John Kung

This video was shot and edited in a couple of hours on a lazy Sunday in and around the Sydney CBD area. It isn’t all that exciting, but it was good fun and it gave me a chance to really play with the video function of my D300s. Overall I am happy with the quality of the video, I wouldn’t really know what to do with higher quality video to be perfectly honest. And since it can only autofocus when it’s on a tripod, and the autofocus is slow as molasses compared to the regular stills autofocus system, the clunkyness of the user interface isn’t such a big impact. To shoot good video you need to plonk it on a tripod and rehearse the pull focus (as in manually focus), so an extra few buttons isn’t all that bad. Isn’t all that good though.

To start, a bit of housekeeping. The video was shot solely with my D300s, on a tripod, with a 24-70mm f/2.8 and edited with iMovie ’09 (high tech eh?). I changed the white balance a little to add a bit of blue, which suited the feel of the piece. It was exported as 720p and uploaded to Vimeo as 720p, so to watch it in its full HD glory go here, go fullscreen, make sure HD is on and scaling is off.

I can’t tell you how much I love being able to control the focus like that, just beautiful. But right off the bat you can see one of the big problems with the video — watch the very first grey car that goes from right to left, notice the cartoonish lean? Like Wile E Coyote running so fast that his legs are running ahead of his, err, head? That’s the rolling shutter effect. It wasn’t too bad in this instance but it was noticeable. Fortunately it didn’t seem to affect the other cars.

Next, notice the flickering light between the columns? I’d noticed this while I was shooting, but for some reason I’d thought it must’ve been candles flickering. It didn’t occur to me until I was editing that the Sydney Town Hall probably hasn’t had a candlelit chandelier for, oh, maybe since electricity was available. This is an issue that plagues the entire video, and I’m pretty sure it’s to do with fluorescent lights. Fluorescent lights aren’t like incandescent bulbs — incandescents emit a constant light while fluros actually flickers in power as well as colour. Usually the rate that it flickers is higher than the human eyes can see, so we just see a steady stream of light. However when you put a video camera in front of a fluro light, the difference of frame rate of the camera and the light shows up as that kind of flickering. Strangely, even though the ad display is lit by fluorescent tubes (at least I’m pretty sure it does) it doesn’t flicker, while pretty much all other lighting does. Also strange is that I’ve tested this by pointing the camera at other fluros I have at home, and I don’t get the flicker. I’ve yet to work out what exactly causes this on the camera and how it can by fixed, so watch this space.

Another issue is the way the D300s will automatically adjust levels unless you specifically lock the exposure. You can see the adjustment in the first clip — the camera boosts the gain when the truck goes past, then it goes back to what it was before. But the transition itself takes place in 1/3rd stop steps, it’s not a smooth transition. In this case it’s not horrid, but imagine panning from a bright window to a dark interior, that’s when you’ll see the step adjustments and it doesn’t look very nice. A related issue is that when shooting outside it doesn’t seem to open up past f/8, even when it says I’m at f/2.8. When I tested this at home indoors it seemed to open right up to the lowest aperture for whatever lens I was shooting. I’m guessing that this has to do with the amount of light around, and that above a certain threshold it will only let you open up so much, which is very, very annoying. I suppose I could just put an 8x ND filter on the lens, but it shouldn’t be this way. I’ll test some more so again, watch this space.

But, as I said in the intro, it’s not that bad. The video quality is good and it’s lovely to look at, the 24 fps gives it that nice film feel. I hope that Nikon takes the video side more seriously, and in later models at least give us full manual control. Here’s hoping at least.