I'm not convinced, can you convince me?

Peter Ferling · September 7th, 2006, 10:12 PM

Why climb the highest mountain? Why go skydiving? Why explore the far corners of the world? It's human nature to do so; because it's there.

Your questions are legit alright -yes they read and appear to be real questions. However, it's not our job to convince you.

Why don't you do what I did and fork over $1400 on a prosumer cam, go through miles of tape and endless days of testing and then make an informed decision? You know, my HC1 is the worst camera I've every used. However, after breaking it and going back to cutting a few DV25 projects, I'm ready to shell out for another one.

Bottom line, why should I care if you dislike HDV? Now give me back the three minutes I've wasted posting this blunt truth.

Robert Young · September 8th, 2006, 02:05 AM

Peter's right, of course, you can talk these things to death, and end up still unsure about any of it. But HDV is the new, inexpensive, fun, stuff, that holds out the promise of better images than we have been settling for. You have to actually check it out, see how you would use it, what it might actually do for you. I initially bought the inexpensive A-1 to get my feet wet with. After a period of playing with it, testing it, comparing to the PD 170, I went off to Italy and shot an entire project on it. The finished project is 30 min long. Friends, collegues, and random observers love the look of it, even shown on SD DVD. People who were on the shoot can't believe the the movie actually came out of that tiny camera. My overall impression is that this movie "looks" better than my prior ones. I'm more than satisfied and am not gonna go back to DV. Exploring this technology has been a fun adventure that is still unfolding. Another way to move ahead is to migrate to bigger chip SD cameras; they'll give you better images, but the cost is quite a bit more.

Dan Keaton · September 8th, 2006, 08:27 AM

Dear Lee,

Thanks for the "Heads Up" concerning the "TimeWarp" feature in After Effects.

That certainly looks interesting.

I used Vegas 6.0d to create the 1% slow motion. I just created a velocity envelope and set the velocity to 1%. Ideally, I should have used 1.6666% percent but this level of grandularity is not avaiable
(1/60 = .0166666666666667) . In any case, it worked great with very little effort.

Andrew Mcarrick · September 8th, 2006, 09:22 AM

My suggestion would be to get the Panasonic HVX200 DVD which talks about the camera and how it compares to HDV. They actually have a shot of a DVX100B and an HDV Sony cam split screen. The Sony cam is blurry/faded and the colors is way off. The 100B the cameras a bright no motion blur. Plus, with the fact that HDV has to drop resolution to adjust for whats going on in the frame where as the HVX200 doesn't.

Tim Brown · September 8th, 2006, 09:37 AM

I'm not so sure I'd give too much credence to the image from the Sony camera on a piece of Panasonic's promotional material, but that just may be me.

Nick Jushchyshyn · September 8th, 2006, 09:52 AM

I'm not personally sold on the idea of getting a purely HDV camera myself.

What I'm likely to do is get either an HVX or one of the Canon cameras with SDI out connections (since these have options to bypass HDV compression) at some point next year.

Dan Keaton · September 8th, 2006, 10:00 AM

The beauty of having HD-SDI out in an HDV camera allows one to use the internal tape mechanisam (HDV) whenever appropriate, and also having the luxury of much higher quality output via HD-SDI whenever necessary.

The number of available HD-SDI recording devices should increase in the future. But, for many applications, HDV does work well.

Kevin Shaw · September 8th, 2006, 10:41 AM

Andrew: the original question here is why anyone might want to shoot HD today when delivery options are somewhat problematic, and that would apply to the HVX200 as well as HDV cameras. In fact one of the problems with the HVX200 is that there's no practical way to deliver the full original image quality to viewers, so footage from that camera has to be compressed to the same delivery codecs as people shooting HDV. There may still be advantages to shooting DVCProHD in some situations, but HDV works fine for many of us and will look good to most viewers compared to SD DVDs. Plus as I noted before, you can run HDV cameras in widescreen DV mode for SD output and avoid any concerns about HDV compression issues.

Peter Ferling · September 8th, 2006, 03:24 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by Kevin Shaw

Andrew: the original question here is why anyone might want to shoot HD today when delivery options are somewhat problematic...

...as I noted before, you can run HDV cameras in widescreen DV mode for SD output and avoid any concerns about HDV compression issues.

Bingo! Get an HDV camera and you can still work in DV.

Heath McKnight · September 9th, 2006, 09:25 AM

Shoot, capture, and edit in HDV; output to HDV, DV, etc.

heath

Mark Donnell · September 9th, 2006, 11:24 PM

My two cents : Yes, HDV gives a better picture than DV. Shooting in 16:9 is important today and will become more important. However, high compression results in loss of quality. Still frames of HDV are unacceptable in some situations. I have struggled with these concepts for about a year, and am going to go with the HVX-200 and DVCPRO HD. It is also difficult to deliver to users today, but at least the archived files will be less compressed and perhaps more useful in the future when higher data rate delivery becomes commonplace. I don't think that even HD-DVD or Blu-ray are going to be the answer, although they may be useful for archiving large files. They too rely on complex compression codecs to lower the data rate of the original video. They will undoubtedly be better than current DVD recordings, but compression reduces quality.

Chris Barcellos · September 10th, 2006, 12:03 AM

If you want to stay in a 4:3 world, shoot the 150. Its a great camera.

If you want to stay in the SD world, shoot the 150, Its a great camera.

If you want 16:9 and HDV resolution, you have to change. That's all. It's your issue not anyone elses.

I have VX2000, and the FX1. The VX2000 was great recently in a shoot of a musical, where lighting was an issue. It was 4:3, which I letterboxed to 16:9 with an overlay. I came out nice, but it was not HDV. It was for DVD delivery, so thats okay.

The Texas shootout pointed out that each camera tested had its pluses and its negatives. HDV was not condemned. You indicate that HDV is compressed, but even in compressed format, the resolution is far superior to your SD. Its a tool man ! One to use if you need it for your business or pleasure.

Heath McKnight · September 10th, 2006, 01:07 AM

I looked at the white paper about the Z1 and FX1, and then I looked at the picture. The compression meant nothing to me when I saw that image. I just wish Panasonic would release their info on the HVX200 like Sony did with their flagship HDV cameras.

heath

Dan Keaton · September 10th, 2006, 05:10 PM

Dear Mark,

For what its worth, I have been very pleased with the stills produced by the XH H1, as have been my film oriented friends.

Taking a still photo while you are recording or not, results in a ".JPG" of around 1,200KB. If you take a still from an HDV recording it results in a 483KB to 545KB file.

Have you seen or taken any stills with the XL H1?

While these stills are not comparable to a high end still camera, they do fit many user's needs.

The still capability of the XL H1 is very useful, in my opinion. No matter if you are recording or not, or playing back a tape, all you have to do is press the photo button. This process, while recording, does not interfere with the recording in any way. This is a major improvement over the Xl1s.

Brian Luce · September 11th, 2006, 01:50 AM

HDV downconverted to SD will give you more color info than native SD when you burn to dvd. also, that color info will allow you to pull better keys.

and the extra rez is great when you crop and zoom in post.

It's just better.

September 8th, 2006, 08:27 AM	#18
Dan Keaton Inner Circle Join Date: Dec 2002 Location: Augusta Georgia Posts: 5,421	Dear Lee, Thanks for the "Heads Up" concerning the "TimeWarp" feature in After Effects. That certainly looks interesting. I used Vegas 6.0d to create the 1% slow motion. I just created a velocity envelope and set the velocity to 1%. Ideally, I should have used 1.6666% percent but this level of grandularity is not avaiable (1/60 = .0166666666666667) . In any case, it worked great with very little effort. __________________ Dan Keaton Augusta Georgia

September 8th, 2006, 09:52 AM	#21
Nick Jushchyshyn Major Player Join Date: Feb 2004 Location: Philadelphia, PA, USA Posts: 548	I'm not personally sold on the idea of getting a purely HDV camera myself. What I'm likely to do is get either an HVX or one of the Canon cameras with SDI out connections (since these have options to bypass HDV compression) at some point next year. __________________ Nick Jushchyshyn Matchmoving, Compositing, TD imdb

September 8th, 2006, 10:00 AM	#22
Dan Keaton Inner Circle Join Date: Dec 2002 Location: Augusta Georgia Posts: 5,421	The beauty of having HD-SDI out in an HDV camera allows one to use the internal tape mechanisam (HDV) whenever appropriate, and also having the luxury of much higher quality output via HD-SDI whenever necessary. The number of available HD-SDI recording devices should increase in the future. But, for many applications, HDV does work well. __________________ Dan Keaton Augusta Georgia

September 9th, 2006, 09:25 AM	#25
Heath McKnight MPS Digital Studios Join Date: Apr 2003 Location: Palm Beach County, Florida Posts: 8,531	Shoot, capture, and edit in HDV; output to HDV, DV, etc. heath __________________ My Final Cut Pro X blog

September 10th, 2006, 12:03 AM	#27
Chris Barcellos Inner Circle Join Date: Nov 2005 Location: Elk Grove CA Posts: 6,838	If you want to stay in a 4:3 world, shoot the 150. Its a great camera. If you want to stay in the SD world, shoot the 150, Its a great camera. If you want 16:9 and HDV resolution, you have to change. That's all. It's your issue not anyone elses. I have VX2000, and the FX1. The VX2000 was great recently in a shoot of a musical, where lighting was an issue. It was 4:3, which I letterboxed to 16:9 with an overlay. I came out nice, but it was not HDV. It was for DVD delivery, so thats okay. The Texas shootout pointed out that each camera tested had its pluses and its negatives. HDV was not condemned. You indicate that HDV is compressed, but even in compressed format, the resolution is far superior to your SD. Its a tool man ! One to use if you need it for your business or pleasure. __________________ Chris J. Barcellos

September 7th, 2006, 10:12 PM	#16
Peter Ferling Trustee Join Date: May 2005 Location: Wyomissing, PA Posts: 1,141 Images: 57	Why climb the highest mountain? Why go skydiving? Why explore the far corners of the world? It's human nature to do so; because it's there. Your questions are legit alright -yes they read and appear to be real questions. However, it's not our job to convince you. Why don't you do what I did and fork over $1400 on a prosumer cam, go through miles of tape and endless days of testing and then make an informed decision? You know, my HC1 is the worst camera I've every used. However, after breaking it and going back to cutting a few DV25 projects, I'm ready to shell out for another one. Bottom line, why should I care if you dislike HDV? Now give me back the three minutes I've wasted posting this blunt truth.

September 8th, 2006, 02:05 AM	#17
Robert Young Trustee Join Date: Mar 2005 Location: Coronado Island Posts: 1,472	Peter's right, of course, you can talk these things to death, and end up still unsure about any of it. But HDV is the new, inexpensive, fun, stuff, that holds out the promise of better images than we have been settling for. You have to actually check it out, see how you would use it, what it might actually do for you. I initially bought the inexpensive A-1 to get my feet wet with. After a period of playing with it, testing it, comparing to the PD 170, I went off to Italy and shot an entire project on it. The finished project is 30 min long. Friends, collegues, and random observers love the look of it, even shown on SD DVD. People who were on the shoot can't believe the the movie actually came out of that tiny camera. My overall impression is that this movie "looks" better than my prior ones. I'm more than satisfied and am not gonna go back to DV. Exploring this technology has been a fun adventure that is still unfolding. Another way to move ahead is to migrate to bigger chip SD cameras; they'll give you better images, but the cost is quite a bit more.

September 8th, 2006, 09:22 AM	#19
Andrew Mcarrick New Boot Join Date: Jul 2006 Location: Egg Harbor Township, New Jersey Posts: 21	My suggestion would be to get the Panasonic HVX200 DVD which talks about the camera and how it compares to HDV. They actually have a shot of a DVX100B and an HDV Sony cam split screen. The Sony cam is blurry/faded and the colors is way off. The 100B the cameras a bright no motion blur. Plus, with the fact that HDV has to drop resolution to adjust for whats going on in the frame where as the HVX200 doesn't.

September 8th, 2006, 09:37 AM	#20
Tim Brown Major Player Join Date: Jan 2003 Location: Richmond, Virginia Posts: 263	I'm not so sure I'd give too much credence to the image from the Sony camera on a piece of Panasonic's promotional material, but that just may be me.

September 8th, 2006, 10:41 AM	#23
Kevin Shaw Inner Circle Join Date: Sep 2004 Location: Sacramento, CA Posts: 2,488	Andrew: the original question here is why anyone might want to shoot HD today when delivery options are somewhat problematic, and that would apply to the HVX200 as well as HDV cameras. In fact one of the problems with the HVX200 is that there's no practical way to deliver the full original image quality to viewers, so footage from that camera has to be compressed to the same delivery codecs as people shooting HDV. There may still be advantages to shooting DVCProHD in some situations, but HDV works fine for many of us and will look good to most viewers compared to SD DVDs. Plus as I noted before, you can run HDV cameras in widescreen DV mode for SD output and avoid any concerns about HDV compression issues.

September 9th, 2006, 11:24 PM	#26
Mark Donnell Major Player Join Date: Nov 2005 Location: Silver City, NM Posts: 385	My two cents : Yes, HDV gives a better picture than DV. Shooting in 16:9 is important today and will become more important. However, high compression results in loss of quality. Still frames of HDV are unacceptable in some situations. I have struggled with these concepts for about a year, and am going to go with the HVX-200 and DVCPRO HD. It is also difficult to deliver to users today, but at least the archived files will be less compressed and perhaps more useful in the future when higher data rate delivery becomes commonplace. I don't think that even HD-DVD or Blu-ray are going to be the answer, although they may be useful for archiving large files. They too rely on complex compression codecs to lower the data rate of the original video. They will undoubtedly be better than current DVD recordings, but compression reduces quality.

September 10th, 2006, 01:07 AM	#28
Heath McKnight MPS Digital Studios Join Date: Apr 2003 Location: Palm Beach County, Florida Posts: 8,531	I looked at the white paper about the Z1 and FX1, and then I looked at the picture. The compression meant nothing to me when I saw that image. I just wish Panasonic would release their info on the HVX200 like Sony did with their flagship HDV cameras. heath __________________ My Final Cut Pro X blog

September 10th, 2006, 05:10 PM	#29
Dan Keaton Inner Circle Join Date: Dec 2002 Location: Augusta Georgia Posts: 5,421	Dear Mark, For what its worth, I have been very pleased with the stills produced by the XH H1, as have been my film oriented friends. Taking a still photo while you are recording or not, results in a ".JPG" of around 1,200KB. If you take a still from an HDV recording it results in a 483KB to 545KB file. Have you seen or taken any stills with the XL H1? While these stills are not comparable to a high end still camera, they do fit many user's needs. The still capability of the XL H1 is very useful, in my opinion. No matter if you are recording or not, or playing back a tape, all you have to do is press the photo button. This process, while recording, does not interfere with the recording in any way. This is a major improvement over the Xl1s. __________________ Dan Keaton Augusta Georgia

September 11th, 2006, 01:50 AM	#30
Brian Luce Inner Circle Join Date: Jan 2006 Posts: 2,290	HDV downconverted to SD will give you more color info than native SD when you burn to dvd. also, that color info will allow you to pull better keys. and the extra rez is great when you crop and zoom in post. It's just better.