Introduction:
I am just begining in the film world and decided so far that post-production / effects is an area of interest to me so that is my area of focus thus-far (I enjoy the mind numbing moments at 500% zoom touching up pixels...). Anyway, I started w/ my Canon SD200 (yes, the digital camera) in video mode, a 2-day trial of After Effects CS3 and a tripod. The first thing I noticed was that masking and compositing two "identical" shots of a scene was extremely difficult with a completely automatic (and grainy) video recorder, but I still managed to make it work, all-be-it lame looking with multiple shades of the background coming through the masks. Then I started cruising the web to find a camera that could be set to manual to keep everything exactly the same between the "identical" shots. I found your very nice forum here and for my price range noted your unanimously "only two camcorders in the < $1000 range". Of course, getting ahold of a PV-GS300 was nearly impossible new and I'm not a fan of used camcorders, so I opted for the PV-GS320 (Mic input isn't a huge deal for me at this stage). With the new camera in hand, I rushed home, charged the battery, read the manual cover-to-cover, and installed the included DV->HDD transfer software on my PC. Much to my dismay, even with all settings set to manual (Focus, Iris, WB, and Shutter) I am still having a heck of a time getting "identical" shots! The varying shades of my off-white wall that I shoot against are very easy to pick-out whenever it is masked in from the "clean" layer underneith. I have tried w/ limited success to adjust the brightness and contrast values of the clean layer to match, but if I have two masks, one may match perfectly to the clean-layer, and the other will be off and vice-versa.
Now to the question(s): Am I completely missing something obvious? Is it supposed to be a challenge to get the scenes to match? Is the issue w/ lighting? (the area I shoot against is an empty room, against an off-white wall lit by a single overhead 65Watt floodlight). Any advise that could be given (even go read this 40000 page guide and then we will talk) would be helpful.
Thanks a ton in advance for reading this... ?:)?
Yeah, a lot of people struggled with this PV GS300 versus GS320 issue. I don't know why they discontinued the external mic input; everyone in the world seems to miss it. It's still thought of as a good imaging system for the money.
Sorry I can't answer your question, but I hope someone does. I'm a little confused by "identical shots". You mean you are re shooting the same scene?
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if they're 2 different shots (as in, the camera was turned off or the scene changed - even slightly), then it's probably a metering problem.
while you have the iris, focus, and white balance on manual, there are still things that the camera does automatically. i have a canon 350d (still camera) and once tried to make a stop motion film, but after shooting a bunch of pictures and playing them in succession, it appeared as if the scene was slightly flickering. my camera (set on manual) was still evaluating all the light in the shot and coming up with an exposure. because i was using only a desk lamp, the light wasn't absolutely perfect, so my camera evaluated each shot slightly differently.
so, different types of lighting play a big part in it (fluorescent is usually the hardest to work with), but it can also be a problem with the camera itself. try reading up on ?url="http://www.cambridgeincolour.com/tutorials/camera-metering.htm"?metering?/url?.
fortunately, there are a lot of ways to fix this in post. what software are you using now?
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