I don't quite understand why threads dealing with 25P issues keep getting closed. This issue is extremely important to anyone in PAL-land considering the V1E, particularly in light of recent announcements from Sony. I'd be very grateful if people could continue posting whatever information they have on the 25P issue here.

I would request that you refrain from posting in this thread if you do not have direct experience or new information on the 25P issue, or wish to discuss matters other than the 25P issue. Thank you.

Like you, Mike, I'd like to ask all those affected to keep posting about any new information on the problem, refraining from anything that would justify closing the thread again...

Mike, I would suggest if you have the time getting to the VideoForum in Earls Court on February 6-8 (http://www.videoforum.co.uk) - Sony always have a big stand there and it is a good place to see such things close up. It was where at the 2005 show I first saw the Z1E in the flesh (and subsequently talked my department into buying two, with no regrets). It is almost certain that Sony will have V1Es (and maybe FX7s) there.

Sorry if you already know all about this and are going. Don't mean to tell you what you already know but it's something not everyone will know about.


I can't myself see what more information there can be at the moment, and if there is I'm sure it'll be posted in a new thread for everyone's benefit. At the risk of wondering off topic, the threads were closed because I think the relevant facts had been exhausted and were going around in circles.

I don't quite understand why threads dealing with 25P issues keep getting closed...

Chris closed the most recent thread himself, and any that were closed by other moderators have been done after extensive discussion and with his approval. I suggest you read Chris' post from yesterday which I think speaks for itself....

http://www.dvinfo.net/conf/showthread.php?t=84616

From the informative to the minor gripes to the all out bitching, its forums and comments, (nit picking and all) that give people like me a very clear understanding as to how good or bad hardware like this really is.

Compared to a small note somewhere saying "25p is flawed in the v1e".

I too am appreciative of the chance to discuss this issue.

I'm not interested in any of the debate that has been attached to it so I would like to keep it informative only.

And as such, I just spoke to Sony Australia who assured me that the V1P over here has "NO ISSUES WITH THE PROGRESSIVE FUNCTION. IT IS A FULLY FUNCTIONAL CAMERA THAT WAS RELEASED WITH THE FIX ALREADY COMPLETED."

This issue is extremely important to anyone in PAL-land considering the V1E, particularly in light of recent announcements from Sony.

There has been no announcement by Sony. Only a post from one person who claims "someone" at Sony Service UK -- which is hardly Sony UK Product management -- told him something.

It's also been claimed Sony has removed all references to 24p from their website: http://www.sonybiz.net/

Well here's what the website says about the V1E:

"Progressive scan (25p) capability and full HDV resolution

The HVR-V1E is a compact and lightweight professional HDV camcorder, sharing similar dimensions to the popular DSR-PD170P

The HVR-V1E is the first Sony professional to incorporate 3 ClearVid CMOS sensors. Coupled with Sony's Enhanced Imaging Processor (EIP) these sensors provide high sensitivity, low noise and a wide dynamic range to help achieve high-quality, smearless images.

In addition to offering 1080/50i acquisition, it also provides 25p shooting - making it ideal for film-makers with smaller budgets and those who wish to create a more cinematic look and feel to their production.

Other professional features include timecode preset function, two XLR microphone inputs, a timecode link to synchronise time codes between multiple cameras and HDV/DVCAM/DV recording and playback for flexible workflow options."

Given that Sony can be tight-lipped, I am in favour of sharing any info we can get a hold of - without debating its validity. Having just spent a large amount of my company's money on a V1P, I'm in a position where I feel I need to regularly update my partners to assure them I haven't made a huge mistake so the more I hear from more sources the more comfortable I feel. When I speak to people from Sony I don't feel they know as much as some of the knowledgable folks here, so I'm all about using each other and each other's experiences to our advantage.

It's also been claimed Sony has removed all references to 24p from their website...

For two days (this week Monday and Tuesday) ALL references regarding 25p were removed from that website. The website has been changed in the recent days. First they removed the 25p feature, then they added back. But in one page they forgot :) It is the "Features" page where the cam is still stated as a 1080i only, nothing about 25p - I wonder why 25p is not a feature... Obviously in a hurry they forgot to redesign that page back to the 25p original.

check now the same site under "Features"

And here is a .pdf of it to prove (25p.pdf)

I attach another .pdf that came from Sony Support who took my camera for a firmware update and ask me to torn down sharpness to 3 (!!!) in order to avoid "Line flicker" as they call it, resulted as a side effect of their fix.

Btw, it was NOT me who has found the site modification and posted here.

I feel obliged to back Zsolt up on this. Sony has indeed removed, then put back most 25p references on the web site in question. Also, I have received an e-mail from PrimeSupport to the exactly same effect as Zsolt's; here it goes (just copied and pasted original message in RTF):
__________________________________
Hello Piotr,

Unfortunately, we cannot comment on anything posted on a non-Sony site.

PrimeSupport have indeed been advised by the Product Team that the modification has now been re-released for upgrade. The loss of resolution in 25P mode is corrected now by the mod. The "Line Flicker" that can be seen after the mod can be eliminated by reducing the "Sharpness" setting in the Picture Profile menu of the camera.

The HVR-V1e remains the only HDV format camera whose chip scans in real Progressive Scan in 1080.

If your camera has not been modified, please contact the helpdesk and we will arrange to have the modification performed at our repair centre. If your camera has been modified and you remain unsatisfied with the results, please contact your point of sale.

Today I took our moded V1P outdoors and shoot a few minutes of footage just before dusk. The scene included some trees with very fine needle like leaves. The overall scene had good light levels, enough for the camera to suggest I needed ND1 engaged. Camera was in Auto at 50i.

I captured the footage into Vegas 7.0d and proceeded to watch it at full res.
Mostly it looked pretty good, perhaps a little more noise than I'd have expected but apart from that a pretty appealing image, no aliasing noticed.

However in the darker areas of those fine leaves there it was, this sudden loss of almost any resolution, whole large areas devoid of any detail. With enough of the tree in the frame it was very visually distracting.

Now here's the problem with what I've seen and what I've said about it.

Until others can reproduce the problem in a controlled environment it's really not worth much, maybe I'm a lousy cameraman, maybe my glasses are on the fritz, maybe I'm just an idiot. I can't really prove anything one way or the other so I can't really help directly other than add my voice to what others are saying, there does seem to be something unusual going on.

What we need is some hard science bought to this issue, the specific camera settings, a reproduceable image in front of the camera at a specific level of illumination and ideally a test measurement that measures the result. Just the same as we would measure resolution or light sensitivity.

Sony might very well believe there isn't a problem, I doubt you'd see what I saw under any of the standard tests cameras are subjected to. I'd bet I could shoot 100s of hours of footage and probably never notice it either. Or maybe there isn't a problem at all, maybe it's just a case of knowing how best to use the camera.

Now there's people here way more knowledgeable than me, perhaps they can recommend a starting point for a quantitative test to try to resolve this issue. If we do find something then we've got something for others, even Sony, to look into. Until it's hard science it'll just keep ending up in he said, she said stuff with bruised egos and folks defending their position.

Camera was in Auto at 50i.Interesting stuff Bob.

Only thing is .... you said in your post that the cam was in 50i mode? is that right? Because up til now everyone has been full of praise abotu the 50i mode and all the 'issue' discussion was about the 25p mode.

Can you confirm that you did really shoot in interlaced mode ??

thanks

Camera was in Auto at 50i.

...stuff with bruised egos and folks defending their position.

Please, please don't confuse reader again, this thread is for 25p, NOT 50i.

And if you did 25p without problem, I would appreciate if you can share some of the raw footage (with sharpness setting info etc).

Thanks Bob.

It's also been claimed Sony has removed all references to 24p from their website...As has been demonstrated above, obviously these "claims" were indeed true for a short period of time until the web site reverted back to its original content. It's safe to say that the 25P references were at first removed, and then promptly restored, within a relatively short span of time. But, all that matters is the *current* text on the site... not how many times it has been changed.

Also it's worth repeating that there has been NO official "announcement" from Sony.

One more warning to a handful of people... threads get closed on this site most often due to personal attacks and flaming. For clarification, see http://www.dvinfo.net/conf/showthread.php?t=84616. I've already had to do a couple of edits here. If you find that *this* thread has been closed, it means that somebody ignored my very clear indications about what is not acceptable on DV Info Net.

And now, back to *technical* and *creative* matters... thanks in advance,

Thank you Chris, you are one step ahead then me.

Please, please don't confuse reader again, this thread is for 25p, NOT 50i.

And if you did 25p without problem, I would appreciate if you can share some of the raw footage (with sharpness setting info etc).

Thanks Bob.

Just to confirm, yes the camera was shooting 50i.

I wasn't shooting 25p as I had assumed it was no longer an issue as Sony had taken 25p off the table. It seems that that has changed.

I don't want to post footage, I don't even want to offer an opinion until we address how, perhaps wrongly and if so someone please correct me, we can devise a methodology for testing for this problem. I'm trying to take 'me' out of the loop and get back to what I, as an engineer, have always considered to be the basics. A Test Case.

I'd imagine such a test case would go something like this:

1) Printout supplied pdf, jpg etc onto A4 paper.
2) Illuminate a x lumens
3) camera at y distance, zoom until image at full frame
4) Camera settings......
5) Record image
6) Capture image using...
7) Look at image in some defined way
8) Observe....problem

This way I believe others can try to reproduce the problem. If several people can reproduce the problem then we have a verifiable result. At the moment I feel there's just too many variables involved.
I'm prepared to follow this up shooting whatever mode anyone thinks would be helpfull but I'd really like some input on how to do this using some form of test procedure so I can post definative results that others can reproduce. My best thought at the moment would be to shoot the same scene using two different cameras, I have access to just about all the Sony HDV cameras, would such an effort be usefull? My feeling is that it wouldn't be as I'll be pointing those cameras at a scene only I would have access to.

Maybe this should be in a thread titled "How to test for..."?

Bob

I think the best way is to avoid all normal camera test!!! :)

One Sunday afternoon I shot several different scenes and built a very good idea of when 25P issues begin to dominate the image. The one dominating factor is to have a scene with lots of fine detail for example a field of grass. Under these circumstances the problems are easy to spot when switching between 50i and 25P. Also under different lighting conditions as 25P is subjected to very high levels of detail obliteration in dark areas of the image that 50i is not subjected to. We can only speculate why this is the case....well I have a good idea!!! :)

Up till now I have had all my offers of help thrown back in my face by Sony. I have offered to send tapes to show the problem post "fix" to anyone who wants to see them. So far no takers. I have been told the camera is fixed but turn down the sharpness.

I am now exchanging the V1E for a Canon Xh-A1 and moving on. I think I have done all I can under the circumstances to bring peoples attention to the problem.

If anyone can get Sony to listen then I wish you the very best of luck. I just don't think they want to hear..

Now we see that the V1U is not without its issues.

All the best.

TT

It's safe to say that the 25P references were at first removed, and then promptly restored, within a relatively short span of time. But, all that matters is the *current* text on the site... not how many times it has been changed.

Also it's worth repeating that there has been NO official "announcement" from Sony.

It appears there was a local low-level decision to re-position the V1E and then -- perhaps after the intervention of Tokyo -- a higher-level decision to reverse this decision. That was the substance of the middle of the night email from the U.K. that I posted a day back. And, why I felt the TITLE of the thread was questionable.

Of course, that leaves two issues:

1) how "bad" is the V1E when video is viewed in the real-world on an HD video monitor? Looking at JPEGs and .MT2 frame-by-frame is not the way an audience sees video. Check Adam Wilt's still images of HDV compression to see how bad a single frame can look. Read about CUE and ICE to see what frame grabs from MPEG-2 DVDs look like -- they are not pretty.

2) The email said Sony had not given-up on "improving" the quality. Which means the issue is still open on 25p. However, I think Thomas is correct -- we are seeing the inherent result of carrying progressive within interlace. Why it is so noticeable in 25p -- I have no idea.

1) Last time I looked I was firmly seated in the real world. The issues are clearly visible on any monitoring device be that a LMD monitor or consumer level HDTV. The reason why jpgs have been uploaded is because they adequately show most of the problems without need to upload 50-60MBs of data. Credit those that have reported the issue with a modicum of intelligence.

2) The answer to why there is a quality issue is far more prosaic.

Who thinks the oil paint effect on the V1U/E/P is acceptable?

TT

I can’t see the oil paint effect. I believe my V1P is hugely acceptable.

Incredible machine.

I have no issue with the little 25p I’ve shot.