... take a look at my tutorials secion to find out more )

Storing is done in HDV (which is basically MPEG layer 2 in Main Profile and High 1440 level) in all cameras - save for the already mentioned JVC. This profile declares a sampling of YUV 4:2:0 and a maximum pixels of 1440x1152. Rendering in image to 180x1440 blocks for the DCT. On a typical base it gives a more clear result in motion then the "newer" "mp4" format, or so called AVCHD codec which is based on fewer static sample blocks but increase of motion detection and free blobs. In stills the AVCHD codec definitely has an advantage over the HDV codec, but in motion it has the tendency to "morph" the image, meaning that motion parts in a fine detail are not in sync with the rest of the motion of the image. This fact renders the AVCHD codec impractical if you want to do some post processing and motion tracking. Also the linear approach of HDV and its chunks makes it faster to access for DTE.

Optical Properties

One has to mention that this was a hard comparison to make. All lensesystems were from Canon, safe for the HVR, which is Carl Zeiss and the JVC, which of course is Fujinon. One simply has to tell that comparing Fujinon with Canon is unfair - as the result is so obviously clear that I originally didn't even want to waste time in doing a real comparison. But then again, the differences in those Canon lense systems in the three price categories sparked my interes.

The most obvious drawback on the Canon was on the Canon XL H1 - that sadly failed in my eyed because of a non acceptable CA. You can take a look for yourself in the comparison chard below. The image of the russian building where you can see the dark trees against the sky - a definitve no-go. Although all cameras have a great range of zoom and well manufactured ringsystem ( I will leave the HVR out here ) there are differences in handling. One thing I noticed was a rather loud sonic drive of the new Canon XL H1A that is audiable in the internal microphone if you take pictured and zoom/focus. For production no problem, but might cause some disturbance when hobby filming with the attached mic.

Optical stabiliziers ( if present ) is equally well done in all Canons. But the most surprising plus was the extreme of 32,5mm in the Canon XH A1s that even surpasses the wide angle of the FX1 - and no notifiable CA in that one. A little sidenote to the CA. Cromatic aberration is "normal" for these class of optics. I will not go into too much detail here how CA occurs and what creates it, but for a standard coating that one can still pay there IS cromatic aberration. No way around it. But I recently tested a funny cam by Sony - the new XDCAM EX series. It promises to have a CAC - a CA compensation - that made me curious. It really, if you shoot those awfull comparison pictures with a black mesh on bright background absolutely NO CA. So it made me wonder - and I wondered not long Its done in software. There is no special coating on the lenssystem. The CAC is a pure piece of software, that can also be done in post processing but is done on the fly in the cameras GPU. Adventage - you can use brilliant images without CA in life environment, but.... and here comes the BUT: Never try using the zoom with that. It completely increases the visible CA when you zoom, as the software somehow isn't able to compensate the CA while changing the lens configuration. Actually it makes the CA even more visible for the eye as its effect is increased in comparison to non zoom. So my two cents: Great idea, but badly implemented.

Testimages

Those pictures were taken in different light and distance situations. One was at noon with clouded sky at about 3800K and shows the russian mausoleum in Bad Homburg. The other one was taken at night, shot against bright spotlights to give a maximum distance in luminance, to test properties of noise, sensitifity and responsiveness in chrominance. Also the bright cloudless noon sun was taken on the taunus, with an even more extreme distance between light and shadows. Just with swapped around weights. ( Snow with hard sunshadows ) I used an anchored production tripod from sachtler with reattachable camera plate to have the ability to shoot as identical motives as possible. But because of different lens properties or sadly a "oh, sorry, I didn't know that I shouldn't move that tripot"s some motives show different. But it gives the general idea...

JVC-GY-HD100	Canon-XL-H1A	Canon-XL-H1	Canon-XH-A1s	Sony HVR-A1E

Signal Processing

Some notes to signal processing here. The main difference is in the HVR and all the others. The HVR uses a CMOS sensor and all others CCD. To put it all in a nutshell: CMOS is great for color but baaaaaaad for lowlight. CCD is great for lowlight, but bad for color. Actually, I would prefer CCD over CMOS still. Sadly the CMOS adventage gets lost in the HVR because of its small diameter of the lenssystem. In simple terms: Few light goes in, few light can be used for the adventage of the CMOS.

I don't want to go into too much detail about shutter speeds, AE shifts, programs and whatnot. But a few exceptions from the standard I want to highlight: One thing is the infredibly fast and accurate instant autofocus of the Canon lens systems. It even works under extreme conditions without a typical AF-jittering. Meaning, it finds the right focal length even in 25P, 1/25, <15lux. A sad disadventage was that the JVC has no image stabilizer - making handling and shooting a rather "artistic" action. But given the weight of that thing, its rather flowting then jumping aroung in movement. ( Such as the HVR, whis is an absolute pain in the a** to handly - small, lightwight and only electronical image stabilizer )

General Handling and Connecting

All cameras have, of course, a FireWire connection that enables seamless recording on a fire store device. Also external connectors for secondary displays, video feed and such are presend. Some have SDI output and Genlock in/out. But thats nothing I really tested - not interesting for me as I do not dwell into direct YUV422 recording or mixing or whatnot for sudio environment. Also a lot of the automatic programs the cameras had - I did not test. I run my cameras in manual mode, as this gives the best result in my eyes - given you know what you are doing of course

There are certain aspects one has to consider when shooting. How do you want to handle your cam and whar do you want to shoot. For extreme example: You will possibly not be able to shoot shoulder shots with the HVR. It simply is too small for that. But you also will surely never shoot flybys or steady shots with a GY-HD100. It is the need that will dictate the type of camera you will need. Another thin is the axial stability of the camera. Typically a more heavy camera has a better stability if you do some freeform shots. Taken the example, it virtually is impossible to shoot a flyby with the HVR without completely making a zigzag into the motion. But also you don't want to do such with the JVC. You simply have no way in carrying the cam as well as controling it at the same time that way. It simply is not built for such shots.

The good middle-range are the "shoulder" semiprofessional XLs from Canon. You can use them on shoulder and even can use them for flyby, steady and other freeform shots - thoght I would not recommand that. On the other hand, the XH A1 is brilliant for freeform shots, but because of the too close display, you can not use it for shoulder or even clip on shoulder shots. The adventage the FX1 had was that its display was as far in front of the camera as possible, which enabled the user to do clip on shoulder - shoulder shots and use the display as external VF. Sadly one can not do that with the XH :/

Afternote

I will not give a favourite here. It is a simple comparision on picked properties that I was able to test and that were important for me. Surely this can not be a real objective test under studio conditions, but was an - as best as possibly practicable - thing I was able to rig up in such short time. If you have questions about cerrtain properties or experiences with those cams - just ask me. I can still test or retest them for some time as I have them here. Also if you want me to shade some light in more detail to seomthing, please go on and tell me. I didn't want to write a huge comparision of all technical properties as there certainly are numerous out in the net for you to read Its more an "in the field" test and a "usability" test that happened just for the fun of it. But I hope it will give you some insight and maybe help you when deciding on using one of those cams for your shoots

Fetching Equipment

nospam@example.com (FinFarenath) — Sun, 08 Feb 2009 22:39:00 +0100

Whooho... today we went to the broadcaster to fetch the Equipment and collect everything together. They fetched me with a huge van and then we drove to the hr studios where we fetched he rest of the needed equipment. Cameras, Cables, Recorders, Reflectors and a lot more. All in all a very busy thing to carefully store everything in that van. But then the fun started.

Our equipment for cameras was in one JVC GY-HD100, one Canon XL H1 and one Canon XL H1A. Whow... great Cameras in deed. We spend the whole day in testing those babies out. And it was a real fun to so so. ( Just a sidenode. Only the JVC was form the hr, the other two are privately owned and the fun part is, the XL H1 realy is my old cam I sold to a freind a few years ago And it's still in perfect shape and running smoothly. Good to see its in good hands, but also sad to see that I am stuck with a small camery nowadays. Of course my HVR-A1E is not bad at all, but still the optical system is not the same. )

Colorcorrecting those three brutes was a non funny task, I can tell you. We took over an hour until we had all cameras leveled and in same colorquality for all settings to shoot. And then we started to just for the fun do some comparisons for quality, handling and over all performance to get ourselves used to handling them blindly. Was a lot of fun to shoot just for the fun of it. Although the weather was not that well, it was fine for just esting average settings in the target light situation we will shoot next weekend ( hopefully, if the weather stays )

We also tested a little sieline equipmenet I was thinking about to use at EF this year. A digital video and communication system for cameras. I was at least able to get the audio work biirectionally, but failed to do it for video. The line form camera to picture control worked fine, but I was unable to get the control and videofeed back to the camera. The image quality is excellent tho. Maybe I will find someone this week who can - for a coffe or so - explain to me how to set this up in the right way.

I'll write more about the different models and types and maybe post some comparison video footage when I can find some time to extract and name the different images. Anyway... I am realy excied about doing a video project again after ushc long time.

Great ;)

nospam@example.com (FinFarenath) — Fri, 06 Feb 2009 13:57:00 +0100

I am fascinated. Really The evening with two of my freinds from the television broadcast times went extremely interesting and well.

To be honest - I missed working in such a team over the last half year or so. And it's great to see I am not forgotten. More so - the projekt they want me in is a real interesting one. Its a small TV productions about the roman empite in the taunus. We will set up and film in different locations around the taunus and its many facilities of the roman empires wall and military keeps around here.

My part will be, besides occational photography, directional issues for pictures - namely DP work. I am realy excited about this. This sunday we will fetch the equipment we get from the television broadcaster and have out shooting plan ready by then. So let's see how this will fare...

I only hope the weather will hold and give good impressions from the places as we need moisty athmosphere with few direct sunrays but no real wet and rainy weather for the shooting. Hairy thing this. Also we have to see if we will get all the shooting permissions in the governed buildings and facilities we have to shoot at days when we actually can shoot... thats even more tricky.

Photos at the Zoo

nospam@example.com (FinFarenath) — Mon, 05 Jan 2009 23:49:00 +0100

To take my mind off glooming, I visited Diego and we went to the Amneville Zoo in france to take some photos there. Surprised by a lot of new snow in the night the journey to him was rather tyring as people seem to loose all knowledge about how to steer a car when the weather turns like that. Anyway... I finally arrived ( tho a little later then expected ) at his place, we swapped cars and drove on.

You can find the zoo via google maps when clicking here or directly by clicking on the Amneville Zoo website.

The zoo was a real pleasure to be in. Besides nearly no one else besides up the whole place was deserted from humans. And they have a lot of felines and other species. This zoo really is a great one. We took a lot of pictures - great ones. But I guess I rather will let the pictures tell the story then writing about it. Snowleopards in th snow, Tigers as well and oh so beautiful looking wolves...

New fields

nospam@example.com (FinFarenath) — Tue, 18 Nov 2008 14:30:07 +0100

New fields... or riding in a strange place. Yesterday I went to test a new field and area for horseriding again. The place lacks - on the first glance - a lot of things one would usualy find in a horseclub or such. But it has a lot more of brains then one would find in most places. Its not a pretty and noble etiquettesque ( what a word actually ) place, but its one that has a lot to offer. A lot of free space where the horses can stay outside on the open fields instead of dusty and dark boxes and a lot of room to enjoy yourself and the horses.

They have 2 squares for riding and jumping as well, also with a "roof" The fun thing is - the roof actually is a highway bridge a nearly hundret meters above that keeps the rain off the ground, yet lets a lot of sun, air and noises through so that you actually feel as if you are in the open. Its a great place... not what one might think now "a riding quare under a highway?" giggles Well... was my first hought as well - but testing it and being there actually showed that its a great place and the highway is that far above tha one doesn't really notice.

Riding was a lot of fun there too with a lot of freedom on how you want to ride. It definitely is nothing for beginners as you dont have instructors there - but it definitely is something for one who wants to come back into it when already knowing what and how to do The horses are all well trained ( at least the one I was on, yesterday ) and the place does not lack a single bit in tidyness for the horses. Fresh open space, fresh food and lot of care. Great area for riding out and doing long rides on the weekend as well as lots of opportunities to have a rideshare with someones horse.

I am looking forward to go there again to deepen my mind about what I realy should think about that place. The downside was... that we had so much freedom... nearly seemed "uninterested"... but we will see....

Radio

nospam@example.com (FinFarenath) — Thu, 06 Nov 2008 14:12:36 +0100

This weekend me and Tillikum will broadcast our small webradiostation called Radio Active on the web. If you want to tune in, have a seat or make yourself comfortable and join in. Have a look at the website for RadioActive or chat with us in the channel #radioactive on FurNet. Broadcast will start this saturday at about 20:00.

The new PC

nospam@example.com (FinFarenath) — Tue, 23 Sep 2008 22:48:00 +0200

The new PC... well its final now that I will get myself a new PC. And those will be new selected parts I buy and assemble. I wanted a reliable, silent and not extremely top of the art pc, that is able to handle all software and work processes I need and is also able to take a good load of actual game graphics and fast rendering hardware. The most important point for me was that it needed to be absolutely silent.... and guess what... I hope it will work

Intel Core2Quad Q9550 4x2,88GHz at 12MB L1 Cache and 75W
The CPU is one of the rather middle range parts for it is the still fastest and most accurate one that still is able to take 71°C and only needs 75Watt power in full load. Qualifying it for a fanless heatsink solution. Read a nice comparison here: Test of Intel Core 2 Quad CPUs

Gigabyte GA-EP35C-DS3R
Being the seemingly only Mainboard that supoerts ECC ram with that stepping as well as being power saving sensitive and passively cooled this was the first choice for th basis of the pc. Take a look at the manufacturers website Gigabyte GA-EP35C-DS3R

DDR3 4GB
Memory was a necessary part to be 4GB as well as ECC enabled, fast ram. So the choice for price fell to this one, CL9 PC3-10667 with 1333MHz clocking.

Hitachi Ultrastar 1TB and OCZ Solid State Drive 32GB
Those are the base for the software. The OS and essential drivers and programs will go to the SSD drive, so that or normal operation, mail, net, office and so on, no rotatig hard disk is needed... and thusfor no nose generated at all Also making a rather fast basedrive with 143MB/s read and 93MB/s write. Read a review at Tom's hardware guide

ASUS EN9600gt silent/htdi PCI2 2.0
Good performance, yet with no active coling that creates noise... This one is simply 0dB as it is passively cooled and still yealds a huge game and graphic performance Take a look here Review of the passively colled GPU

Thermaltake Sonic Tower Rev2
Wanting a real compleately silent PC, sure I need a passively cooled CPU heatsink. This one was the best and most efficient found in many reviews. Looks interesting Well.. have a look for yourself Test on "Ich bin leise"

Hope everything will fit together and work out as planned and imagined. And I also want to give a huge hugle and big big thankies to my husky Tillikum, who helped me a lot.. well... not to be honest, he not only helped he did nearly all that was needed and supported me a great deal. Thank you

Marshlands with a good swamp

nospam@example.com (FinFarenath) — Thu, 31 Jul 2008 10:04:56 +0200

After a lot of searching in the near and far vincinity I found a great marshland with a wonderfully swamp in it. We went there yesterday night again to see how it was, but the rain - or let's rather say - a rain and thunderstorm with huge amounts of water pouring down surprised us and so in the end the whole marshland was flooded and we were unable to try out that swamp again. In fact the whole area was flooded, it looked like a huge lake, rather then a swamp.

But anyway - I finally took some pictures for you to enjoy. Hopefully next time I will have a more dryer chance to visit there - even tho it might take till next year as I might visit there earliest in september again and then there is too much rain and the sunny season is over already.

For the pictures - there is one with a general impression of the swamplands under water, looking like a lake and one with the part that I tried out. Sadly also flooded, but you might get the idea how it may look when dry. I also stitched together a panorama of that area. ( Look here to see how to stitch a panorama by yourself ).

Medieval Market

nospam@example.com (FinFarenath) — Sun, 05 Dec 2004 19:54:09 +0100

Today I met with Akuro to go to the medieval christmas market on the nearby castle. I was happy that we were able to meet today as it greatly lifted my spirits. We had a great time, rejoicing again and talking about this and that. We had also a lot of fun skimming through the crowds of ppl there and looking for potential christmas presents. Sadly none of us found something suitable for anyone, so we fist just sat down outside in front of a bonfire, enjoying the nice athmosphere in front of the keeps outter defense lines. Yet the only distracting thing there was the shrill piping of children running around. So we went inside, taking a good watch from the keep tower around the land and also watched the candymaker do some candy *still munches some sweets from there... yummi*. Later we went inside sitting in front of the great hearth in the casltes insides on a wooden table and side by side draw some sketches in the cnadlelight... After all, a wonderful day today was. Thank you, Akuro. hugs

ArtGallery 2.0

nospam@example.com (FinFarenath) — Sat, 21 Aug 2004 11:45:56 +0200

I finally finished my ArtGallery version2. Its a port of an existing gallery I rewrote mainly to fit to my belongs and the lair here. It was a few nights typing and working, but finally I have it online. It will have a lot more features I will introduce bit by bit in the next few weeks if it wirks on a stable basis. The new Gallery can be found exactly at the same place where the old one was, but has a couple new features... and also, I hope a more appealing layout.

I would love to get some feedback about it. *grinnblushes

Well it was a lot of work to manually port the whole data and timestamps of everything from the old to the new one. I also reworked nearly all images there to have a better quality. I hope you will all like the new things there and eventually look at it. You can leave comments, like usual and watch the images and pictures in all categories. But it also has a major new feature. You can ask for a personal login. If you have such a login, you are able to see a lot more images and also in a higher resolution. Its still in a teststate, so don't flood me with requests for a login... I will give it to good friends only anyways...

Impressions of the place where I am living.

nospam@example.com (FinFarenath) — Fri, 09 Jul 2004 13:19:03 +0200

I got those few minutes I needed to put up the photo I did last weekend on my birthday. This is a 360 image of the countryside nearby where I am living. The photo was made from the top of a tree I climbed up to and then took numerous pictures around me, and sketched them together.

Bug fixed.

nospam@example.com (FinFarenath) — Tue, 01 Jun 2004 11:43:25 +0200

Hmm. I found a silly bug today. But luckily it was very easy to fix. So the engine runs now on internal version 1.27@main. I still need to do some code cleanup and then I will start to implement the version 1.1. I for sure will have comments and mood-emoticons there then.

Photos of the recent weekends.

nospam@example.com (FinFarenath) — Tue, 01 Jun 2004 11:11:50 +0200

Hi there. I finally found a few minutes to put the photos of the recent weekends together. Here they are: