On Friday, 15 October 2010 I attended the Johnny Spinks CD release party on the upper floor of the Royal Canadian Legion in a town called Almonte. The room is fairly small … perhaps 30 feet wide by 50 feet long … something like that. It held perhaps 100 rather rowdy people, as you can hear on the video. The one thing that is truly striking about this room is how dark it is when only a few small pot lights are on. Reall, really dark :-)
And so this is the test bed for the F300EXR’s first video in my hands. I had already tested the audio quality (one of my main concerns with any concert camera) and found it to be significantly better than the F70 and F80. It seems that Fuji may have reduced the sensitivity to bass notes and the subsequent distortion in the vocal tracks. In fact, I find no sign of it on this video …
Unfortunately, the darkness means that the stock out of camera video appear to be blank, except for the lights and the exit sign. I decided to try to see what was on the video (i.e. had the F300EXR captured anything?) below the threshold of visibility. I started in Pinnacle Studio 14, but was *shocked* to discover that they give you no video adjustments … to get even the simplest brightness and contrast adjustments, you need to purchase a plugin in pack from another vendor for $50 .. or from Pinnacle for $104. This application disappoints me more and more …
I then tried Nero 9 (accidentally, but fortuitously as it turned out) and found that the video seemed to be 4:3. But I could see some detail in black and white and that was what I wanted. I tried Nero 10, the latest version, and found that it had the ability to set the aspect ration right up front … nice. But despite using the same settings that worked on Nero 9, I was unable to get a decent image. It looked very flat and posterized, whereas the image I was seeing on the Nero 9 film actually had a 3-dimensional quality to it despite being grainy and dim.
So back to Nero 9 I went … and on export I was able to select the aspect ration and the result is decent.
I have a few videos to master, but I started with Mustang Sally. Partially because I really like the song, and partially because the audience participation in this song is really fun to listen to …
My analysis:
- A lot more detail under the hood than I expected. Not bad at all.
- The audio is excellent. Matches what I heard in the venue and even manages to hear the performer more than the crowd.
- The codec still sucks, but I did not find it unpleasant to work with. It takes about 1GB per 5 minutes of video, which adds up to 40 minutes per 8GB card. The Panny is more efficient and can record for longer, but the F300EXR is good enough for my purposes and has the potential to be my concert cam of choice for everything.
I will be attending two concerts the week after next … same venue and not that well lit, but far better lit than this room, where no lights were on the performers at all …
Addendum: The difference between the original video and the adjusted video, and the Nero 9 settings that pull what little is there out of the void.
And these are the settings that do that …
Addendum 2: I checked out Windows Movie Maker and it offers a simplistic effect for black and white and a simple control for brightness that handles gamma and everything in a reasonable way. The down side is that it does not quite get bright enough. Still, I would rate Windows Movie Maker right behind Nero 9 for this task and ahead of Nero 10. Pinnacle does not even place because you have to pay extra for a brightness control …
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