JY-HD10 quality opinions?

Darren Kelly · October 10th, 2003, 02:26 PM

I've spent considerable time with this camera and think some are being alittle hard on it.

true the camera is not a panacea, but it does give you a true HD image and does allow you to get more pop out of your images for very little money.

As I've said - probably too many times, I've done a comparison with the Cinealta and the image of the HD10, even upconverted to 1080i is very nice in comparison.

My opinion is a well shot HD10U image will match a poorly shot Cinealta image.

We are going into great detail on the controls and the manual work arounds on the Jumpstart DVD. I also expect to be able to provide footage people can fiew and compare in native format.

I still think it's a much better camera than people want to give it credit for.

my 2 cents

Alex Raskin · October 10th, 2003, 03:15 PM

Darren, I'm not sure whether your DVD is already shipping, or you are taking pre-orders on that?

Also, I'd buy it online, but not via PayPal - which unfortunately is the only online option you offer right now.

Kindly clarify.

Thanks!

Darren Kelly · October 10th, 2003, 03:30 PM

No, it's currently on Pre-sale. Ships in a few weeks, November 1

If you don't want to use Paypal, which does allow Visa and MC, you can email me privately and we will accept Visa and MC.

Send 2 email, one with your Name and Visa Number and the second one with your address and expiry date, that way you have additional security.

dkelly@masterworks.bc.ca

Hope this helps

Why not Paypal, just out of curiosity

John Eriksson · October 11th, 2003, 12:19 AM

I can use the 60 progressive frames from SD and slow down to 24 or even to 15-fps, that is, getting a barely smooth SLOW shot of 4x the time, at 720x480. This is also an interesting feature I could use. Could I?

Yes I think this would be possible to do, I have tought about it for a long time too. YES FINALLY great slowmotion on video!!! // sure you can use twixtor, but real slowmotion with more filmed frames would be much better..

Martin Munthe · October 11th, 2003, 06:02 AM

There's nothing wrong with PayPal. In fact it's one of those really GREAT business ideas. It's made the world of person to person or person to small company transactions A LOT safer. I don't see why it would be more hazardous to buy something using PayPal compared to buying through any private e-store (?). Any mobster can pay money to set up a legit e-store. PayPal is a bit bigger than that and have survived most dot com companies and is doing better than ever.

I would however strongly advice against sending numbers over email. If money would disappear through an established service like PayPal you're bank will do a refund of the amount you've lost (most banks I know of do). But if you admit you've sent your credit card info via email I don't think they will help you get anything back. Even if you've sent only partial information over two emails. Any hacker could easily go through Darrens email. A computer geek friend of mine showed me how easy it is to hack anyones email once. It's quite scary.

...I know I'm of topic but anyway...

Emilio Le Roux · October 11th, 2003, 12:49 PM

Thank you, pals, for the footage.

I've played around with it quite a bit.

First of all, it is true there are some blocky artifacts in color areas, but that's not so diferent from DV compression. I've raised the staturation of both XL1 and HD10 stills, and the blocky artifacts become evident, only the artifact patterns are different. DV is more a block pattern, HD10 is more chaotic.

Footage responds very well to level modifying, which I do a lot.

For editing, I've renamed the m2t streams to MPEG and they load correctly in Vegas Video 4.0d and in After Effects! But the speed is unacceptable.

Of course I can recompress to DV but that's limited to 720x480 ntsc. I want to keep the HD footage to manipulate freely, zoom, etc. into AE.
I was thinking about an intermediary codec for HD editing, mainly inside AM.

I re-rendered the footage in AE, to several quicktime CODECS like MJPEG. They are slow but work nice if comparing with the MPEG files.

For my surprise, i downloaded PicVideo MJPEG software compressor/decompressor and it is so fast it allows realtime editing in VEGAS even at 1280x720 full quality preview!

(
full demo available in http://www.pegasusimaging.com/picvideomjpeg.htm
)

In maximum quality (=20), a 30 second stream was 600 MB big. Comparing closely with the original stream, even saturating it, it looks identical.
In quality=16, it dropped down to 90MB (just below DV) and playing smoothly from the editor since the data rate is lighter. This allows fades to be seen in realtime.

I believe a compression factor (quality = 18 to 19) will deliver a good image and size ratio, perhaps better than editing in MPEG2 since MJPEG is a well known editing codec. But that I will not know right now because I don't have the camera to 'upload' the final video and project it somewhere.

Just wanted to share this experiences to those who are working with it.

Of course these are attempts to make HD editing possible for the 'poor man', like me, with an Athlon XP 2000+ and just one dedicated 120 GB HD for video. If money were not a problem, ther would be a couple better solutions. Any ideas?

Emilio

Emilio Le Roux · October 11th, 2003, 01:16 PM

Also, i think this link is nice, for MAC only:

http://www.bitjazz.com/

sheervideo lossless codec. Claims to be 100% lossless and perfect quality yet halving uncompressed video size and rate.

Emilio

Ken Hodson · October 11th, 2003, 01:39 PM

How is the quality when you want to move away from the mjpeg codec? I have read that mjpeg to an .avi format is not ideal as they use different compression schemes that cause artifact type problems when recompressing.
I still have a Matrox Rainbow Runner capture card and I would capture to Morgan Mjpeg or Pic Video Mjpeg, I would the have to convert to Huffyuv then to .avi to get a decent convertion. Mjpeg direct to Divx always gave bad results.
ken

Emilio Le Roux · October 11th, 2003, 02:40 PM

For what i've read, the problem is if you introduce yet another lossy compressor when editing, it gets worse.

MPEG2 compressor is very lossy.

It is already unavoidable to accept the HD10 footage compressed in MPEG2. From now on, the ideal thing is to work with a better compression scheme up to the final render.

MJPEG codec is a widely used editing codec, and it is also destructive but can be better (and god, faster) than MPEG2. MJPEG cards were intended to be for offline editing purposes, yet they are being used for broadcasting (the same way miniDV is being used in professional video).

Im not a experienced pro in codecs and video, but i work very carefully into after effects, sometimes zooming the picture a lot... pushing up levels and saturation, blurring or sharpening, so artifacts are a problem for me.

From the experiences I have done with the HD footage, i get some ideas (not conclusions yet)

-The best result is to have MPEG2 streams from the HD converted to uncompressed AVI. That's unpractical because we're talking some 100MB a second, and also the big data stream makes editing slow.

-Picvideo MJPEG gives almost identical quality at 20, big files (20MB/second) and slow to stream too. Instead of this option you have Huffyuv codec, somewhat bigger files (30MB/sec) and a bit slower but lossless. There is also that sheervideo codec for mac and due for windows, but it has also big file sizes. (similar to Huffyuv, as seen from their stats). It claims to be faster indeed.

-Almost identical quality to the eye at Picvideo MJPEG with quality=19, much smaller files (6mb/second) and real time editing in vegas, very fast in AE too.

- The worst thing is recompressing to MPEG2, even without an intermediary lossy codec. The artifacts become evident. If I was editing in DV i would edit in MJPEG or Huffyuv codec then render in DV. If I wanted output to 35mm film I would then deliver a JPEG sequence at 1280x720 for the final filming process, not recompress to MPEG2.

Emilio

Eric Bilodeau · October 11th, 2003, 05:57 PM

You are right Emilio, DV and HDV are very alike in therms of chroma compression noise. You are also right that compression artefacts become a problem when tweeking a lot (witch I do also). I had this problem with DV but HDV is of better resolution so, to me, it still is a step forward.

Emilio Le Roux · October 11th, 2003, 06:50 PM

well i'm having fun.

HDV video resolution is so high I can't compare it to DV. In the definition/quality compression I can't help keeping HDV, specially in my kind of work, that is usually 30 seconds of high detail. (Of course if my main job were events and weddings, or documentaries, i'll stick with a better DV camera).

In the compression side, I'd work with uncompressed AVI or with HuffYuv, which is free, lossless and half file sizes.

But for the time being I need smaller files, so I'm using Picvideo MJPEG at quality=18 (in a 0-20 scale). Comparing the final picture, even zoomed in and with a lot of image tweaks, I see no evident blockiness or quality loss.

I use picvideo MJPEG because it is a fast software codec (I don't have hardware MJPEG). It is AVI so it works with most tools. I'm using a demo but I'll buy a registration soon.
Also, it has a 1:1:1 subsampling compression option, theorically better and slightly larger files, but since the video has been already sampled at 4:2:2 on the camera, don't know if it's of any use. The codec also has different luminance and chrominance compression factors.

I wanted to ask in here, is there a tool for batch converting m2t files? until now i've been renaming them to mpeg, loading them in vegas and rendering as AVI.

Emilio

Ken Hodson · October 11th, 2003, 08:08 PM

Most will want to go from mpeg2ts to WM9/Divx or mpeg2. From what I understand mjpeg as an editing codec is not the best in-between when used in that equation.
How would you rate Pic mjpeg at quality=20/19/18, compared to HuffYUV in the above senario?
Also it is my understanding the camera is 4:2:0 in colour space.
Ken

Emilio Le Roux · October 11th, 2003, 09:37 PM

sorry, I was mistaken...

DV video uses 4:1:1 in NTSC, which is worse than 4:2:2.
MPEG2 is 4:2:2, but I don't know if this applies to the HD10 stream. So it would be better than DV in matters of Chroma sampling?

It's hard to tell about the codecs, since the original MPEG2 footage has some very light blocky artifacts that could cover new ones produced by recompression.

MJPEG at quality=20 and 19 seemed identical to the original m2t footage or the footage converted to uncompressed AVI, or the HuffYuv codec, after examining closely. Suppossedly the Huffyuv codec is lossless.

At q=18/17, after saturating, zooming and contrasting the video, perhaps you can tell very light differences in the artifacts.

At q=16 the video is too blocky, and this becomes evident when it's in motion and saturation is raised.

I compressed a 30 second 1280x480 and got different sizes:

Huffyuv: 900MB
MJPEG at 20: 600MB
MJPEG at 19: 220MB
MJPEG at 16: 90MB

30 sec DV(720x480) is 110 MB

I haven't tried to encode to DivX, although.

Steve Mullen · October 11th, 2003, 10:08 PM

<<<-- Originally posted by Emilio Le Roux : sorry, I was mistaken...

DV video uses 4:1:1 in NTSC, which is worse than 4:2:2.
MPEG2 is 4:2:2, but I don't know if this applies to the HD10 stream. -->>>

It's 4:2:0.

I'm not sure why everyone is looking at all these other codecs. If you want to edit HDV on the PC -- there are the KDDI, Vegas 4, and Aspect HD solutions.

Clearly, nothing so far gets the job done like Aspect HD.

Alex Raskin · October 11th, 2003, 11:05 PM

<<<-- Originally posted by Steve Mullen : I'm not sure why everyone is looking at all these other codecs. If you want to edit HDV on the PC -- there are the KDDI, Vegas 4, and Aspect HD solutions.

Clearly, nothing so far gets the job done like Aspect HD. -->>>

Barring the simpliest editing, one always has to shuffle chunks of video between the NLE (Premiere) and AfterEffects.

I don't see how this would work if editing is kept in MPEG2 format domain, like wth Aspect HD.

Rather, the practical way of doing this would be to convert all captured m2t files into HUFFYUV-compressed AVIs (lossless, 1/3 of the uncompressed AVI size at 2Gb/minute), and then import these AVIs into the NLE.

Roundabout betw. NLE and AfterEffects then happens in AVI format.

October 10th, 2003, 02:26 PM	#16
Darren Kelly Major Player Join Date: Aug 2003 Location: Vancouver Posts: 351	I've spent considerable time with this camera and think some are being alittle hard on it. true the camera is not a panacea, but it does give you a true HD image and does allow you to get more pop out of your images for very little money. As I've said - probably too many times, I've done a comparison with the Cinealta and the image of the HD10, even upconverted to 1080i is very nice in comparison. My opinion is a well shot HD10U image will match a poorly shot Cinealta image. We are going into great detail on the controls and the manual work arounds on the Jumpstart DVD. I also expect to be able to provide footage people can fiew and compare in native format. I still think it's a much better camera than people want to give it credit for. my 2 cents __________________ Darren Kelly

October 10th, 2003, 03:30 PM	#18
Darren Kelly Major Player Join Date: Aug 2003 Location: Vancouver Posts: 351	No, it's currently on Pre-sale. Ships in a few weeks, November 1 If you don't want to use Paypal, which does allow Visa and MC, you can email me privately and we will accept Visa and MC. Send 2 email, one with your Name and Visa Number and the second one with your address and expiry date, that way you have additional security. dkelly@masterworks.bc.ca Hope this helps Why not Paypal, just out of curiosity __________________ Darren Kelly

October 11th, 2003, 06:02 AM	#20
Martin Munthe Major Player Join Date: Apr 2002 Location: Stockholm, Sweden Posts: 331	There's nothing wrong with PayPal. In fact it's one of those really GREAT business ideas. It's made the world of person to person or person to small company transactions A LOT safer. I don't see why it would be more hazardous to buy something using PayPal compared to buying through any private e-store (?). Any mobster can pay money to set up a legit e-store. PayPal is a bit bigger than that and have survived most dot com companies and is doing better than ever. I would however strongly advice against sending numbers over email. If money would disappear through an established service like PayPal you're bank will do a refund of the amount you've lost (most banks I know of do). But if you admit you've sent your credit card info via email I don't think they will help you get anything back. Even if you've sent only partial information over two emails. Any hacker could easily go through Darrens email. A computer geek friend of mine showed me how easy it is to hack anyones email once. It's quite scary. ...I know I'm of topic but anyway... __________________ Martin Munthe VFX Supervisor/DP/Director

October 11th, 2003, 12:49 PM	#21
Emilio Le Roux Regular Crew Join Date: Oct 2003 Location: Salvador, Bahia Posts: 33	editing HD codecs Thank you, pals, for the footage. I've played around with it quite a bit. First of all, it is true there are some blocky artifacts in color areas, but that's not so diferent from DV compression. I've raised the staturation of both XL1 and HD10 stills, and the blocky artifacts become evident, only the artifact patterns are different. DV is more a block pattern, HD10 is more chaotic. Footage responds very well to level modifying, which I do a lot. For editing, I've renamed the m2t streams to MPEG and they load correctly in Vegas Video 4.0d and in After Effects! But the speed is unacceptable. Of course I can recompress to DV but that's limited to 720x480 ntsc. I want to keep the HD footage to manipulate freely, zoom, etc. into AE. I was thinking about an intermediary codec for HD editing, mainly inside AM. I re-rendered the footage in AE, to several quicktime CODECS like MJPEG. They are slow but work nice if comparing with the MPEG files. For my surprise, i downloaded PicVideo MJPEG software compressor/decompressor and it is so fast it allows realtime editing in VEGAS even at 1280x720 full quality preview! ( full demo available in http://www.pegasusimaging.com/picvideomjpeg.htm ) In maximum quality (=20), a 30 second stream was 600 MB big. Comparing closely with the original stream, even saturating it, it looks identical. In quality=16, it dropped down to 90MB (just below DV) and playing smoothly from the editor since the data rate is lighter. This allows fades to be seen in realtime. I believe a compression factor (quality = 18 to 19) will deliver a good image and size ratio, perhaps better than editing in MPEG2 since MJPEG is a well known editing codec. But that I will not know right now because I don't have the camera to 'upload' the final video and project it somewhere. Just wanted to share this experiences to those who are working with it. Of course these are attempts to make HD editing possible for the 'poor man', like me, with an Athlon XP 2000+ and just one dedicated 120 GB HD for video. If money were not a problem, ther would be a couple better solutions. Any ideas? Emilio

October 11th, 2003, 01:39 PM	#23
Ken Hodson Trustee Join Date: Aug 2003 Location: Vancouver BC Canada Posts: 1,315	How is the quality when you want to move away from the mjpeg codec? I have read that mjpeg to an .avi format is not ideal as they use different compression schemes that cause artifact type problems when recompressing. I still have a Matrox Rainbow Runner capture card and I would capture to Morgan Mjpeg or Pic Video Mjpeg, I would the have to convert to Huffyuv then to .avi to get a decent convertion. Mjpeg direct to Divx always gave bad results. ken __________________ Damnit Jim, I'm a film maker not a sysytems tech.

October 10th, 2003, 03:15 PM	#17
Alex Raskin Trustee Join Date: Sep 2003 Posts: 1,435	Darren, I'm not sure whether your DVD is already shipping, or you are taking pre-orders on that? Also, I'd buy it online, but not via PayPal - which unfortunately is the only online option you offer right now. Kindly clarify. Thanks!

October 11th, 2003, 12:19 AM	#19
John Eriksson Regular Crew Join Date: Aug 2003 Posts: 57	I can use the 60 progressive frames from SD and slow down to 24 or even to 15-fps, that is, getting a barely smooth SLOW shot of 4x the time, at 720x480. This is also an interesting feature I could use. Could I? Yes I think this would be possible to do, I have tought about it for a long time too. YES FINALLY great slowmotion on video!!! // sure you can use twixtor, but real slowmotion with more filmed frames would be much better..

October 11th, 2003, 01:16 PM	#22
Emilio Le Roux Regular Crew Join Date: Oct 2003 Location: Salvador, Bahia Posts: 33	Also, i think this link is nice, for MAC only: http://www.bitjazz.com/ sheervideo lossless codec. Claims to be 100% lossless and perfect quality yet halving uncompressed video size and rate. Emilio

October 11th, 2003, 02:40 PM	#24
Emilio Le Roux Regular Crew Join Date: Oct 2003 Location: Salvador, Bahia Posts: 33	For what i've read, the problem is if you introduce yet another lossy compressor when editing, it gets worse. MPEG2 compressor is very lossy. It is already unavoidable to accept the HD10 footage compressed in MPEG2. From now on, the ideal thing is to work with a better compression scheme up to the final render. MJPEG codec is a widely used editing codec, and it is also destructive but can be better (and god, faster) than MPEG2. MJPEG cards were intended to be for offline editing purposes, yet they are being used for broadcasting (the same way miniDV is being used in professional video). Im not a experienced pro in codecs and video, but i work very carefully into after effects, sometimes zooming the picture a lot... pushing up levels and saturation, blurring or sharpening, so artifacts are a problem for me. From the experiences I have done with the HD footage, i get some ideas (not conclusions yet) -The best result is to have MPEG2 streams from the HD converted to uncompressed AVI. That's unpractical because we're talking some 100MB a second, and also the big data stream makes editing slow. -Picvideo MJPEG gives almost identical quality at 20, big files (20MB/second) and slow to stream too. Instead of this option you have Huffyuv codec, somewhat bigger files (30MB/sec) and a bit slower but lossless. There is also that sheervideo codec for mac and due for windows, but it has also big file sizes. (similar to Huffyuv, as seen from their stats). It claims to be faster indeed. -Almost identical quality to the eye at Picvideo MJPEG with quality=19, much smaller files (6mb/second) and real time editing in vegas, very fast in AE too. - The worst thing is recompressing to MPEG2, even without an intermediary lossy codec. The artifacts become evident. If I was editing in DV i would edit in MJPEG or Huffyuv codec then render in DV. If I wanted output to 35mm film I would then deliver a JPEG sequence at 1280x720 for the final filming process, not recompress to MPEG2. Emilio

October 11th, 2003, 05:57 PM	#25
Eric Bilodeau Major Player Join Date: Jun 2003 Location: Chicoutimi, Canada Posts: 334	You are right Emilio, DV and HDV are very alike in therms of chroma compression noise. You are also right that compression artefacts become a problem when tweeking a lot (witch I do also). I had this problem with DV but HDV is of better resolution so, to me, it still is a step forward. __________________ Eric Bilodeau video SFX,DOP ___________________ http://www.fictis.net info@fictis.net

October 11th, 2003, 06:50 PM	#26
Emilio Le Roux Regular Crew Join Date: Oct 2003 Location: Salvador, Bahia Posts: 33	well i'm having fun. HDV video resolution is so high I can't compare it to DV. In the definition/quality compression I can't help keeping HDV, specially in my kind of work, that is usually 30 seconds of high detail. (Of course if my main job were events and weddings, or documentaries, i'll stick with a better DV camera). In the compression side, I'd work with uncompressed AVI or with HuffYuv, which is free, lossless and half file sizes. But for the time being I need smaller files, so I'm using Picvideo MJPEG at quality=18 (in a 0-20 scale). Comparing the final picture, even zoomed in and with a lot of image tweaks, I see no evident blockiness or quality loss. I use picvideo MJPEG because it is a fast software codec (I don't have hardware MJPEG). It is AVI so it works with most tools. I'm using a demo but I'll buy a registration soon. Also, it has a 1:1:1 subsampling compression option, theorically better and slightly larger files, but since the video has been already sampled at 4:2:2 on the camera, don't know if it's of any use. The codec also has different luminance and chrominance compression factors. I wanted to ask in here, is there a tool for batch converting m2t files? until now i've been renaming them to mpeg, loading them in vegas and rendering as AVI. Emilio

October 11th, 2003, 08:08 PM	#27
Ken Hodson Trustee Join Date: Aug 2003 Location: Vancouver BC Canada Posts: 1,315	Most will want to go from mpeg2ts to WM9/Divx or mpeg2. From what I understand mjpeg as an editing codec is not the best in-between when used in that equation. How would you rate Pic mjpeg at quality=20/19/18, compared to HuffYUV in the above senario? Also it is my understanding the camera is 4:2:0 in colour space. Ken __________________ Damnit Jim, I'm a film maker not a sysytems tech.

October 11th, 2003, 09:37 PM	#28
Emilio Le Roux Regular Crew Join Date: Oct 2003 Location: Salvador, Bahia Posts: 33	sorry, I was mistaken... DV video uses 4:1:1 in NTSC, which is worse than 4:2:2. MPEG2 is 4:2:2, but I don't know if this applies to the HD10 stream. So it would be better than DV in matters of Chroma sampling? It's hard to tell about the codecs, since the original MPEG2 footage has some very light blocky artifacts that could cover new ones produced by recompression. MJPEG at quality=20 and 19 seemed identical to the original m2t footage or the footage converted to uncompressed AVI, or the HuffYuv codec, after examining closely. Suppossedly the Huffyuv codec is lossless. At q=18/17, after saturating, zooming and contrasting the video, perhaps you can tell very light differences in the artifacts. At q=16 the video is too blocky, and this becomes evident when it's in motion and saturation is raised. I compressed a 30 second 1280x480 and got different sizes: Huffyuv: 900MB MJPEG at 20: 600MB MJPEG at 19: 220MB MJPEG at 16: 90MB 30 sec DV(720x480) is 110 MB I haven't tried to encode to DivX, although.

October 11th, 2003, 10:08 PM	#29
Steve Mullen HDV Cinema Join Date: Feb 2003 Location: Las Vegas Posts: 4,007	<<<-- Originally posted by Emilio Le Roux : sorry, I was mistaken... DV video uses 4:1:1 in NTSC, which is worse than 4:2:2. MPEG2 is 4:2:2, but I don't know if this applies to the HD10 stream. -->>> It's 4:2:0. I'm not sure why everyone is looking at all these other codecs. If you want to edit HDV on the PC -- there are the KDDI, Vegas 4, and Aspect HD solutions. Clearly, nothing so far gets the job done like Aspect HD. __________________ Switcher's Quick Guide to the Avid Media Composer >>> http://home.mindspring.com/~d-v-c

October 11th, 2003, 11:05 PM	#30
Alex Raskin Trustee Join Date: Sep 2003 Posts: 1,435	<<<-- Originally posted by Steve Mullen : I'm not sure why everyone is looking at all these other codecs. If you want to edit HDV on the PC -- there are the KDDI, Vegas 4, and Aspect HD solutions. Clearly, nothing so far gets the job done like Aspect HD. -->>> Barring the simpliest editing, one always has to shuffle chunks of video between the NLE (Premiere) and AfterEffects. I don't see how this would work if editing is kept in MPEG2 format domain, like wth Aspect HD. Rather, the practical way of doing this would be to convert all captured m2t files into HUFFYUV-compressed AVIs (lossless, 1/3 of the uncompressed AVI size at 2Gb/minute), and then import these AVIs into the NLE. Roundabout betw. NLE and AfterEffects then happens in AVI format.