Wes, someone is trying to pass of your cat picture as their own.

Link removed by Admin -- it pointed to material belonging to a DV Info Net member which has been re-distributed by a non-member without permission; a violation of copyright.

Check the cat picture under the HV20 samples.

His "capture" is much softer and less detailed than yours.

Mike

Thanks Mike! haha... that does look EXACTLY like my cat shot! What are the odds?

Not sure why they would want to use my shot... make it look worse and post it is beyond me. In defense of whoever posted this they say that it is a frame grabbed from "some HV20 footage" so I don't think they are saying they took the footage. It would have been appropriate to at least credit the source of the original footage though.

I think he's just grabbed a bunch of shots that have been posted here. I recognise a couple of the others too. Doesn't mention that he took the footage himself though. I think they're just for comparison, and he most probably would have downloaded footage from the other cameras too.

But what terrible frame grabs! He's going to give the HV20 a bad name if people see those shots.

In defense of whoever posted this they say that it is a frame grabbed from "some HV20 footage" so I don't think they are saying they took the footage. It would have been appropriate to at least credit the source of the original footage though.

Agreed, but it sure is implied.

Not to mention the fact that it makes your footage look like garbage when compared to your frame grab.

Of course, he could have just posted your excellent frame grab to show what the HV20 is really capable of, but he seems to have an agenda of his own.

BTW, he was too busy bashing the HV20 on another site and was using these "frame grabs" to show how soft the image is.

Funny, your grab from the same footage looks anything but soft. ;)

Mike

He's not a member here but he posts on usenet and I know of him from other circles not related to digital video. However he's not saying that Wes Vasher's clips are his own. Instead he is saying "below are some sample still frames that I pulled from some Canon HV20 footage," as in, somebody else's footage. Hope this helps,

In the thread he posted links to (on another forum) he goes on to try and bash the HV20 by showing the samples he took from other users footage without any mention of who's footage it is. He could have at least given them some credit.

That's a big no-no as far as I'm concerned. Especially since his "grabs" make their footage look terrible.

In the end, it seems that was his goal.

The funny thing is, he accused someone else of doctoring their HV20 pics! Just because they looked good. :)

I'm not all that bitter, but I would be a little annoyed if someone did that with my footage. Just thought it was worth a "heads up".

Wonder why someone would go to so much trouble to make the HV20 look bad.

To make himself feel good about putting out near $5k for his camera.... And, mind you, I am not knocking V1U. I would buy it if I had the need. What I love about the HV20 is that it gave me an entree into 24p that I wouldn't have, and it makes a hell of a nice image to boot...

Each still, without a doubt in my mind, has had a Gaussian blur applied before posting. It's too soft to even be a bad lens - with a bad lens, the HDV codec will still leave artifacts, and there are none. It's been doctored, Jim.

Someone's defensive and out to prove something.

Not 'cool'.

Not sure why they would want to use my shot... make it look worse and post it is beyond me. In defense of whoever posted this they say that it is a frame grabbed from "some HV20 footage" so I don't think they are saying they took the footage. It would have been appropriate to at least credit the source of the original footage though.

Wes, I went head to head with this guy over at AVS. He's incredibly dishonest and I called him on that. His site gives no credit to anyone's picture and his intent was to 'prove' how 'soft' the HV20 video is.

I told him I had both the FX7 and the HV20 and found the detail to be every bit as good with the HV20. He used your doctored grabs as 'proof' that he was right. I've rarely seen anything like it! I then went on to post a grab from my HV20, but had to downsize it due to file size restrictions on that site. He then accused ME of 'doctoring' the shot since I downsized it and thus made it 'look good'. He then took another frame grab from somewhere else (probably here) and then sharpened it, applied leveling adjustments and then downsized it. Of course it looked terrible and was horribly oversharpened. I told him my undoctored shot was far better than his attempt to 'prove' how bad the HV20 was. The guy is bad news.

What ticked me off was that he called ME dishonest because I downsized the shot due to file size restrictions...and look what he did!

BTW, he did the same thing on another thread where he claimed that ABC's HD was no better than SD. There he took a 720p grab from ABC and horribly enlarged it so that it was soft. He was called on that too.

AVS doesn't harbour them, he was banned after the moderator caught wind of his post. In fact, it was the moderator from AVS who figured out that he was taking footage from here, doctoring it, and posting it over there.

I love this site, but for Home Theater advice, there is no better than AVS.
AVS' camcorder sub-forum is no match for the forums here however. Not their speciality.

Cheers,

Mike

That's good to hear, thanks Mike -- I've always thought highly of AVS. Was worried there for a minute.

No problem, Chris.

The problem is... when a forum has >400,000 members it does get tougher to keep an eye on everyone.

I prefer smaller, more tight-knit forums myself.

This forum is great for many reasons.

Cheers,

Mike

AVS doesn't harbour them, he was banned after the moderator caught wind of his post. In fact, it was the moderator from AVS who figured out that he was taking footage from here, doctoring it, and posting it over there.


Mike


Mike is correct. I sent the mod a PM thanking him for his detective work. I think nailing people like that is important in maintaining the integrity of the site.

http://www.lousyheros.com/pics/hv101.jpg
http://www.lousyheros.com/pics/hv102.jpg

Soft... Hah...

These were Hv10 w/ slight saturation adjust (1280 x 720 not 1440 x 1080)

Ken Ross is right in all respects, I followed that thread at the AVS Forum and I came to the same conclusion.

I think this guy feels "He is the last CocaCola in the desert."

Luis

Thanks guys, it's much appreciated. The forums would be far better places if we didn't have to spend so much time battling with guys on a 'mission'.

Nice shots Joe, but you would have been accused of 'tampering' with them. ;)

I don't know how you make pictures sharper :o You can only do so much with Photochop

I quote...
A friend of mine joked about me buying a HV20, just to satisfy the malcontents and to post my own footage. For a moment, I considered that thought, but then I realized that nothing will satisfy these people because they will claim that I shot the footage improperly on purpose. By using footage shot by Canon enthusiasts, I figure their motivation is to put up clips representing the BEST of their shooting, that way no one can argue that I shot the footage with biased settings. Since I can't control other people's shooting methods, it can't be argued that I shot bad footage on purpose just to make Canon look bad.


Nope, can't argue with that. We can argue that the frame grabs have been tampered with since Wes' original frame grabs look 100 times better than what he posted on his site.

Claims he's output them from Vegas. The worst it possibly could look from Vegas would be if he's not removed the pulldown, and then used the blend fields method to deinterlace the footage which can make a mess of things at times. Even then I don't think it would look as bad as the examples he's posted.

big mess for nothing.
This guy is simply unable to use a video software properly.
He does not doctor anything, he is simply stupid, putting stuff inside his computer and getting them out blindly hey man , after all it's digital !).
he is not very a pro on internet management.

read his remark:
"I'm seeing about 30 NAT sessions per minute, thousands of times busier than normal"
hey, if 30 sessions per minute is THOUSAND time busier than normal, you can imagine the traffic he got normally .

I have a website that I have freely allowed my video content I've shot to be downloaded or just streamed and viewed. A friend of mine alerted me that he has seen several of my videos show up on YouTube with no mention that they originated from my website. I'm not saying or doing anything from my past mistakes but I have decided to employ a new editing technique. I just edit in the title track as an overlay filmed by ________ and my website URL. I just disperse these two items a few times through the clip. Since all of my video clips are music videos, it would be noticible if someone edits the frames out that has my "titling". I place the titling down in the lower right hand corner as an overlay and just for a few seconds so as to be the least detraction as possible from the content of the clip.

I've noticed quite a few people stamp something somewhere on photos they post on the Internet. That might be an option that we employ here and in other forums that we post content. We're here to share or stuff so that others can learn, but at the same time, we don't need to have unscrupulous people ripping us off. Even if he hadn't reprocessed the clip or photo, I think it's still wrong. I'm actually for people ripping off my content & have it spread around in most cases, I just want the content to be properly credited.

The problem with that is I know I like to see native M2T video right from the tape so that's what I try to post and if you watermark your footage then you're going to add a generation of compression. But I understand why many do this.

I understand what you're saying. Posting samples on a forum like this is a special situaltion. I doubt that anybody would post M2t, which is HD MP2, for general consumption as a rule because of the huge downloads. I think I sampled a 30 second m2t file here awhile back and it was about 155 meg.

I think the Internet bandwidth is still a few years away from being practical to push out HD for general consumption. We need a minum of 4 mbs or better downstream for this to be a reality. I feel like I've been pushing the edge of practicality for the general Internet population, when I've been posting all my videos at 640/480/30fps/768kbs. I imagine 512 kbs is about the average DSL downstream for most users. Maybe a little better at times for cable people but the problem with cable is the bw varies all over the place depending on how many are on the cable in a given area at any given time.

We can argue that the frame grabs have been tampered with since Wes' original frame grabs look 100 times better than what he posted on his site.

What he doesn't realize (or chooses to ignore), is the fact that any camera operator can produce hideous video if he/she doesn't know what they're doing. I always found it fascinating that he claimed he couldn't find any HV20 footage when it's littered all around the internet.

He then resorts to taking a fine quality frame grab and then doctoring it to look so obviously worse than what we know Wes' shot was originally. Additionally, he claimed my shot was taken in the dedicated picture mode as opposed to video and that was part of the reason why it looked better...I was stacking the deck. In fact, the pix I posted was from video already shot, put in freeze frame and then captured by hitting the photo button. Adobe was used for nothing more than downsizing to meet AVS file attachment requirements.

I guess we can all agree, 'unbelievable'.

Claims he's output them from Vegas. The worst it possibly could look from Vegas would be if he's not removed the pulldown, and then used the blend fields method to deinterlace the footage which can make a mess of things at times. Even then I don't think it would look as bad as the examples he's posted.

But the interesting thing is that even if you gave someone 'credit' for being nothing more than ignorant in a bungled attempt to post a picture, surely that person would have been able to see how he thoroughly destroyed the sharpness and quality of the picture. At that point he would realize "I goofed, I better try again". This is precisely why I am 100% convinced that this was a deliberate attempt to destroy the credibility of the HV20.

In fact, when I asked him how posted resolution numbers, independent reviews and user testimonials could all be wrong, he totally ignored these comments. The guy has a mission, that couldn't be more obvious. He is simply ticked off that a cheap camera like this could be getting the reviews and picture quality it does.

he's not a member here but he posts on usenet and I know of him from other circles not related to digital video.

Wow. People still post there? I thought that was long forgotten.

Usenet? Strange as it may seem, it's still around. The extremely high noise level in which it excels was a significant factor in my decision to initiate this site and establish a real-names policy in an effort to generate some online accountability. After witnessing usenet first hand, I wondered if it would be possible to try to give the internet a good name, and as such that's been the goal here since the beginning.

Meanwhile usenet today is only a shell of its former self, thankfully.

He is simply ticked off that a cheap camera like this could be getting the reviews and picture quality it does.
Actually I am finding that there are quite a few people with this same type attitude. It's all funny to me because sometimes I can read between the lines in their responses to certain questions or in their general statements about the cam. The HV20 is not a professional cam and has its shortcomings but with what it does in its price range it is inspiring a lot of other up and coming filmakers (videomakers). It has the ability to produce top notch products. I think this is intimidating for some people especially people like this who probably owns a much higher end cam. But, thanks to forums like this people can be well informed.

This thread cracks me up.

Regarding ALL of those stills... no matter what camera they came from, they all looked soft.

Bill

Claims he's output them from Vegas. The worst it possibly could look from Vegas would be if he's not removed the pulldown, and then used the blend fields method to deinterlace the footage which can make a mess of things at times. Even then I don't think it would look as bad as the examples he's posted.I've received an email from him, the gist of which I will not discuss here, but he did outline for me the steps that he took to create those stills. I am not disclosing the contents of a private email here, because he has also provided the same information about his capture method on a public page at his web site.

No mention is made of pulldown removal or deinterlace technique. Perhaps this will shed a clue as to why his particular samples directly conflict with the overwhelming amount of material provided by so many other people:

1. Load the m2t file into Vegas 7e.

2. Step search to a good, motionless frame where everything has good focus and no motion blur.

3. Click the “Save snapshot to File" button just above the monitor window.

4. That creates a JPEG file about 700K on average.

He says that he used this method to capture all of the stills from all of the cameras. He wants to know why, if his capture method is so bad, do some of the stills look worse than the others, and concludes that the reason must be the difference between footage. In order to bring this back to an orderly technical discussion, does anyone have any comments about this capture methodology in particular?

read his remark:
"I'm seeing about 30 NAT sessions per minute, thousands of times busier than normal"

Wasn't there a claim that it was a denial of service? I suppose that might be true if you tried to run a web server on an Amiga or a PDA. A denial of service would either be enough traffic to crash your web server, or clog your internet service with requests such that you can't access the server or the internet.

In order to bring this back to an orderly technical discussion, does anyone have any comments about this capture methodology in particular?


Yes Chris, to be blunt, his methodology doesn't work and he should have seen this from the get go. It should have been painfully obvious to him that his finished product didn't begin to look as sharp as the original that was posted by Wes or the m2t from which it came. I'm not in the habit of making stills from any of my videos since I use a dedicated digital camera for that purpose. I posted a still from existing video to merely show him that what he posted was not indicative of the quality of the camera. In fact, I told him it's absurd to judge the quality of any video camera by the quality of the stills it produces or frame grabs for that matter. But as could be clearly seen from the still I posted, my pausing the video in-camera, hitting the photo button to capture, was an obviously 'purer' method to capturing more of the quality. I had no need to 'manipulate' anything in Photoshop other than to use it as a tool for downsizing to meet the 'attachment' criteria for AVS.

The ongoing irony here is that there are tons of still captures from the HV20 right here on dvinfo. Almost all of these are of far higher quality than what he posted. Wes' shots are just one example, there are others. This too should have been a 'clue' that something was not right with his 'methodology'.

Yes Chris, to be blunt, his methodology doesn't work and he should have seen this from the get go. Right, Ken -- no argument there. But the question I'm posing to the group is, given the listed steps (http://www.dvinfo.net/conf/showpost.php?p=686743&postcount=50) that he used to create his stills, *why* did that procedure produce uncharacteristically bad images? Specifically, what was he doing wrong? Let's assume that all he did were only the four steps outlined above. What exactly are the mistakes here? No mention is made of pulldown removal or deinterlace technique. Are those the only considerations?

It should have been painfully obvious to him that his finished product didn't begin to look as sharp as the original that was posted by Wes or the m2t from which it came. Can we pin down a precise technical reason for this discrepancy though? Or is it just a massive conspiracy perpetrated by HV20 owners and assorted Canonistas worldwide (I asked, tongue firmly in cheek).

I told him it's absurd to judge the quality of any video camera by the quality of the stills it produces or frame grabs for that matter. Oh, I completely agree with you wholeheartedly. There's no single worse way to "compare" camcorders than by examining still frame .jpg images, it's an incredibly pointless process. I found the fracas about uploading full-size frame grabs to AVS somewhat amusing, as I could easily accommodate those full-size images here, with no uploading restrictions on size or weight. In retrospect I guess I could be talked into doing it, but why bother.

But as could be clearly seen from the still I posted, my pausing the video in-camera, hitting the photo button to capture, was an obviously 'purer' method to capturing more of the quality.Which leads me to another point that I'm about to bring up in a following post. His public claim that "a video frame grab doesn't have EXIF header data" is false, and I'll explain how and why that is.

The ongoing irony here is that there are tons of still captures from the HV20 right here on dvinfo. Well, not only the HV20 but also the Sony V1U and frankly every other significant HD or SD camcorder on the market -- this is after all one of the largest digital video sites on the web (and the single largest HDV site, bar none). The fact that there is so much good, representative material here is the primary reason why I usually don't appreciate the posting of links to other sites. In this case though, the matter at hand concerns material belonging to Wes and others, taken without their permission and redistributed without proper credit, which most definitely is *not*representative.

It goes back to my question: based on the capture steps (http://www.dvinfo.net/conf/showpost.php?p=686743&postcount=50) listed above, *why* are those frames not representative? What are the technical reasons for the poor quality of those particular images compared to their original versions?

*why* are those frames not representative? What are the technical reasons for the poor quality of those particular images compared to their original versions?

That's a good question. It brings to mind how Mac G3's used to render DV on the fly, it was all pixelated so that it would play smoothly but if you turned on the full quality it was crystal clear. Perhaps there's some low resolution rendering going on in Vegas.

I also agree that judging video from frame grabs just doens't work. Many times you look at a frame grab and it looks blah, but seeing the full motion video can look fantastic.

I have actually been using my video camera to aquire stills, not from the photo mode but actually from video streams because the picture quality is so outstanding. It's like having a 1440x1080 digital still camera that can shoot 24fps continuously which isn't too bad, though the continous shooting still mode on the HV20 is decent also.

Chris, intriguing question. Personally I do most of my framegrabs from MPC. On the HV20, I sometimes use the photo button while recording video but not often. I tried the framegrab method on one m2t with MPC first and Vegas second.

Notes about the m2t:
It was shot with PF24 in TV-48 with my custom effect which Custom effect was Color Depth 0, Sharpness -1, Contrast -1, Brightness -1. Native m2t straight from tape = 24p in 60i transport. Fortunately, the first frame appeared to be progressive.

MPC Method:
1) Load m2t, it will autoplay.
2) Stop
3) Pause (it will automatically go to the first key frame)
4) Save image (options are JPEG and BMP)

Produces a 1440x1080 4:3 image.

Vegas Method:
1) Set project to HDV1080-24p preset: 1440x1080, motion blur: Gaussian, Deinterlace: Blend, Field order: None (progressive)
2) Preview window: Best (full) -- odd thing the image is 1440x1080 but preview makes it 1920x1080.
3) Save file (from the preview window-options are JPEG and PNG).

Produces a 1920x1080 16:9 image

What this tells me about Vegas, the quality of the snapshot will depend on the quality setting in the preview window. Obviously, when size changes from native HDV there will be resampling of the image. The preview window is probably (someone please confirm) also affected by the project blur and deinterlace setting.

Pictures (all 4 formats -- 4.43MB)
http://www.sendspace.com/file/cggbpb

As for the stills, he should really just get permission to use some that other people have taken instead of downloading mt2 clips and making his own from those, no matter how he's done them. To be honest, a few of his V1U stills don't look that good either.

As for the stills, he should really just get permission to use some that other people have taken instead of downloading mt2 clips and making his own from those, no matter how he's done them. To be honest, a few of his V1U stills don't look that good either.

That's my biggest complaint. To not get permission and then post such terrible stills when Wes himself has already provided much better stills of his own footage. It all just seems wrong.

Regardless, this will be my last post on the subject. I think we are giving him far too much attention as it is.

Mike

1920 x 1080 images...

http://www.lousyheros.com/pics/dvi/

Meh... HV10... not true progressive, interlaced (at 1/2000 shutter) converted to progressive... some pics are good some are meh...

Looks 10x as good when you're actually watching the footage... the frame-grabs are a really poor representation

I sent this guy an email and he ignored me, you can read his "latest" update... I guess I wasn't very polite ;) Actually I just called him out... offering 20+ hours of raw footage + as many frame grabs as he wants... he just ignored it

As the originator of this thread I request to the moderators that it be closed.
This guy is getting far too much attention.

Mostly due to the fact that I created this thread.
I just wanted Wes to know that his work was being used in an unfair manner.


Thanks,

Mike

And this will by my last post on this too since I do agree with Mike, this guy is getting far too much attention.

Joe, thanks for the full sized frames. They're here for anyone to see as are many others. Of course you may be accused of doctoring these somehow. :) However it's pretty obvious that the quality is there.

The point is, as I and others have stated before, one of the poorest ways to determine the quality of camera A vs camera B is to use frame grabs. They simply don't do any justice to the full motion video. There are sufficient independent reviews on this camera, resolution tests, sufficient native m2t clips and more than enough user testimonials (some by owners of far more expensive HDV cams that have a solid reference point), to underscore the amazing quality of this unit.

This entire discussion began when I responded to this individual's assertion that the HV20's output was 'soft'. Anyone that owns the camera knows how comical that is. I shot some footage on Saturday at an airshow and the quality was simply stunning. Anyone that would have called that footage 'soft', viewed on a 50" Fujitsu plasma, would have needed emergency treatment at their local opthamologist.

Would I use this camera professionally? Of course not, there isn't enough adjustment flexibility and I wouldn't have the guts to show up at a paid job with a camera of this size. However, does its output compare very favorably to far far more expensive HD cameras in many conditions? You betcha. In the end, isn't that what it's all about? ;)

As the originator of this thread I request to the moderators that it be closed.
This guy is getting far too much attention.

As you wish, Mike. I agree. This thing has pretty much run its course.

regards,

-gb-