The gigantic "which camera should I buy" thread!

[Peter Jefferson]

DVX with warm colours?? first ive heard of that one.. moreso cool colours as the CCD has been specifically designed to crush reds as red is the Bane of DV..

persoanlly i think the DVX100 kicks ass for this.. the whole look is just so damn right..

The XL2 requires intricate configurations, and a decent wide lense to really be abel to take advantage of it..

however if your shooting digital to specifically go to film, i woudl recommend teh Z1.. the higher rez, and larger frame size of HDV will reproduce a nicer, cleaner filmic transfer.

[Graham Jones]

the PD1 (JVC) is also very suitable for filmout.. shoots 25p, true 16:9 and has incredible res.

[Gladys Araque]

I THINK MY QUESTION WAS A LITTLE CONFUSING Let me try again......

I want to shoot my project with the XL2 PAL on 16:9 I have two questions:


1) Is it possible to convert 16:9 to 3:4 for DVD distribution?
Will the movie loose resolution. How much? Is it better to shoot 3:4 then even though I want to go to Film initially but then I want to go into DVD rental market.


2) PAL or NTSC I know the dv film LAB transfer in TEXAS has the software to go from PAL to NTSC conversion and that it does not cause any effect on quality or resolution. BUT the 20% that everyone talks about that you gain by shooting PAL when compared to NTSC is always done at 25fps to 30fps. I guess because 24fps is fairly new it is never expalined if 25fps and 24fps are compatable or how different are the resolution gap betwwen both.


My question is if we compare 24fps NTSC and 25fps PAL is there still a 20% gain in reslolution?


Thanks
Gladys

[Gladys Araque]

Graham Jones Senior THANKS FOR THE TIP ON THE CAMERA!!!!!!!!!!!! I always get excited when there's a new possibility.

Are there other cameras DV that are true 16:9? out there?

I though the only one was the XL2

Thanks

[Graham Jones]

Sure! I only saw our footage on a progressive 16:9 monitor last week. The guys in the post house thought it looked like HD. It doesn't - but it doesn't look like SD either. The res is very surprising, possibly because it captures HD and downconverts, but also it's the progressive quality. No interline blur. When we get our 60 sec 35mm test back I will post again.

[Ignacio Rodriguez]

> possible to convert 16:9 to 3:4 for DVD distribution?
> Will the movie loose resolution. How much? Is it better to
> shoot 3:4 then even though I want to go to Film initially but
> then I want to go into DVD rental market.

You can make 16:9 anamorphic DVDs, very similar to the way DV handles 16:9. If you want you can crop for 4:3 and in that case the answer is yes, you will lose some resolution. You can even program pan and scan so that DVD players move around a window in the frame when outputting to 4:3. At least so I have learned. But I have never done such a thing. I have only tested 16:9 letterboxed DVD from 16:9 PDX10 material. Looked great.

If for no other reason, go for PAL and the speed change so when you uprezz to HD in the future or transfer to film you will get the added resolution of PAL over NTSC.

Have you considered HDV? If you deinterlace HDV you should also get no interlace effects. And the higher resolution will help future-proof your material.

[Michael Sinclair]

My good buddy is a fantastic guy with a lot of talent. He is always on the phone on a well known radio show in NYC here. He has appeared on the show in person too. He has a lot of ambition. He does comedy. He had a rap song out well before Eminem was a "White rapper". He is a jack of all trades. People look at him in awe when he constantly lives up to his promises of bringing another celebrity around the neighborhood. In between, he drives a cab, owned a bagle store and what ever else to pay the bills. Recently he went to Vegas and met with the producers of some of the well know reality DVD's that go around. I won't name them. They use the VX2100. They gave him money towards making a movie. It could be about anything but they actually love his background. They want it to be about who he is. He has about 150 hours of his past life in DV from a Canon zr10 and high 8 from a Sony. He also has various footage that was donated to him from several shows that he has been on. One recent show featured a rapper that has since died. It was supposed to be a weekly show on the big music video channel we all know. The show was canceled of course. He has the un-aired footage of him. Since I have been a friend over the years, and the only one who has shown him what I have learned so far, he came to me to partner up with him. I have Sony Vegas and Adobe Premiere Pro 1.5. However, I know squat about the programs. I have been too busy to learn. I own a Canon Optura 300. Over the last six months, I have taken about 30 hours of family video and transfered it to DV on the computer I built. I have a decent rig. It has two WD Raptors in 74Gb. One 250Gb WD 7200 rpm SATA hard drive too. It is an AMD Athlon 64 3500+ s939. I have 1gb of Cas2 gamers ram. The video card is one under tops for gaming (not a matrox). For video rendering I have had no dropped frame rates. I never defragged in the 9 months since I had the machine and it stills renders video fast. I am basically new at this. I teach HS in Brooklyn NY. I want to help my buddy as best as I can. I hope to get a lot advice from anyone who wants to help with this project. BTW, I went to his house last night. When I walked in, he had a brand new Sony VX2100 sitting on a remote control tripod. He had about 2000 bucks in accesories laying beside it. My eyebrows went straight up. We both sat there and stared at it until I realized that we were both too scared to touch the camera. He said he threw out the box right away. I save boxes. When I asked why, he said, "I gotta stay positive. This movie will be made with this camera." This guy has talent and cajones. I read the manual for the vx2100 all day today. I would appreciate any advice from those who have used the camera before. I never used zebra striping before. It has built in ND filters too. So, does this idiot have any questions? Sure I do. Day two here ;) A few I could think of for now are;

1) What is your opinion on trying to edit on a PC. I never got past the artifacts that I get on the PC when rendering to a final DVD format. The motion artifacts. I know about DVD being lossy but I see better results from the work of others. Is a MAC needed in this business? I have had mixed opinions. Some one told me that I need Canopus and some time to play with settings. Man, I would need two lives for that. I have Canopus and I can't seem to get rid of the artifacting when the cam pans fast.

2) I'll ask about other's success in mixing different video cam's footage into one project. I know that the topic has been discussed before on this site.

3) My buddy told me that the guys who edited the movies in the reality DVD scene that he has hooked up with offered him to help me out. Yet, I still want advice from those who know anything about this camera.

Anyway, thanks for reading all of this if you did. I'll be back!

[Glenn Chan]

Michael,
You might want to post your questions in its own thread as it doesn't quiet exactly pertain to this thread. In any case, I think a moderator here will likely split it off into its own thread.

My crack at your questions:
1- Ideas are the #1 thing. Have a good idea of what you want to do and the story you want to tell. It might change when you start shooting, but if you don't have a good idea going in then you might lack focus.

2- You still need to pay a little attention to the technical aspects to make sure your footage is good. The first thing you should work on is keeping the camera steady. If you pay attention to this, it should be fine. Don't do the family video thing and run around with the camera and zoom in and out everywhere.

3- The next thing you should work on is audio. The goal is usually to pickup dialogue that is easily understandable and not muddied by echo/reverb or high background noise.

You need to get an external microphone and some support accessories for it. For run and gun stuff, it's likely that you'll have to settle with mounting the microphone on the camera unless you have a sound guy with a boom. The microphone on the camera is the worst place to put the microphone and will give you the worst sound. If you can use a handheld mic, wireless lav on the interviewee, or boom mic you will get better sound. But this may not always be practical, so you'll need to mount the microphone on the camera. You'll need a shotgun (or hypercardioid) microphone, windscreen, and shockmount.

Check the "now hear this"/audio forum here for equipment recommendations, as you will pull up lots of information if you search through the forum.

To learn more about getting good audio, I recommend you get Jay Rose's book "Great Sound for Digital Video" (see dplay.com for information on how to get it for $30). Apparently Ty Ford's book is good too, but I haven't read it so I can't say. There are also good resources on the internet.

4- The next most important thing IMO is to learn how to use your camera right. The BBC online training site has some great information on how they use the VX2000.
http://www.bbctraining.com/onlineCou...=5160&cat=2781

Learn how to get proper exposure, how to get proper focus, how to shoot things right so life is easier in post (i.e. avoiding timecode breaks).

5- If you are interviewing people, there are certain ways to interview people to get interviews. Ask open-ended questions instead of yes/no questions so you don't get one-word responses. Make the interviewee comfortable so they're more likely to open up to you. Start off with easy questions, try to minimize distractions, don't scare them with your gear (boom mic, camera in their face can be intimidating). People and interpersonal skills also really help, although you may not learn too much by reading about them. One way you might be able to get better at them would be to watch people and figure out what is going through their minds, try to see things from their point of view.

---

Those are the most important things in my opinion.

Editing: The button pushing/technical side of editing makes very little difference on your final product. You still need to know how to push those buttons though.

Do you need a Mac? No. PC/Premiere and PC/Vegas are very good tools for editing. They give the same quality as other systems more or less. Both are fairly stable and you can be quite productive with either as long as you figure out how to use them. There are various resources for learning how to use the programs... try the editing/post production forums here. I personally prefer Vegas, but that program may not make sense to you (you'll have to relearn things if you are used to Premiere or Final Cut).

DVD: Try posting in the appropriate post production forum here with information on what program you are using to make your DVD, and how long your video is. You just need to increase the bitrate you're using to encode.

2) I'll ask about other's success in mixing different video cam's footage into one project. I know that the topic has been discussed before on this site.

If there are consumer cameras involved, you should likely try to match the footage as the consumer stuff will stand out. You can see an example of what Vegas can do at my website:
http://www.glennchan.info/matching/matching.htm
(One camera is prosumer/pro 3CCD camera like the VX2100, the other consumer.)

Premiere Pro can only do the same level of color correction with 3rd party stuff (color finesse plug-in, or automatic duck to move your project into high-end avid/combustion/after effects).

If the ideas in your video are good and there's money involved, you can get the special editing stuff done by someone else (i.e. color correction, audio post, DVD authoring). In this case, using Premiere Pro can be a good idea as you can finish off Premiere projects on higher end systems (Automatic Duck into another system for color correction, OMF export for Pro Tools or equivalent for audio post).

[Gints Klimanis]

As Mark writes, spend the money on lights. You can buy a little $1000 camera, $500 on lights for better results and the rest for a wireless microphone system.

I have a VX2000, and it is very soft wide open.
You will need to shoot it at f/4 for sharpness.

[Michael Sinclair]

Thanks for the immediate advice. I'm going to spend today researching all that you have mentioned in your post.

[Gladys Araque]

Thank you guys!!!!!

I just checked on the JVC GR PD1 and found out that it's half the price of the XL2 and it's a true 16:9 found some footage on line at
http://www.sanjinjukic.com/index_formentera1.html is aTANGO movie shot in Paris. small clip but it looks good. The only thing I found to be areal set back is loss of color due to it being ONLY a ONE chip cam however the resolution is Great!!!!!! becasue is a HDV cam.

Director Peter Jackson used the JVC GR-PD1 for shooting his version of King Kong blockbuster.

There are many reason for that option he said:

1. Multi-Format Recording and Playback: MPEG-2 PAL Progressive (16:9 625/50p 625/25p,
4:3 625/50p), DV PAL Interlace (4:3, 625/50i).

2. Component (Y/Pb/Pr), Y/C, Composite, i.LINK interfaces.

3. Hi-Def F1.8-F1.9 Optically Stabilised Zoom Lens.

4. 1/3-inch 1.18 Megapixel Progressive Scan 16:9 CCD with Hybrid
Complementary-Primary Digital Filter.

5. Native resolution of the only one CCD is 1280x659 pixels with a
widescreen 16:9 progressive scan.

6. MPEG-2 Recording on MiniDV Cassette.

7. The camera captures video at a resolution of 1280 x 659 pixels, with 25 progressively
scanned frames per second. The output/capture picture size starts with 1024x576 pixels in
m2t file (MPEG-TS). That size can be easy up convert to the smaller HD scan line count with
the higher resolution progressive scan of 1280x720 pixels in 10 bit uncompressed file with
very little, if any, quality loss.

8. It means that with JVC GR-PD1 you get the best picture quality at 720p25 for
that camera price below Euro € 2000.

9. If you would work on Apple Macintosh with Final Cut Pro HD you do not need any
additional HDV software to buy. All other HDV applications can be found online and
they are free of charge. Also Apple at Macworld SF 2005 released native HDV support in
Final Cut Express HD and iMovie.

10. Free helper apps on Mac are Apple DVHSCap , MPEG Streamclip, DiVA and VLC Player.

11. EDITING ON MAC

Variant 1: Go on Apple site, find iMovie HD, read and order iLife suite where you can get
iMovie HD. Than follow iMovie HD worklflow.

Variant 2: Go on Apple site, find Final Cut Express HD, read about HDV workflow and
order FCE HD.

Variant 3: My workflow at "Free Capture, Preview, Encoding with Mac"



JVC GR-PD1 (625p)

If you are a freak of shooting a low budget FILM on VIDEO or like somebody called "digital intermediate" and if you would like to achieve 24fps HD FILM-STYLE video with the highest picture quality from the cheapest native 16:9 Wide Screen Extended Definition Progressive Scan Digital Video Camera on the market that costs less than Euro € 2500 you should probably try out JVC GR-PD1.

I hope this helps someone with a very very ultra low BUDGET as for me I have finally decided TODAY. I will go with the Canon XL2 E PAL. Finally after 6 months of thinking an researching and analysis I finally reached a decision. It's going to be a challenge with the lenses and focus problems of the 20X but I am hopefull that in the end I will have a good enough Product to market.

This are my personal, personal rates for cameras good enough to transfer to 35mm Film if shot with a good DP and Story.

Best: Canon XL2 E PAL
2nd: DVX 100A PAL
3rd: JVC GR PD1
4th: Sony PD 170 or 150 PAL

A thousand THANKS again. No more posting required on this subject for me I'm done......

[Graham Jones]

I saw a photo of Jackson on the roof of a building, maybe empire state, with the PD1 but just assumed he was on a recy..

[Ignacio Rodriguez]

I was thinking Sony when is said HDV. The JVC camera you mention is a single-sensor cam and at that size, it has problems with noise, especially chroma noise, unless you have a lot of light are your disposal, which in the case of budget production is not usually the case. Sensitivity of the Sony FX1/Z1 is not as good as the PD170 but much better than the JVC.

[Rob Lohman]

You DO NOT (!) need a 4:3 DVD if you have 16:9 source material
(unless you do not want the black bars on a 4:3 TV).

DVD players can automatically letterbox 16:9 footage for display
on a 4:3 TV if these players are set up correctly.

All those commercial Hollywood DVD's are 16:9 anamorphic. If you
told your DVD player you have a 16:9 TV attached it will send the
signal as is. If you told it there is a 4:3 TV attached it will first
squeeze the footage down and then add the black bars.

So stick with a 16:9 DVD for 16:9 footage.

Also:

" from PAL to NTSC conversion and that it does not cause any effect on quality or resolution "

Is in my opinion totally incorrect. You will always loose some
quality and you will definitely loose resolution!

[Agus Casse]

I have compared and try the VX2100 with a DVC80, and it really sucks at low light... also in the DVC80 you have much more manual controls than the sony.


I am getting a DVC60 as a companion to my DVC80,... (crap it isnt sold anymore... )


I have tested it.. and it look like a solid choice.