So.... Where are the various HD sample frames?

[Yang Wen]

<<<-- Originally posted by Heath McKnight : <<<-- Originally posted by Yang Wen :
Ha, I didn't read your post carefully and almost fell out of my seat when I saw the sydney opera house image. Then I realized it wasn't from the JVC and regained my composture... Yeah the JVC is NOT HD but merely crappy HDV, far from being GOOD HD. -->>>

Yang,

Are you starting a war here? Why are you saying this? Have you even USED the camera at all?

Please explain,

heath -->>>

The whole point of this post was to compare JVC HDV to other HD footage right? I responded to what I saw, simply as that. The two JVC caps can't compare to the other two HD caps. Not even close.

[Heath McKnight]

Okay, good point, but you are generalizing with the "crappy HDV" comment. I would recommend taking a look footage and stills from both Frederich and my short films (Frederich offers both footage and stills, I only offer stills for now):

http://www.dvinfo.net/conf/showthrea...threadid=22833

This will give you and others a better idea of what the camera can do in a really ideal situation, ie, controlled.

heath

[Les Dit]

Heath, I think some people are pissed off that the DV camera they know and love is not the shining star that it once was. So they shoot insults at the cameras that are significantly different than theirs. It's kind of a macho type of thing. Like a dog defending it's turf. All I know is anyone I show JVC footage to is very impressed by the pleasing image. And that is *all* that matters in the end, isn't it?
-Les

[Heath McKnight]

Well, Les, I know how you feel, but I just want to take a moment to remind us all that this is an informative, but nice, website. Like my mom always says, keep it civil.

Sorry if I went off half-cocked!

heath

[Steve Crisdale]

<<<-- Originally posted by Les Dit : The Opera house image looked horrible. Did you guys see the edges of the white roof, left side? It had horrible red chromatic aberrations, I was thinking that the lens was bad. I'm glad it apparently was just an off the air capture. I think the HD10 would have done a much better job.

-Les

Your perception of the aberations in the Opera House grab was exactly why I posted these pics....This is the standard of HD free to air broadcast images, shot with much more expensive gear than the humble HD10. Surprise, Surprise!!! 1080i HD isn't necessarily leaps and bounds ahead of the JVC's 720p. It's not necessary to have every frame in 'perfect focus'. Each subsequent frame of the stream has the detail in a different region. Because the stream is displaying each frame so rapidly, the eye doesn't perceive these single frame 'adjustments'. It's obviously part of the MPEG2 compression regime.

Why not save one of the JVC frames I posted, as well as one of the Free to Air HD program images - open them up in a good image editor, like Photoshop. Resize (with bicubic resample on) the JVC image to 1920 x 1080 and then compare the two images.....(You could of course downsample the 1080 image to 1280 x 720 for comparison). You may be surprised at the result.

I believe that if you're unbiased at what you see is the result you may not pan this camcorder so much.....

[Ben Buie]

We will be posting still frames from our upcoming docudrama ("on our way up") shot on the HD10 soon. We will also try to do some Windows Media 9 HD clips. Hopefully this will give people more examples of what the HD10 is capable of.

We've got 16 hours of .m2t files to wade through in post first though :) So far we only have about 2 minutes fully edited and sync'd with music and stuff, and we will probably redo that. We are trying to end up with at least 50 minutes running time.

Ed (my partner in crime on this project) has made several posts regarding this camera, so here is my take . . .

If you are shooting "run-n-gun", this is probably not going to be your camera. It doesn't do well with a lot of jerky camera movement, and it has poor low light performance. Note that I said camera movement; your subject can be moving like crazy, just not the camera.

Do NOT underexpose with this camera. This is contrary to the typical way to make DV look like film. With a PD-150, which has amazing low-light performance, you need to underexpose a stop or two to make it look like film. If you do that with this camera you will be pissed off when you put it on a monitor, and it will look great in the viewfinder. This camera just gets too noisy in low light. So be warned. Did I mention the viewfinder on this thing is useless for HD :)

The good news is that you don't really need to do any of the typical "DV to Film" tricks to make the HD10 stuff look like film. The combination of 1) 30p, 2) HD resolution, and 3) real 16:9 aspect ratio makes even the rough cuts look a lot like film.

The 3-chip vs 1-chip thing is way overblown. This thing has, at the very least, as good color reproduction as the PD-150 we were using in good lighting. The only thing we really seem to be missing from the PD-150 is the low-light performance. However, the PD-150 stuff looks like video, and the HD-10 stuff looks like film/HD. Sure, I can take the PD-150 footage, crop it 16:9, do some gamma tricks, remember to underexpose, etc. In the end it is still SD. I have a lot more options with the HD10 footage; I can stay in HD through the whole editing process, and then have several output choices (DVHS, anamorphic DVD, Windows Media HD, letterboxed NTSC, etc.). All the masters are HD though. That will come in handy at some point, you can bet on that.

The HD10 would make a great HD documentary camera (for the stuff like you see on Discovery HD). Put this thing on a tripod, dolly, or steady-tracker, slap on some ND's, and outdoor footage (even in the bright sun) looks simply amazing, especially when compared to DV.

I've seen several reviews and posts (which by the way almost made me overlook this camera) that claim that the only use for this camera is for rich guys who want to see their home videos on their HD monitors. That is nutty. If your final destination is DVD, and you want your product to look at least very similar to the big budget DVDs you get in the store, then in my opinion it is hard to beat the HD10. There is no easier, better, or less expensive way to get an anamorphic DVD product that looks like it was originated from film.

As far as managing and editing with the HDV footage, it really is pretty simple. The original .m2t files take up LESS room than your DV footage, so if you have enough room for DV you have enough room for HDV. We use ConnectHD from Cineform, so we end up converting the shots we like into the Cineform HD AVI format, which take up about twice as much space. With 16 hours of raw footage and a 160GB video drive, here is our workflow:

1) Capture Day #1's footage in .m2t format into the computer

2) Back up the .m2t files to DVD (about 30 minutes can be stored on a DVD+R)

3) Log the shots. We use the VLC player to view the files at 30 fps in HD.

4) Pick which shots we like, delete the rest. We give the files descriptive names so we know what the heck they are.

5) Convert the files we like into Cineform .avi.

6) Delete the remaining .m2t's. We then have the .m2t's backed up on DVD and on the source tapes.

7) Repeat steps 1 - 6 for each day's footage.

8) Edit everything in Vegas. Keep the preview window at half size (double-click the preview window's title bar to toggle between full and half size), and Vegas can work with the Cineform .avi format at 30 fps, even on our venerable Athlon 2000 (1.6 GHZ) machine. Don't bother trying to work with the .m2t files natively in Vegas or Premiere, it will bring your machine to its knees. Besides, MPEG2 is a horrible editing format for various reasons. Cineform is the way to go.

9) USE A REAL TV 27" - 32" TV (SD OR HD) TO CHECK YOUR WORK FROM TIME TO TIME. Your computer monitor, cranked up to at least 1280x1024, is technically an HD monitor. However, your eyes are only about 2 feet away, so everything starts to look like crap after a while. Trust me, stuff you thought looked mediocre on your computer monitor might end up looking amazing on a TV. Your computer monitor is very unforgiving, especially with HD, so don't crazy trying to overcorrect something that you think looks bad on your computer monitor.

10) Output the final edited version in Cineform AVI format.

11) Use VirtualDub for some final cleanup. Virtualdub has a decent chroma-noise reducer and a nice temporal smoother to remove some noise. VirtualDub can also output using the Cineform AVI format. If we had enough money we would use AspectHD w/ PremierePro, and we would use their chroma-noise tools, but alas that is a future purchase.

12) Keep the cineform .avi files as our master. Convert the .avi back into .m2t and output to tape for backup and for HD demo purposes. Back up both the Cineform .avi and .m2t masters on DVDs as well.

13) At the very least we will output to: Anamorphic DVD, letterboxed NTSC DV, Windows Media 9 HD, letterboxed BetaCAM SP, and HDCAM. The final two output options have to be done through a local video house, as we don't have a BetaCAM SP or HDCAM deck. The only reason we will do the last 2 formats is for compatability with both SD and HD networks, and because we don't want to even discuss the HDV format with the networks. Anyway, if your buyer can't work with at least one of the above formats, then find another buyer.

Ok, I went WAY off topic (sorry Heath), but I hope this helps. I will post a link to the stills and clips as soon as we finish them.

[Ken Hodson]

"Ok, I went WAY off topic (sorry Heath), but I hope this helps. I will post a link to the stills and clips as soon as we finish them."

No worries Ben. A slight divergence is always welcomed when it is so thought out and informative. Your real world hands on input is much more valued than the biased "crappy HDV" flames.
Ken

[Heath McKnight]

Ben, great job, no sweat on the off the topic stuff, because it really wasn't. Off topic would be if you went into an "essay" about another camera or something. :-)

heath

[Troy Lamont]

Wow,

Excellent post Ben! :)

I can't wait to get a peek at the flick you guys shot...

Troy