I went to the Georgia Aquarium with my wife and some out of town friends recently and took my XH A1 with me to shoot some quick 24F vids. Here are some frame grabs:
http://www.philipwilliams.com/XHA1.aspx

They're resized to 1280x720 in Premiere and saved as 50% quality JPEGs in Photoshop, so they're quite soft compared to the original frames.

I'll say this much, the Canon handled waves, splashing, bubbles, flash photography and dozens of moving fish with no MPEG issues. And 24F looks absolutely awesome. Any resolution hit is imperceptible to viewers. Motion signature is right on. Everyone that's watched the Aquarium footage and some Stone Mountain Park footage I shot thinks it looks like a movie. In the Stone Mountain videos, people have told me its like they're right there.


<EDIT>I've got a decent 60-70Mb WMV file about 2:20 in length of the Whale Sharks (quite a bit of banding in the gradients though; compression isn't kind to underwater shots).</EDIT> If someone would like to consider hosting it please do let me know.


And before anyone says anything, their is some massive chromatic aberation coming off the glass on the Beluga Whale tank. Its the glass wall, NOT the camera :)

hey nice shots. i think i'll go to the aquarium and get some footage when i get the chance. did you have a problem getting close to the fish/whales/etc? how come your 2 min video is 400 MB??? what type of compression settings are you using?

just wondering because i have a few 3 or 4 minute clips with music/dialogue that is good quality and not even over 50MB.

hey nice shots. i think i'll go to the aquarium and get some footage when i get the chance. did you have a problem getting close to the fish/whales/etc? how come your 2 min video is 400 MB??? what type of compression settings are you using?

just wondering because i have a few 3 or 4 minute clips with music/dialogue that is good quality and not even over 50MB.

You know, I was just wondering about that file size myself. Its an H.264 Quicktime, but its just so huge. I just used the Premiere Media Exporter. I think I'm gonna fire off another export to WMV before I go to bed and see how that turns out.

As for getting close to the animals, its not too bad. It was a bit rough when I went, but it was Sunday afternoon during the Thanksgiving holiday weekend and it was very busy. Get in during the morning hours on a weekday and I'm told you can pretty much have the exhibits to yourself.

oh good. that's what i was hoping you'd say. i'll probably go on one of my days off or something. can i just walk right in? because i heard you had to make a reservation or something due to all the people that come.

if you ever get that file size right please post, i'd love to see how it turns out being as you had to shoot through those aquarium tanks.

as far as the compression i used premeire a coupla times at work and couldn't figure out for the life of me how to get the files size to be smaller without resolution lost. i'm used to using FCP Studio for my video editing.

You can check their website to see if there are available tickets by the hour. I'd say you could safely show up on a weekday morning without a reservation though. As a precaution, you could always call them up before heading out.

If you get an annual pass you can just go into the member's entrance and walk right in any time.

I went there a few weeks ago and grabbed these clips from the aquarium. I shot in 24F.
Let me know what you think.

http://one.revver.com/watch/107162/flv/affiliate/38294

Hmmm. I don't understand why people feel the need to downsize their frame grabs. How do you compare the sharpness of one camcorder to another?

Philip,

If your intent is to render videos for online web viewing and you use Adobe PPro, you might want to check out my blog post on this subject.

http://exposureroom.com/members/skumar.aspx/blogs/

Shiv.

Fellows, you're replying to a thread from December 2006...

Wow, don't know how that happened. This thread showed up as "unread" in the clips area.