HV20 bypassing HDV - 4:2:2 captured to Decklink HD EXtreme at DVinfo.net

Robert Ducon · May 8th, 2007, 12:09 PM

Hi all! I shot this video last week with my HV20 outputting a LIVE (no HDV) video feed to my Mac Pro 50 feet away, which captured at 4:2:2 1920x1080 60i with the Photo JPEG codec using my Decklink HD Extreme card. Yes, I built a high quality component cable with BNC termination to do this.

So I very nearly captured uncompressed component!

The Mac Pro had a 3x 250GB hard disk RAID, but still couldn’t get up to 30FPS at 8bit uncompressed (it maxed at 27FPS) – I needed just one more drive! I’ll do a 4x 250GB RAID within the next month, so I’ll keep everyone up to date when that happens.

I captured to full 1080P JPEG, so let me say again, no HDV in this workflow.

Here’s a mini music video I made out of the footage I shot (pull down hasn’t happened – this is 24P footage in a 60i timeline).

Right-click and Save As to download:

http://hv20.teack.net/movies/hornby_..._movie.mp4.zip

Any artifacts you see are from the codecs (I colour corrected and played with the footage), not the camera itself. The raw footage was very clean. JPEG cannot handle colour correction, so as far as I’m concerned, it’s 8bit uncompressed or Cineform (when it comes out) for post work. Cheers!

Gabriel Chiefetz · May 8th, 2007, 05:08 PM

Nice blue flowers! Did you have latitude trouble with the very last shots, against the sky? It looks like maybe the blacks in the stump got crushed, and you tried to cc?

Thanks for the footage? And what was the song??

Robert Ducon · May 8th, 2007, 08:34 PM

Thanks Gabriel; the flowers looked nice in the garden at 7AM. Yes, the latter two shots of the stump was through a window with the HV20 at full zoom - reflections in the room cut back on the blacks, and sunlight was getting into the lens at that point too (no hood on the camera) so they're not the best shots.

I just shot this for myself to see how (near) uncompressed was to edit, glad you enjoyed the experience for what it was worth. I liked the song too - "Shut Your Eyes" by Snow Patrol.

Mike Thomann · May 8th, 2007, 11:20 PM

Excellent footage of the clouds, they're very animated. They remind me of bustling New York City pedestrians, I think it would be nice to superimpose such footages in another piece, especially with similar music.

Fergus Anderson · May 9th, 2007, 06:02 AM

Thanks Robert

Sadly the clip wont play in VLC, MPC or WMP for me.

Could you tell me if bypassing the HDV compression improves the image when panning or in movement etc? I understand that the mpeg interframe compression also adds to problems when panning with resolution loss.

Would bypassing the HDV compression also improve stobing?

Cheers

Robert Ducon · May 9th, 2007, 09:50 AM

Fergus, the clip was made in QuickTime and works great using Apple's player.

As I was the only person near both the camera and computer, I had to run between the two - 50 feet each way - so I kept all the camera work to locked-down on sticks. My plan was to speed up the footage; time lapse.

I believe HDV is very good most of the time - the codec is rendered better in the HV20 than in the Sony FX1s and Z1Us I've used. In high motion circumstances, on stills it'll be sharper (more so if used with a high shutter speed) but HDV will be fine for most pans and tilts.

I will be doing a shoot soon - either with the HV20 or Z1U - for an indie film i'm DPing, and we'll be doing uncompressed 8bit capture to my Mac Pro - on the road! That's right.. entire camera rig + capture & video village will be mobile. I'll post that and that'll be the best example of clean capture (if it works lol).

Would capturing to disk improve strobing? That's 24P and a side-effect of the essence of 24 progressive frames a second. It won't change unless you turn off the 24P mode and go back to normal capture at 60i.

Mike Thomann · May 9th, 2007, 09:58 AM

How will you be getting the PCIe card to connect to the laptop? Are you using that $900+ PCIe to expresscard adapter, or is there now a cheaper or simpler solution? EDIT: Now I see, you'll be toting a tower.

Mikon Haaksman · May 9th, 2007, 02:00 PM

Nice looking footage! Quite impressive. Did you drop the footage out of fcp into compressor? I'm curious what settings you used to get the final output.

Gabriel Chiefetz · May 9th, 2007, 06:27 PM

Great, I look forward to seeing what you shoot next. Have you noticed any of the infamous rolling shutter issue that some people have encountered with the HV20? Where the image looks like jello when there's a lot of camera movement?

Good luck with your shoot!

Jung Kyu · May 9th, 2007, 07:57 PM

hv10 deinterlance footage
4:2:2 conversion
film gamma

http://jya.jp/jt/tmp//1178759146.wmv

Salah Baker · May 9th, 2007, 08:53 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by Jung Kyu

hv10 deinterlance footage
4:2:2 conversion
film gamma

http://jya.jp/jt/tmp//1178759146.wmv

what was that mess?

Robert Ducon · May 10th, 2007, 01:30 PM

Mikon, the footage was rendered with good ole QuickTime - didn't use compressor at all. Just SD video export with MP4 h.264 as the options. I think I left the bitrate to auto.

Gabriel, if the camera got *bumped* while on the tripod, a weird warping effect would occur - the vibration of a bump moved the camera faster back and forth than is possible in a hand held situation, so it'd look weird then. But you wouldn't use a shot with that had been jerky or bumped anyway, and it would only effect 1 or 2 frames. A heavier CMOS camera probably wouldn't experience this though - the HV20 was a wee too light weight for the tripod.

I've used it hand held in a moving car, and it wasn't a problem, so no, it's not something I'm concerned about and would recommend any CMOS camera where the specs count.

In effect, if someone actually felt the CMOS is a problem it'd be like saying, 'I like to keep my worst footage pristine.' The only situations where it'd show up are: mounted to a helmet as a helmet cam, mounted to the end of a boom that is experiencing bad wind-induced vibrations, being used and dropped by a 4 year old.

No issue yet. I'll be mounting this very light weight camera to the end of a boom soon, so, we'll see what happens...

Gabriel Chiefetz · May 11th, 2007, 12:11 AM

Thanks for your report regarding the lack of "jello" problem. I swear I saw a similar jello jiggle in this V1E (another cmos cam) footage:

http://www.marketingmedia.co.za/sony...le_footage.htm

When they first mount the dog sled, everything goes gooey for a bit. This would mirror what you say exactly, because it looks like there's some vibration going on.

Just trying to ascertain whether this is just a problem for gearheads, or whether it's a significant issue!

Cheers,
Gabriel

May 8th, 2007, 12:09 PM	#1
Robert Ducon Major Player Join Date: Nov 2006 Location: Victoria BC Posts: 400	HV20 bypassing HDV - 4:2:2 captured to Decklink HD EXtreme Hi all! I shot this video last week with my HV20 outputting a LIVE (no HDV) video feed to my Mac Pro 50 feet away, which captured at 4:2:2 1920x1080 60i with the Photo JPEG codec using my Decklink HD Extreme card. Yes, I built a high quality component cable with BNC termination to do this. So I very nearly captured uncompressed component! The Mac Pro had a 3x 250GB hard disk RAID, but still couldn’t get up to 30FPS at 8bit uncompressed (it maxed at 27FPS) – I needed just one more drive! I’ll do a 4x 250GB RAID within the next month, so I’ll keep everyone up to date when that happens. I captured to full 1080P JPEG, so let me say again, no HDV in this workflow. Here’s a mini music video I made out of the footage I shot (pull down hasn’t happened – this is 24P footage in a 60i timeline). Right-click and Save As to download: http://hv20.teack.net/movies/hornby_..._movie.mp4.zip Any artifacts you see are from the codecs (I colour corrected and played with the footage), not the camera itself. The raw footage was very clean. JPEG cannot handle colour correction, so as far as I’m concerned, it’s 8bit uncompressed or Cineform (when it comes out) for post work. Cheers! __________________ Mac + Canon HV20 Last edited by Robert Ducon; May 8th, 2007 at 01:07 PM. Reason: I edited this post - the first file that I had linked had problems on playback once downloaded!

May 8th, 2007, 08:34 PM	#3
Robert Ducon Major Player Join Date: Nov 2006 Location: Victoria BC Posts: 400	Thanks Gabriel; the flowers looked nice in the garden at 7AM. Yes, the latter two shots of the stump was through a window with the HV20 at full zoom - reflections in the room cut back on the blacks, and sunlight was getting into the lens at that point too (no hood on the camera) so they're not the best shots. I just shot this for myself to see how (near) uncompressed was to edit, glad you enjoyed the experience for what it was worth. I liked the song too - "Shut Your Eyes" by Snow Patrol. __________________ Mac + Canon HV20

May 9th, 2007, 09:50 AM	#6
Robert Ducon Major Player Join Date: Nov 2006 Location: Victoria BC Posts: 400	Fergus, the clip was made in QuickTime and works great using Apple's player. As I was the only person near both the camera and computer, I had to run between the two - 50 feet each way - so I kept all the camera work to locked-down on sticks. My plan was to speed up the footage; time lapse. I believe HDV is very good most of the time - the codec is rendered better in the HV20 than in the Sony FX1s and Z1Us I've used. In high motion circumstances, on stills it'll be sharper (more so if used with a high shutter speed) but HDV will be fine for most pans and tilts. I will be doing a shoot soon - either with the HV20 or Z1U - for an indie film i'm DPing, and we'll be doing uncompressed 8bit capture to my Mac Pro - on the road! That's right.. entire camera rig + capture & video village will be mobile. I'll post that and that'll be the best example of clean capture (if it works lol). Would capturing to disk improve strobing? That's 24P and a side-effect of the essence of 24 progressive frames a second. It won't change unless you turn off the 24P mode and go back to normal capture at 60i. __________________ Mac + Canon HV20

May 9th, 2007, 07:57 PM	#10
Jung Kyu Regular Crew Join Date: Jul 2004 Posts: 143	hv10 deinterlance footage hv10 deinterlance footage 4:2:2 conversion film gamma http://jya.jp/jt/tmp//1178759146.wmv

May 10th, 2007, 01:30 PM	#12
Robert Ducon Major Player Join Date: Nov 2006 Location: Victoria BC Posts: 400	Mikon, the footage was rendered with good ole QuickTime - didn't use compressor at all. Just SD video export with MP4 h.264 as the options. I think I left the bitrate to auto. Gabriel, if the camera got bumped while on the tripod, a weird warping effect would occur - the vibration of a bump moved the camera faster back and forth than is possible in a hand held situation, so it'd look weird then. But you wouldn't use a shot with that had been jerky or bumped anyway, and it would only effect 1 or 2 frames. A heavier CMOS camera probably wouldn't experience this though - the HV20 was a wee too light weight for the tripod. I've used it hand held in a moving car, and it wasn't a problem, so no, it's not something I'm concerned about and would recommend any CMOS camera where the specs count. In effect, if someone actually felt the CMOS is a problem it'd be like saying, 'I like to keep my worst footage pristine.' The only situations where it'd show up are: mounted to a helmet as a helmet cam, mounted to the end of a boom that is experiencing bad wind-induced vibrations, being used and dropped by a 4 year old. No issue yet. I'll be mounting this very light weight camera to the end of a boom soon, so, we'll see what happens... __________________ Mac + Canon HV20

May 8th, 2007, 05:08 PM	#2
Gabriel Chiefetz Regular Crew Join Date: Oct 2005 Posts: 73	Nice blue flowers! Did you have latitude trouble with the very last shots, against the sky? It looks like maybe the blacks in the stump got crushed, and you tried to cc? Thanks for the footage? And what was the song??

May 8th, 2007, 11:20 PM	#4
Mike Thomann Regular Crew Join Date: May 2007 Location: Amherst, NY Posts: 100	Excellent footage of the clouds, they're very animated. They remind me of bustling New York City pedestrians, I think it would be nice to superimpose such footages in another piece, especially with similar music.

May 9th, 2007, 06:02 AM	#5
Fergus Anderson Major Player Join Date: Nov 2006 Location: London, UK Posts: 321	Thanks Robert Sadly the clip wont play in VLC, MPC or WMP for me. Could you tell me if bypassing the HDV compression improves the image when panning or in movement etc? I understand that the mpeg interframe compression also adds to problems when panning with resolution loss. Would bypassing the HDV compression also improve stobing? Cheers

May 9th, 2007, 09:58 AM	#7
Mike Thomann Regular Crew Join Date: May 2007 Location: Amherst, NY Posts: 100	How will you be getting the PCIe card to connect to the laptop? Are you using that $900+ PCIe to expresscard adapter, or is there now a cheaper or simpler solution? EDIT: Now I see, you'll be toting a tower.

May 9th, 2007, 02:00 PM	#8
Mikon Haaksman Regular Crew Join Date: Apr 2007 Location: Houston, TX Posts: 42	Nice looking footage! Quite impressive. Did you drop the footage out of fcp into compressor? I'm curious what settings you used to get the final output.

May 9th, 2007, 06:27 PM	#9
Gabriel Chiefetz Regular Crew Join Date: Oct 2005 Posts: 73	Great, I look forward to seeing what you shoot next. Have you noticed any of the infamous rolling shutter issue that some people have encountered with the HV20? Where the image looks like jello when there's a lot of camera movement? Good luck with your shoot!

May 11th, 2007, 12:11 AM	#13
Gabriel Chiefetz Regular Crew Join Date: Oct 2005 Posts: 73	Thanks for your report regarding the lack of "jello" problem. I swear I saw a similar jello jiggle in this V1E (another cmos cam) footage: http://www.marketingmedia.co.za/sony...le_footage.htm When they first mount the dog sled, everything goes gooey for a bit. This would mirror what you say exactly, because it looks like there's some vibration going on. Just trying to ascertain whether this is just a problem for gearheads, or whether it's a significant issue! Cheers, Gabriel