I did a quick side-by-side with my "old" GL2 and sparkly new XL2 in 16:9, 30p that I thought might be of some interest to the community. If so:

http://www.geosynchrony.com/scratchpad.htm

One favor, though...please "Right Click...Save As..." so you're only tapping my server once for the 16MB WM9 file. That'll help me tremendously to keep the bandwidth under control. Thanks.

Great footage test pete, all these clips being posted are really making me lean to the XL2 as an upgrade to my XM2 (GL2)....

Pete

Great comparison...I think this shows what most of us have been experiencing with the camera. I think your uprezzing the footage to 720p is interesting as well...one of the things you notice is the lack of aliasing, compared to the Gl2 image..the lack of stairsteps is one of the things that lets it blow up to HD size and still look good. I just tried it with some of my clips, and I was really surprised how good it holds up.

Barry

Pete, the XL2 footage looks great!

But I'd like to some comparision where I can tell how great the XL2 is over the GL2. Not how bad GL2 is compared to XL2... because the GL2 footage looks kinda funny... I have the XM2 (PAL version of GL2) and I think it can do more then what you're showing. Is the "sharpness" turned all way UP on that camera?!

I'd like to upgrade from XM2 to XL2. But this test is NOT helping me decide....

Pete...nice site....thanks for the recruiting MP3. <g>.

Amazing!

It is so surprising how the xl2 looks uprezzed to HD. If there were any doubts about me getting the xl2, they are gone.

Thanks a lot!

wow, was this uprezzed to 720p?

Thanks for the comments, folks.

Cosmin,

Both cameras used the factory default for colors, sharpness, etc -- EXCEPT I had been playing with the XL2's skin tone feature and I'm not sure if I had remembered to turn that off before doing this little demo. Regardless, in 16:9 (but perhaps not in 4:3?) the XL2 unquestionably has higher resolution, as one would expect. It may be that your PAL XM2 looks better than my NTSC GL2 clip; PAL has more lines and a different chroma scheme (4:2:0 vs 4:1:1) that may give a little different look than NTSC.

As far as your decision to buy a new camera...it really depends what you want out of a camera. Although far from encyclopedic, several of us shared a few thoughts in another thread:

http://www.dvinfo.net/conf/showthread.php?s=&threadid=32268

When I have more time, I'll add another frame grab or two to my web site (probably NOT today). I'll double check and report all pertinent settings.

Alfredo and Aaron,

Yes, 720p. I captured both cameras' clips into PPro 1.5, trimmed them down, added the titles, and exported using PPro's Adobe Media Encoder WM9 720p setting.

I was simply attempting to minimize visible transcoding artifacts so that the actual differences in the two cameras' images would not be masked by the transcoding and additional compression. But I guess this also shows that for those of us looking forward to the day when HDTV will be ubiquitous, our (up-rezzed) XL2 footage will still look ok on the Home Big Screen.

Ciao for now,

Pete, thank you for your explanations!
I'm not going to upgrade this year. (financial issues!) So, I have plenty of time to read user opinions and decide!

Thanks for the other link also!

Hey Pete,

Thanks for the footage!

I only have one question: is the Xl2 footage supposed to freeze in the middle of the movie, or is that just me?

Excellent Thread!! just what I was looking for! :THUMBS UP:

Michael,
The cameras were actually side-by-side recording at the same time, but their clips are played in the file sequentially, XL2 first, then GL2. There's an apparent "jump" as the footage switches from the end of the XL2 clip to the beginning of GL2 clip, but I just checked and it played through fine for me directly off the web site.

All,
Glad some of y'all are finding these little studies useful. While my wife and daughter are out of town the next 5 days, I'll be a "Class B" bachelor so I think I'll have time to do some more mini-tests that are on my video To Do List.

Well done, Pete! Let me know if you need hosting assistance with that 16mb file; I'd be happy to upload it if it'll take the strain off of your server. Much appreciated,

I think it might just be my slow computer then, as it is pausing (video only, audio is fine) during the XL2 part of the video.

Wow, as an owner fo the GL2 and hopefulyl FUTURE XL2 owner, this was a useful clip. I was actually amazed to see that there is such a difference in the two pictures. I think you just made Canon another $6000 from me!

Matthew...but don't you want to wait and save your money for their HD camera? ;-) Oh, oh...Chris is going to send me to Area 51 because I'm wishing too hard!

Chris, I haven't had any bandwidth concerns in the past, but with the renewed interest, I'll check this evening how I'm doing. Thanks for the offer.

Anyway, technology marches on but at any given time, you usually get what you pay for. A GL2 setup is half the cost of being ready to ramble with an XL2 and associated gear. I think if you shoot 60i, narrowscreen it may not be worth the cost. But if you want top quality 16:9 and/or progressive, the XL2 is worth every penny. I was looking at some various clips last evening, and the difference between the GL2 and XL2 for 16:9 progressive footage was VERY obvious.

Pete...

I understand the push towards HD but I am satsfied with SD right now. To upgrade to an HD work-flow isn't in the cards for me right now. All my televisions are still SD, and I think alot of digital films shot SD still look great.

For my purposes, a camera with native 16:9 res, 24p, interchangable lenses, and a fairly low price (thier HD will be REAL expensive), is good enough for me.

I do cinematic films so HD looks too soap opera-ish for my tastes...

Matt

I have a consideration of another type regarding this thread.

How difficult is it to match the GL2 and the XL2 for a two camera shoot? Is it a matter of bring the XL 2 quality down to the level of the GL2? Does the GL2 have enough menu controls to match color, white balance etc...of the more controllable XL2?

I have to make a choice for an upcoming shoot of using either those two Canons or matching two DVX100's. Matching two DVX 100's seems as if it may be considerably more easy.

Any thoughts? Thanks.

If 60i narrow, the Canons would probably work together pretty well. Some extra work in post, but not too tough, I'd think. But then, the DVXs would do well for that, too.

I've never shot with a DVX, but gather from other discussions that its 16:9 is probably mid-way between the GL2 and XL2. There's only so much you can do in post to sweeten the GL2's image so you'd mostly be "dumbing down" the XL2's image to get a match...probably be much simpler to shoot with the two DVXs in that case, I'm guessing.

Yeah, I forgot that it's 4:3, 30p. But matching is very important.

Despite some of the things that I've read to the contrary (i.e that you had to work with the XL2 to get the same "out of the box" film look of the DVX), there is a real similarity between the look of the DVX and the XL2 shot in 24p with cine gamma. The big difference is in 16:9 where the image quality drops on the DVX.

I faced this situation just last week when I had the 2 XL2s out on location and needed to cover a World Cup snowboard event for another long term project we're producing. All of that footage from the lsat year has been acquired in XL2 16:9. The only camera available to pick up these WC scenes was the DVX. I took a quick look at the footage and moved on...I knew that we could letterbox the DVX footage and make it look fine alongside the majority of XL2 work.

If it was a controlled film on set where the action and actors would be cut differently, then I wouldn;t have OKed it, but in many cases it will work just fine.