AVCCAM Pixellation in 720P

[Chris Harding]

Hi All

I have been shooting with the HMC80 mainly in interlaced mode with awesome results. I had a free day yesterday (rare!!!) so I figured it was worth trying some footage in progressive mode!!

Now all the footage (especially faces) have pixel artifacts on them???? I shot the same scenes in 50i (I have PAL cameras) and they were perfect!! Shoot in 720 25P or 50P and it pixellates, same goes for footage in 1080 24P and 25P!!! They show up in camera as well as in Sony Vegas playing the MTS file.

Any bright ideas why???? Surely it must be a setting ??? I tried in full auto as well as full manual with the same results .... cos it mainly appears on faces I'm wondering if the face detect settings are messing things up.

Any advice from 80 or 40 owners (we have the same basics in both cameras) would be greatly appreciated

Chris

[Trinity Bourne]

Hi Chris,

I don't have the camcorder you mention but I've just purchased the HMC151 and have found something very similar. The first thing I did was try out all the various settings. Like your model, the only setting that seems to get unpixellated footage is 50i. I am really surprised that noone else has reported this problem.

Would be interesting to see if anyone else has issue.

After reading all the amazing reviews about this camera I am not very impressed. I am having audio hiss issues too.

Trinity

[Mike Beckett]

Chris,

I can't speak for Vegas, I'm an Adobe man (for my sins).

720 50p footage from my HMC41 goes all blocky and pixellated when I have it on the timeline in Premiere Pro CS5, and sometimes does that if I am just playing it back directly in an external player too.

VLC Player is normally fine (my PC is pretty fast), and if I render the timeline in Premiere Pro, then it plays back fine. I don't have one of the high-end graphics cards that PP CS5 uses for better playback or rendering.

I think the 50p footage needs more processing power than 1080 50i. I haven't really bothered tinkering with this too much, as a render is a quick thing to fix it for me.

I haven't seen any problems in-camera though - it's all been when I get the files into the computer to work on them.

[Chris Harding]

Thanks Mike and Trinity

I must admit I never tried rendering 50P at all..it was junky on the timeline so I assumed it would be the same rendered out. Now, I did notice that the HMC82 has "face recognition" and that was on during the test...I have been up to my neck in weddings so I have to admit I haven't tried it without face detection ..(I turned all that un-necessary stuff off soon after I found the pixellation.

You can actually see the pixellation if you play back in camera too so I figured it was an issue.

When I get time to test I will have another try at shooting 50P ..at present I am just shooting in 50i and then transcoding down to m2t HDV files at 50mbps using Upshift ...I also tell the software to make the file progressive and results are pretty good!!! Technically progressive shooting should give you better image quality but for now consistency is more critical until my season ends in mid June!!!

Trinity...you shouldn't have ANY hiss at all....I assume you are using one of the XLR channels???? OK, first of all is the channel set to "MIC" ??? secondly, is the mic self powered (does it have a battery??) If not then you also have to make sure that Phantom power is on (on my cams it's marked as +48v)

Apart from a faulty mic or incorrect XLR plug connections, it really sounds like you are trying to use an unpowered mic in the channel and in the absence of a decent signal, the camera is desperately trying to lift the gain as much as it can to get a decent signal ...all that gets thru seems to be hiss. Check that the mic is self powered and then make sure that the XLR plug is wired correctly....older camcorders often could supply a low voltage to unpowered mics but with XLR channels on Panasonic you need to switch the phantom power on!!!

Chris