Hi there,

Got my HC3 yesterday and played around with it today.
Heres the result:

www.2vault.com/SlowmoHC3.wmv

Kind regards

what size is that clip??? Im thinking of the same camera.... it seems a no brainer for the price point?? whats been your impressions???

Wow, that is impressive, whats the acual resolution like compared to the FX1? Have you got an HDV version of that?

They are 1080i clips as far as I can tell.
But they have lost alot of the resolution. When you switch into the
smooth recording mode you see about a 50% loss in resolution. But because I only use this cam for web resolutions I think it does the job.

The camera have a really hard time focusing while in smooth recording.
You have to point it at the subject quite a while before recording.
The "buffert" feature works great for me. I press the button when my friends land their flips and I get slomo from 3 seconds before I pushed the button.

Mitchell: What do you want to know? I bought it because I need a light camera to bring with me to shows and shoot small web resolution clips to feature on our website www.2vault.com - I liked it because it had the slow recording feature. But to be honest me personally, I would never use it to shoot anything serious. But If you have specific questions or want to see stuff shot with it, let me know and I'll try to help you make a fair decition.

Ainslie Davies: Well, my friend got a Z1 but I've never seen any raw material from that. A week after he got it, he dropped it from Swedens highest building: http://www.diepresse.com/upload/20050824/torso1.jpg
He found it about a kilometer from the building. It was acually recording and he tried to rehouse the tape but I don't know how that went. I can't really judge if the 2 cameras can be put up against each other so I won't comment on it.

This is a Sony HDR-HC3 (PAL)

Kind regards,
Andreas

I'm looking to master that exact same style of editing...

What did you use to ramp down that speed? I love Adobe premiere Pro, but I think that is the one feature missing.

I'm looking to master that exact same style of editing...

What did you use to ramp down that speed? I love Adobe premiere Pro, but I think that is the one feature missing.


I have this camcorder and I think this clip is just the smooth slow motion recrding mode on the camera. It`s a feature that shoots at 200+fps for 3 seconds giving you a 12 sec. slo mo clip. It`s a nice feature with one big draw back. You needs lots of light!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! !
I don`t think this clip is a postprod. editing sample...

They are 1080i clips as far as I can tell.


Any chance of an acual HDV clip, WMV at either 1080 or 720? The one you posted was compressed to 400x228, I would love to see it at 1920(1440)x1080 or 1280x720 to compare to the bigger cams and see what the resolution loss is with the slow-motion.

I'm going away for a few days right now. I'll try to post some new material when I get back.

I used Vegas for the speed ramp, edit and color correction.

Scott: It's not 200fps. It's more around 120fps in camera. But you could make it around 300 fps in post without it looking really bad.

This clip is just a cam test really, nothing fancy at all. Just me and my friends playing around.

Look for new clips this upcoming weekend.

/Andreas

I am uploading a short clip (huge file, though - more than 60MB) that shows 12 seconds of footage shot with the HC3's slow-motion feature, and then another few seconds of pretty much the same scene with the HC3's regular recording mode, to show the difference. This is a QuickTime movie file with 1920x1080 resolution, which explains the file size.

As you'll be able to see easily, the noise in the slow-motion recording is really bad. Judge for yourself if this is still a useful feature.

The upload is currently in progress (slow transmit on my internet connection), but you'll be able to download the file here:
http://idisk.mac.com/mpauly-Public?
Filename: HC3 SlowMotion.mov

- Martin

To add another variation for comparison, I appended to the clip described in my post above another 12 seconds of slow-motion video, this time slowed down by Final Cut Pro. I took the first three seconds of the HC3's normal recording and had Final Cut Pro slow it down to 25% of the original speed, making it 12 seconds long. To me, the result looks much nicer than the HC3's built-in slow-motion recording.

The filename is still the same, but the file size has grown to just around 100MB. To summarize, the file contains the following (about 12 seconds each):

1. HC3's slow-motion recording
2. HC3's regular recording
3. HC3's regular recording, slowed down by Final Cut.

All in 1920x1080, such that you can really see what comes out ot the camera.

- Martin

Any chance of a Windows compatable quicktime file or something WMV encoded? Keen to see what this cam can do!

Any chance of a Windows compatable quicktime file or something WMV encoded? Keen to see what this cam can do!
It works on my windows machine with quicktime 7, have you updated?
Or else download VLC player from www.videolan.org
That player can basicly play everyting

VLC can't play it either, though it does play other .mov's. My editing PC has not been able to play any quicktime file outside of a webbrowser for about 6weeks. So I have been trying to play it on my laptop with quicktime 7 but it says "missing component" sometimes. Just a white screen with no audio or video. Sux

I thought I would have cracked it this time... I remembered that I had an iBook G4 in the library so I downloaded the clip onto that... nothing, still nothing; it just refuses to play saying "missing component". The story so far; Editing PC - will not play on VLC or Quick; HP/Compaq laptop - same thing; G4 iBook - will not play on Quick or that crazy iMovie HD.

The only thing I can think of is that I am missing some Final Cut component as we are a PC based company but I don't get how - a few posts up - it has been played on a Windows PC.

I guess I will never know.

I don't know what to tell you, Ainslie. I am showing it with QuickTime (7.0.4, I believe) without a problem on my iMac. I don't have a PC at hand to try it out, but apparently it worked for Jesper. The only other thing I could do is take some stills (of individual frames) to show the noise in the image. Would that be helpful?

- Martin

Stills would be great, one from camera, camera slow-mo, and FCP slowmo at the same places. I will try to get it working on my iBook later as I think I should have the best chance on a mac!

OK, same folder as before. Look for files HDR HC3 Regular.png and HDR HC3 Slow Motion.png. I didn't copy a single frame from the FinalCutPro slowed-down clip.

Hope this works better. At the very least, you should get a good idea of the magnitude of the difference.

- Martin

Cheers for that, wow that is a huge difference! Looks like DV vs HDV!

I don't know what to tell you, Ainslie. I am showing it with QuickTime (7.0.4, I believe) without a problem on my iMac. I don't have a PC at hand to try it out, but apparently it worked for Jesper.- Martin

It does not work for Quicktime on my powerbook either, and the reason is that I miss the mpeg-2 playback component for quicktime (costs extra). Maybe that is also the reason for the others.

OTOH, I can see the clip using vlc.

...and I thank you very much for the clip. I was very interested by this slow-motion capability, and considered adding the HC3 to my HC1. Now, I know I don't need to buy the HC3... IMO, the slow-motion footage is not usable. I don't know how they did it, but this slow-motion footage has reduced resolution and severe compression artifacts. And indeed your test was right: the slow-motion from final cut is much better.

(I am not saying that the HC3 is a bad camera, BTW; just that this feature is not much use.)