Is your HVR-DR60 stealing disk space from you?

[Douglas Spotted Eagle]

Comment.
I'm well aware of the owner of that website's claims, have had private dialog with him, and couldn't possibly be more diametrically opposed.
He isn't a poster here and therefore I'll leave it at that.
IMO, his claims are past absurd.

[Bob Grant]

As someone who used to test audio gear I have to agree with Douglas's comments. Even assuming the measured results are accurate I'm still left going "so what?"

How do they compare to other cameras is the same class?
How do those results compare to other non camera based recording options?

And when that's all said and done it's no great secret that no camera is designed as the ultimate audio recording device. There's plenty of options from cheap to staggeringly expensive when it comes to recording location sound, many of the WAY more expensive than several V1s.

Somehow I don't see a huge market for a camera twice the price and twice the size of a V1 with the same image quality but an audio section that's 'studio grade'.

If you're dead set serious about location audio, in the first place we wouldn't be even having a discussion about mics on cameras and secondly you'd be taking along a decent purpose built audio recorder and someone to mother it. Once you accept the fact that by having the mic on the camera the sound reaching the mic is very seriously compromised before you even get started you realise how pointless the rest of the discussion is.

Or to look at it another way broadcasters aren't known to pay more people than they need to and yet they still send out an audio guy and a video guy and that's just for dialogue.

[Piotr Wozniacki]

Douglas and Bob,

Thanks for your comments. I don't have an opinion on whether the author's measurements method was correct or not, but I agree that to my own ears, the frequency response of my V1E is not at all as bad as he claims. One fact that denies his results would be that when I engage wind noise reduction on the camera (or the 80 Hz filter on my Edirol mic), I can hear the difference - which would not be there should the V1's circuitry roll off at above 1000 Hz.

Just came across this recently, and it reminded me of this old thread of ours:-)

[Bill Heslip]

I was reading some chatter about this camera on another forum and a user was very disappointed with the low-end frequency response.
Were these measurements a result of a defective camera, an inherent deficiency of the HDV format, or a design flaw?

Still trying to decide between the V1, the JVC 110 and Canon A1. Thanks for everyone's input so far.

Bill

[Douglas Spotted Eagle]

Having recorded audio for national release with this camera (actually 6 of them) and knowing of one weekly broadcast from a very well known production company (over 100M in revenues in 2006) using the V1 and field audio to the V1 for parts of the show production, not to mention the thousands of V1's that are out there in daily use, his assertions are either mismeasured, or there is some other agenda there, or he's had two "bad" cameras, which is quite difficult to accept.
All that said, he's not permitted to post in this community; so it's not appropriate to have discussions about his "findings."

[Seth Bloombaum]

The V1 has typical camcorder sound. I'd expect the same from JVC or Canon.

"Typical camcorder sound" to me means that it is fine for all purposes of recording dialog and narrative when using an appropriate mic with manual recording level.

I've heard others say that the auto gain functions are pretty good as far as such things go, I have no application for auto gain so I can't speak from my own experience.

"Typical camcorder sound" to me means that any built-in mics have very limited application. A camera mounted mic is only good for collecting ambience. If you feel otherwise, we're speaking different languages, or, working in different markets. In the markets I work in, sound matters a lot, so, a microphone will always be very close to the subject, which is impossible with a camera-mounted microphone.

"Typical camcorder sound" to me means that I'll want a separate audio recording of music that will be used as a foreground source. Audio is pretty important to me, and I do a fair amount of recording with acoustic performers.

Finally, and maybe most importantly, I've done hours of recording with a high-quality mic with the V1, and listened to the results on reference-quality monitors, and it sounds fine. I trust my ears, they have 27 years of pro audio mixing experience.

The V1 is also just a camera, not a religion, and if a JVC110 or Canon A1 will work better for you, you should get them. It won't be audio quality that determines this.

If you value the good removable glass and shoulder mount, there really is no competition to the JVC100-110. For me, I needed a smaller camera, but I've used the 100 and it is fine and the 720p is very good indeed. The Canon A1 is quite a bit closer to the V1 in how you might use it. Haven't used one, myself.

[Piotr Wozniacki]

Provoked by the article in question on how "bad" the freq response is on V1, today I recorded some live band with my on-camera stereo shotgun Edirol CS-50. I played it back and was pleased with the results - no distorsion, plenty of bass. I remembered to switch wind reduction off, but unfortunately kept my dead cat on the mic, which means that without it the sound could actually be even better.

And all this in AGC, and on-camera mic.

[Serena Steuart]

Actually those test results don't look bad for camera audio. The only criticism is of frequency response, and there it's falling off the page below 100Hz; looks to be about -6dB at 80Hz. I don't see much problem for speech. If designed to minimise audio problems it will be the general LF background noise that plagues most environments. The author presents the results with a rather silly dB scale chosen to exaggerate differences. Out to 20KHz his curve is only 1.5dB down (or 3dB relative to 1KHz), so I don't see any "muffling" of potential 8KHz whine from the HVR-DR60.