The TM700 will be a b-camera for a documentary being shot with an EX1R in 1080p24.

Are there any pros/cons of shooting 24p with the TM700 versus shooting 60p and converting to 24p in post?
Is lowlight performance better in 24p (I would expect it to be)?

Is it true the TM700 does not have ND filters??

TIA

Lowlight performance can be better if you use a slower framerate, because you can then also use a longer shutterspeed. Although, you could just shoot at 1/60th in 60p as opposed to 1/48th at 24p and the difference in light will be very small.

Shooting in 1080p60 will let you slow it down later, or drop frames to put it on a 24p or 30p timeline.

I believe most of the small handycams do have ND filters but they are automatic - you have no control over them and the camera decides when to implement them.

Thanks. I am well acquainted with the exposure triangle and use of shutter speed. I just found a review showing low light performance.

Does the ND filter kick in when in manual mode?

Does the CODEC still record at 28bps at 24p?

Les,

Though some might disagree, the TM700 Digital Cinema mode does not produce true 24p clips. They appear as 30i, 17bps, compared to the HMC40 which appear as true 24p, 21bps. The Digital Cinema clips may be some type of hybrid, but Vegas Pro 9 doesn't know that.

The good news is, Digital Cinema produces noticeably less low-light noise than 60p.

I've never found documentation or evidence that my TM700 has Auto ND filters. I carry a .6.

Good Luck

Dan...thanks...I had't seen that about 24p. Is it still captured as progressive but for some weird reason packaged as 30i? Does it provide the same motion effect as true 24p?

Les,

I've taken a close frame by frame look at a Digital Cinema clip, and unless I'm missing something, can't find any evidence it is anything but 30i (29.97). If this is the case, it might be best to shoot 60p, 28bps and reduce frame rate in post.

I didn't have any movement for my test clips, so can only say they had my living room couch look.

I've seen brochures for the newest TM900 and they're advertising Digital Cinema as 24p, so maybe it's the real thing.

I've never found documentation or evidence that my TM700 has Auto ND filters. I carry a .6.


Dan I'm curious what brand of ND filter you chose.

I need to get one and with the quality of the lens on the TM700 being so good I'm thinking of buying a B+W.

Kirk,

I have been through the mill with filters. I had trouble sourcing B+W 43mm filters for my HMC41 in the UK and struggled to find an alternative. I with Tiffen - they were OK, but if there were any light sources in the picture (the sun, lights on vehicles etc.) there were terrible reflections/sunburst effects.

I recently invested in a set of B+W filters from B&H in New York. I got their Multi-resistant coated (MRC) filters. Not the cheapest, but they are great - and no unwanted relfections or starburst effects. I'm a happy man again!

I got ND 0.3, ND 0.6 and UV filters.

Dan I'm curious what brand of ND filter you chose.

I need to get one and with the quality of the lens on the TM700 being so good I'm thinking of buying a B+W.

I've been using Tiffen ND and Circular polarizers on all my cameras with good success.

Always a good idea to cover a fine lens with quality glass.

I have got my TM700 for six months now and I'm very happy with my purchase. The camera is not perfect (low light performance and ergonomics), but I am amazed every time I play back 60p footage from this baby. It doesn't matter if I am using the the built-in LCD screen, the computer monitor or a 55-inch plasma, the reaction is always the same. People can't believe that such a small camera can produce that high quality image. To me it looks as good as some of the HD channels on cable.

I did some tests using the Digital Cinema mode (24p/17bps) and the HA mode (60i/17bps) and decided to stick with the Progressive (60p/28bit). It is a PITA to edit if you are using Media Composer or Final Cut Pro. But Vegas Pro and Edius can edit the native files without transcoding or rewrapping (sometimes it requires a custom preset). Haven't tried Premiere Pro yet but heard that there is no problem as long as you customize the preset. Right now I am converting the MTS files to ProRes 422 and although it takes time to transcode, the performance and the quality in Final Cut is great. Eventually all the NES will catch up. So I am future-proofing my videos.

I am thinking on buying a GH2 to complement my TM700 and have all my bases covered: The TM700 for the video look and for really smooth slow motion at 1080p, and the GH2 for the film look.

Mike and Dan thanks for the feedback on the filters.

I have spent thousands over the years on B+W filters for still cameras and they've always been outstanding. But I think Tiffen is also offering a better product than they did in the past.

Melvin you should be able to create a film look with the TM700 quite easily. And don't forget there are new replacement models due soon.

Panasonic HDC-TM900, HDC-HS900 and HDC-SD800 Full HD 3MOS Camcorders | Camera News & Reviews (http://reviews.photographyreview.com/blog/panasonic-hdc-tm900-hdc-hs900-and-hdc-sd800-full-hd-3mos-camcorders/)

Les,

Though some might disagree, the TM700 Digital Cinema mode does not produce true 24p clips. They appear as 30i, 17bps, compared to the HMC40 which appear as true 24p, 21bps. The Digital Cinema clips may be some type of hybrid, but Vegas Pro 9 doesn't know that.

The good news is, Digital Cinema produces noticeably less low-light noise than 60p.

I've never found documentation or evidence that my TM700 has Auto ND filters. I carry a .6.

Good Luck

I'm in PAL land so don't have experience with the TM700 in 24p mode, but my guess would be that it is 24p in a 60i wrapper with pulldown applied. You can remove pulldown easily if you are transcoding with something like cineform.

From everything I've read the TM700 does have a built in ND filter. Even in full manual mode, however, it remains automatic. Way back with the GS400/GS500 it's presence could be seen when scrolling through the aperture range with the gain and shutterspeed locked - at a certain point you can open the aperture up and the image will actually get slightly darker. In auto mode the camera will generally use the ND's to keep the iris in the "sweet spot" (I think it's about f4-f5.6) without adding gain or shifting away from the default shutterspeed of 1/60th.

Though some might disagree, the TM700 Digital Cinema mode does not produce true 24p clips. They appear as 30i, 17bps, compared to the HMC40 which appear as true 24p, 21bps. The Digital Cinema clips may be some type of hybrid, but Vegas Pro 9 doesn't know that.

I have both cameras, and use Vegas. It is true that Vegas think the 24p output from the TM700 is 60i. That's because it actually records real, honest, true 24p with pulldown as 60i. Vegas is not yet clever enough to check for this (which I found odd, since it did for at least of the many, many DV camcorders that used the same process). I use Cineform to convert to real 24p, which works like a champ.

With that said, yeah, it's stupid. Panasonic used to include real 24p on their consumer models... my daughter's SD9 does it. The lower bitrate coupled with the extra pulldown fields means that the TM700 will deliver lower quality 24p than the HMC40. Not any lower than its usual 60i modes, just lower than the HMC40's 24Mb/s (21Mb/s average) "native" 24p. They have apparently decided that consumer models don't deserve a "native" 24p mode any more.


The good news is, Digital Cinema produces noticeably less low-light noise than 60p.

Yup.. the standard 180 degree shutter for 24p is 1/48 sec, and you can go to the 360 degrees look with a 1/24fps shutter. The equivalent at 60p is 1/120 sec.

Of course, the 60p mode really needs the extra bitrate... it is, after all, recording 60 frames per second. The 60i mode is only recording half of that, and at least the native 24p mode on the HMC40 1/2.5 the frame rate. So, at least when you're not crazy enough to be shooting fast motion at 24p, you don't need the same bitrate for the same quality.

Hi

Of course, the 60p mode really needs the extra bitrate... it is, after all, recording 60 frames per second. The 60i mode is only recording half of that, and at least the native 24p mode on the HMC40 1/2.5 the frame rate.

Just to add regarding bit-rates. Progressive footage is very much easier to compress than interlaced. For example H264 has encoding settings that means it will look to treat interlaced footage like frames where it can for better compression.

Also the differences between detail in each 50p frame is less than the difference say between each 25p/24p frame, as it's taken sooner after the last one and less things have had chance to change or move as much, this makes it easier for the encoder to find differences between the frames and encode it with more efficiency. So while logic says we should have at least 34Mbits/sec to equal the quality of 17Mbits/sec of interlaced 1080i, as we are capturing twice the information, this isn't the case with these lossy codecs.

Regards

Phil

Well, you do have twice the information coming in... you just toss out more of it. And yeah, that may be quite acceptable.

One thing to keep in mind: 60p is by far the favorite for fast motion, action, sports, etc. So much so that it was the ESPN/ABC (maybe Disney, too, I'm not sure when Disney bought ABC) lobby that got 720/60p into the "Grand Alliance" for HDTV.

So for one, the GOP rate is the same... so if your frame rate is 2.5x faster, you have 2.5x as many I-Frames. And those, you really want as uncompressed as possible. This is where 24p can produce better video: you have 2.5x the bit budget for each I-Frame.

But then consider P and B frames. For those not familar with AVC and other MPEG algorithms, it works like so. The I-Frame is essentially a JPEG. When the next video frame is captured, the camera uses sophisticated motion estimation algorithms to figure out where things in your first frame have moved, if they've moved at all. This results in a set of very compact motion estimation vectors. You then apply those vectors to the first image, and produce a difference fame... basically, what didn't the motion estimation get correct. This is compressed as part of the P or B frame, but there's not much of a bit budget for it.

So back to 60p... all things being equal, you'll have 1/2.5x as much motion between any frames in 60p as 24p. So there's actually a much better chance the motion vectors work well, and there could be substantially lower differences between frames. This becomes really apparent when MPEG starts to fail. If you ever see really fast motion in your videos, you probably start to see "pixelization" and other garbage. Those aren't real pixels, but emergent blocks... the video is being over compressed, so the blocks created for the DCT (JPEG-like) compression start to be visible. In a professional DVD or Blu-ray mastering process, the mastering engineer would speed up the bitrate in such areas if possible... if not, they'd apply a global low-pass filter (eg, blur), which of course blurs the image, but also reduces the detail, and thus, makes the MPEG work better and hopefully not show off the DCT blocks in fast motion. But I digress.

And then there's interlaced video. The encoder breaks this up into separate fields and encodes each one separately. This means that your 4:2:0 color decimation is really run across four lines rather than two, and of course, rather than 16x16 DCT blocks, you have two interlaced 16x16 blocks... so you're looking over 32 pixels, effectively... much more likely that some compression artifacts show up here. This is also a shortcoming of cameras, like the TM700, that pulldown real 24p into fake 60i for recording.. there's absolutely no good reason for that in modern times, other than perhaps to intentionally crapify it and make you want to spend the extra crash for a more professional model. Honestly, in most video, you don't any single difference all at once, but when you stack a few things: wrong frame rate, interlacing, lower bitrate, etc. it can make a noticeable overall difference.

Hi

Well, you do have twice the information coming in... you just toss out more of it. And yeah, that may be quite acceptable.

If you think about it pragmatically, all 60i actually is, is 60p with half the information thrown away immediately by interlacing which is the crudest video compression system dating back to before computers existed.

So the argument more is thrown away with 60p compared to 60i, is really the other way around, and what you end up with is more video information recorded in 60p footage, which is why we like it so much :)

Regards

Phil

Epilog: I shot with the TM-700 in 60p and converted to Prores LT in post. Daylight footage cuts well with the EX1r. I always had a B+W polarizer on the TM-700 which reduces light by about 1 stop and didn't notice any need for an ND. I mostly shot with it one handed and ran it in manual mode ... riding the iris with forefinger and zoom with my thumb. No complaints for a $750 camera although I despise the way that lens ring mode is selected. Sony has done it right on the NX70 albeit at a much higher price point and larger form factor.