Sanyo HD1 footage!

[Chris Taylor]

Well I bought one. Should have it today if I am lucky tommorrow if I am not lucky

once I get it I will shoot some vids and see what happens and upload some samples

Chris Taylor
http://www.nerys.com/

[Chris Taylor]

Ok got it !! First impressions.

I LOVE the weight. the rocket will not. I am having second thoughts on putting this inside a rocket unless I am well enough off at the time to purchase a second one.

Ok outdoors so far as expected (autofocus does do an awful lot of hunting under certain conditions I think I can fix that by changing it to spot focus)

Indoors. Kitchen stuff "Casual Lighting" as expected very low noise (RELATIVE to what I am used too !!) but "low light" is not as good as I had hoped. I dont think it will work at say a birthday party in a restaurent without auxilary lighting. looks like I'm gonna have to build a bracket for it for some lighting.

No test vids yet I was just screwing around with it. Tommorrow I will shoot some test vids and get them uploaded.

Some other notes. I "interupted" the camera by yanking the battery while it was recording and it worked just fine ! Video plays fine right up to the batt yank so I know if the SD card or Batty jiggles or pops under load I will at least be able to get the video up to that moment.

Pictures are not bad the 1.2m while video taping works well enough and could be usefull but not overly so (now if I could capture 5mp without interuption that would impress me)

quality is decent but not enough to replace my casio z57 pocket cam.

Anti Shake. well I have to say it works and works surprisingly well with some caveats

first I understand now exactly how it works why it works and why in the wrong situations it will make your video WORSE

OK follow along here I will try to explain.

take a rectangular shape. now place another rectangle on top of it but 5% smaller.

you now have a BORDER around the smaller rectangle call this your "shake zone" you can wiggle that puppy any way you wand and so long as you dont allow the edges of the two rec's to touch your fine.

Here is the problem what happens when they touch and then some. well lets say this gives me a 1/2" latitude (number from my butt just for discussions sake)

so if I move 1/2" in any direction nothing changes in the camera but what happens if I move 1" past the border limit ?

well now here is where it makes your video worse because for thwe first half in NOTHING changes but when you jerk that extra inche instead of the video moving 1.5" it JERKS .5 inches as the anti shake resets when you exceeded its limits and then finishes the move

this makes the video seem more "jerky"

now for what this is designed to do. your holding the camera steady trying to ficus on a non moving object "perfect" as long as you stay within the limits. this is however nearly impossible with a single hand. I have a very steady hand can shoot 1/4 and even 1/2 seconds exposures steady and have managed over 1sec exposures freehanded.

so you need to use two hands relax breath and use your bodies own built in anti shake to help the camera.

the anti shake will also be EXCELLENT for tripod shooting. yes I said tripod shooting because it will eliminate tiny "bumps" eliminate "vibrations" from say a running car you are using as a steady spot mount or "wind" vibration that could make the camera buzz (vibrate)

but thats about all its good for. It would be neat to use the ENTIRE sensor patch for video buffer space (unless they already are ?) to give more latitude but what happens when you WANT it to shift ?

the little dongle will come in handle to allow me to use external battery packs. its 5v though so none of my standard packs will work. any idea what ths things tolerances are ? ie how far above or below can I go from 5 and have it still work?)

More later as I play more

Chris Taylor
http://www.nerys.com/

[Euisung Lee]

Hello
New member first posting here.
I found this place thanks to xacti hd1. I have a great interest in this 'toy' cam cuz I can easily see this one replacing my sony pc120.

Yet the word 'HD' has such a strong aroma I keep wondering the best possible image quality you can get out of this. Reading through this long thread, the most outstanding issue is that jagged edge on the diagonal lines. On my mac it is happening on any lines running NW to SE (\) direction. It is happening in all footage posted here, with some varying degree. I think this could be a bug, but possibly more the limitation of this model. Some sort of compromise they had make to use one CCD for high res image and movie acquisition.

It seems that soft or vividsoft setting suppress the jaggedness the best, and the baby footage was probably shot with soft setting.

Anyhow, is anybody following up on this issue? Could Sanyo be working on it? I think this jagged \s are the number one reason for the quality degradation, much more so than the mpeg compression.

Thanks

[Mark MacLean]

Originally Posted by Joseph Aurili

Software instructions PDF:

www.gamersden.com/hd1test/Software_GB.pdf

Joseph, I assume that this is the user manual, but I am having a hard time downloading it. Is it still on the server?

[Wayne Morellini]

Originally Posted by Chris Taylor

but "low light" is not as good as I had hoped. I dont think it will work at say a birthday party in a restaurent without auxilary lighting. looks like I'm gonna have to build a bracket for it for some lighting.

There is another way you could get a few more stops, use a condenser 35mm SLR adaptor. What happens is that you get a suitable condenser (however you work that out) in an adaptor for the lens. The condenser will give you the same field of view, and from what I understand the same depth of field, plus hopefully, much more light from the increased aperture of the new lens (if better aperture size). Now get a good ND set (outside should over saturate easily with out them, maybe the ND will increase latitude).

[Joseph Aurili]

That is the user manual for the software, not the main manual. I just clicked on it and it laoded up fine for me.

[Chris Taylor]

shot a couple of vids really quick (uploading now)

http://www.nerys.com/sanyo

they are big so I will only leave them for a day or so few days tops. as I get more I will delete the old and replace with the new ones. CANT WAIT to get to the flying field and shoot some rockets !

I figure at least 1 hours before its done. man what a difference to me. I am used to a megabyte a minute and now I am shooting a little over a megabyte a second :-)

I like that I can whack the toggle up and "lock" the autofocus so once its where I want it I lock it so any potential hunting it eliminated.

so far its doing a pretty darned impressive job. (I am comparing to my mpeg10w and consumer level dv camcorders)

I am going to have to build a head mount for this and a light bracket for low light shooting.

This thing is going to be fun. anyone who downloads my vids. any idea where the crackling sound is coming from in the audio ? it also does something weird to my voice when I talk from behind the camera. I have yet to connect an external mic.

Chris Taylor
http://www.nerys.com/

[Wayne Morellini]

I mentioned HD codec DVD players somewhere, so relatives can watch it without a computer. I have also found some HD encoding software better than H264 or WMP that you might be interested in.

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2003/11..._killer_video/
http://www.reghardware.co.uk/2005/11...me_production/


The down loadable stuff is linked to these pages (these are the people that did the codec they use in Ogg, their VP3.2 codec, they are now upto version VP7):

http://www.on2.com/technology/vp7/
http://www.on2.com/video_samples/vp7-samples/
http://www.on2.com/company/

You notice that the PSNR maxes out around 36db, you get max compression on your upper 6 bits (36db, 48db=8bits) because there is less noise. This might explain why people are saying the bottom right black tiles are all black in the test pattern test of the HD1, it might be dropping them to increase compressibility. Can anybody confirm this?

[Bo Lorentzen]

Somebody kept mentioning "restaurant shots"

so I shot one last night.. snow storm, but there is a picture. (smile)

http://www.bophoto.com/HDV/video/SAN...pan-400iso.MP4

Say... can somebody tell me where to get this "35mm lens condenser" ????


Bo

www.bophoto.com/panos

[Jacky Yew]

Originally Posted by Wayne Morellini

This might explain why people are saying the bottom right black tiles are all black in the test pattern test of the HD1, it might be dropping them to increase compressibility. Can anybody confirm this?

There are 10% highlight and shadow details are being clipped with normal YUV -> RGB conversion. If you have VLC player, try to press ctrl-g to access "Extended GUI" and reduce contrast during playback to reveal hidden details.

[Chris Taylor]

Wow not bad !! yeah its noisy but its emintly usable video even with the noise. on my MPEG10w the noise is soo bad that the video is all but useless in that kind of light assuming I would see anything at all !!

I am definately going to build a module of wide angle diffused LED's to improve night time shooting at close range (restaurant shooting range)

Even moderate indoor lighting is enough to make shooting very pleasurable.

I an uploading some footage I shot at denny's this afternoon. it was pretty bright indoors what I would call medium lighting. it did uite nicely though it did have issues with focusing sometimes not too badly though. whats nice is the display resolution is high enough that I can SEE in real time when its having even small focusing issues and can adjust. its much better since I set it to center focus.

The videos will be online soon. http://www.nerys.com/sanyo

Chris Taylor
http://www.nerys.com/

[Euisung Lee]

An article on jagged \ line issue.

http://www.akihabaranews.com/en/news...+to+a+bug.html

Hope Sanyo fix this issue sooner than later. I'll buy one as soon as they do!

[Chris Taylor]

I am not so concerned over will they fix it so much as can they fix it for those of us who already bought one :-)

its not a HUGE annoyance to me but it would definately be nice for it to be fixed as it is visibly obvious.

Chris Taylor
http://www.nerys.com/

[Chris Taylor]

So some questions. Does anyone know if the EDITING function done IN the camera recompesses it or not ?

it does not look like it does but I dont know for certain. I wish the editing was easier right now I have to PLAY till I get to the start of the clip I want and edit delete first part and then play to the second part where I want my clip to end and then edit delete second half.

this works but its slow and arduous. a quazy time line or a HALF playback speed option would be nice where I pick both my start and end point and it would then let me "preview" this and even "adjust it" and then create the new file.

that would be nice. Especially since I dont know of any lossless way to do this on the computer. Since the camera can do it it seems logical software should be able to as well (I can use TMPGENC to do this with mpeg1 and 2 files) is there a way to do this with mpeg4 files ?

Chris Taylor
http://www.nerys.com/

[Euisung Lee]

Originally Posted by Chris Taylor

So some questions. Does anyone know if the EDITING function done IN the camera recompesses it or not ?

Mpeg4 is an interframe compression so by its nature whenever you cut them it has to reconstruct GOP, ending up recompressing it. But it won't recompress the entire clip, just the adjacent GOPs.