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Serious Magic
DV Rack Field Guide
situations, such as moving from indoors to outdoors in one continuous shot, auto-
matic white balance must be used. In this case, you should carefully review the
shot in the DV Rack digital recorder (using the freeze, zoom and Spectra 60 func-
tions if necessary) to ensure that the camera's automatic white balance function
correctly tracked the changing scene.
Zebra and How it Can Improve Your Video Quality
Zebra is a pattern of diagonal black and white stripes that are overlaid on selected
areas of your video and displayed in the DV Rack Field Monitor. When you turn
Zebra on, an easily discernible striped pattern will appear in the area of your pic-
ture which may be too bright or too dark.
If an area is too bright, like a shiny spot on someone’s head, it can be distracting to
your audience. If an area is too dark, viewers may have problems discerning
detail in areas that are in the shadows. Zebra helps by alerting you to these prob-
lem areas. Your particular thresholds will be unique depending on where you set
them in the Menu button settings but DV Rack default settings attempt to approx-
imate some common scenarios.
A Different Breed of Zebra
Using Dark Zebra to Preserve Shadow
The freedom to create areas of dark shadow in a scene is desirable because it can
meet so many different cinematic goals. But it can be particularly challenging to
create dark or moody ambience in the DV format because the format can be quite
unforgiving when areas of shadow get too dark. Undesirable noise is often intro-
duced into the image which cannot be compensated in post-production.
When lighting and adjusting your camera to create dark ambience you are often
pushing the capabilities of your camera. Fortunately, many DV cameras can
deliver remarkably compelling images in such scenes. The problem is that the
margin for error is narrow and accurate. Objective monitoring of shadow areas is
crucial.
This situation is made especially difficult when using the flip-out screen on many
DV camcorders. In these small screens any region that gets too close to black,
often just appears entirely black. Additionally, the camera's screen, (or even an
external analog monitor), does not show the impact of DV compression on the
live video. It must first be recorded and then played back from tape to see what is
actually happening. DV Rack's native DV field monitor is invaluable in these situ-
ations because you can see the DV-compressed image in real-time as you make
changes.
DV Rack’s dark Zebra allows you to introduce strong shadows into a scene with
the confidence that there is enough detail remaining in the desired areas to still
resolve an image. For example, rich feature shadows on your talent's face can be
dramatic. However, it will look amateurish if there is no detail at all in the shadow
area. In another situation, you may want to ensure that the darkest parts of a
