Sony HDV footage online

[Heath McKnight]

Greg,

It worked for me after I made sure the first S in Sweetn3ss was capitalized.

What didn't work was getting any video to play, just music. Sure, I have the WM9 HD player for Mac OS X, but I don't think my little G3 iBook, though twice as fast as my first blue and white Power Mac G3 edit system, could handle it.

heath

[Scott Anderson]

Heath,

The video played for me with the following: Windows Media Player for Mac 9.0.0, OSX 10.3.5 on a G5 Dual 2GHz /w/ 8GB RAM.

The amazing thing is that it seems to play fine at 100%, but when I jump to full sceen, playback throttles down to about 10-12 frames per second. I guess that WM9 is just not well optimized for Mac.

[Heath McKnight]

I downloaded it and will try again soon. I wish they'd shot on 1080i non-PAL...

heath

[Leonard Richardson]

Hi
I went to a sony's sight tonight and down loaded a sample of video from sony's HDV cam. it was rendered in wmv-9 at 1280x720 16:9 at 5.26 mbps. and they were of flowers and landscapes. I have some footage from a GR-HD1 of flowers rendered to wmv-9 at 1280x720 16:9 5.06 mbps To tell the truth the JVC looked better. the colors looked almost the same. But the JVC had more fine detail like around the flowers and the small leafs. I'm sure the manual controls will be better ( Plus Audio control ) But for me I want the best picture!!! and i'll wait for JVC's update I'm sure there will be one! I think the people that run out and trade there HD1/HD10 thinking they are going to get alot more might not be that happy after the extra money spent. This is just my point of veiw ! and i'm not a pro. Has any one else seen the clips ? what do you think ?


Len

[Don Berube]

How about Sony ante up and post some low-light footage taken with their new HDV handycam? heh

- don

[Daymon Hoffman]

Quick somebody pinch one from a show and copya heap of footage.. ;)

[Boyd Ostroff]

<<<-- Originally posted by Leonard Richardson : I think the people that run out and trade there HD1/HD10 thinking they are going to get alot more might not be that happy after the extra money spent. -->>>

I think it's way too early to draw any conclusions about this un-released camera. Wait a few months until they are out in the field. I agree it would be a bad idea to sell your existing camera on the hope that some new model will be better... you know the expression "better the devil that you know." Personally I hold out a lot of hope for this new Sony, but am not jumping to any conclusions at this early stage.

Visit the XL-2 forum to see an example of what can happen... someone over there sold his DVX-100a and ordered an XL-2 sight unseen. Now there are certain aspects of the XL-2 which are not to his liking and he's facing some deadlines. I'm sure the XL-2 is actually fine, but for whatever reason it wasn't what this guy expected. Not a good idea to put yourself in such a position...

[Bob England]

<<<-- Originally posted by Daymon Hoffman : Ah i'm glad someone else finally thinks the resolution department isnt as HIGH Defintion as it could be. with 960x1080i native pixels going into the image its no wonder.... then poor lowly MPEG2 used to compress it (it hates interlaced remember?). -->>>

As has been pointed out elsewhere, while the CCDs are 960x1080, the FX1 uses a 50% horizontal pixel shift (like Canon and Panasonic) between the green and red+blue pixels to get an effective 1440 pixel horizontal resolution (960 x 1.5 = 1440).

[Paul Mogg]

I'm sure that's true Bob, but the footage I've seen posted so far doesn't look like 1440 * 1080 footage to me in terms of detail, (which is the same as the CineAlta I believe). I hope that native footage from the camera, when it becomes available, looks closer to what you would expect from that 1080i HD resolution. Let's hope.

[Daymon Hoffman]

<<<-- Originally posted by Bob England : <<<-- Originally posted by Daymon Hoffman : Ah i'm glad someone else finally thinks the resolution department isnt as HIGH Defintion as it could be. with 960x1080i native pixels going into the image its no wonder.... then poor lowly MPEG2 used to compress it (it hates interlaced remember?). -->>>

As has been pointed out elsewhere, while the CCDs are 960x1080, the FX1 uses a 50% horizontal pixel shift (like Canon and Panasonic) between the green and red+blue pixels to get an effective 1440 pixel horizontal resolution (960 x 1.5 = 1440). -->>>

Would you mind pointing me to where it was pointed out (something official would be great thanks)?

If such a processs is true... i fail to see how it can result in a "real full pixel" equivelant when its 1/3rd of a pixels definition? (if you get me!) :). But hopefully some explanation from the enineers will explain it.

Taking into consideration what Paul is saying and what the footage shows... a downconvert of 1440 should produce even more stunning results then the native 1440 itself due to the nature of resizing smaller (low quality footage at D1 looks great at Half D1 for example). So the sample should have been rather stunning i would think. Even though it was still nice footage, for HD its really not that nice. The tree scene with the ppl on the chairs is very underdetailed and blurry or smeary (for want of better words)... seems seroiusly lacking detail (the in focus shot).

[Don Berube]

So, does anyone else realize that none of the footage shows any motion? It's like watching a set of still images. Is this not important to anyone? Perhaps Sony decided that nobody would be impressed looking at MPEG breakup?

- don

[Ben Buie]

<<<-- Originally posted by Don Berube : So, does anyone else realize that none of the footage shows any motion? It's like watching a set of still images. Is this not important to anyone? Perhaps Sony decided that nobody would be impressed looking at MPEG breakup?

- don -->>>

Hi Don, just wondering if you have worked with the HD10 or HDV before? While the HD10 is not without its faults (1 CCD, crappy low light sensitivity, not enough manual control), I can say first hand that traditional MPEG2 problems are not a factor with HDV (since we shoot everything in that format right now). 19 Mbps (25 Mbps for the Sony) is a pretty high bit-rate for MPEG2, so even scenes with fast motion are free of mosquito noise, breakup, and other compression artifacts. I believe it is the high bitrate combined with a very good MPEG2 encoder that makes this possible.

I can only imagine the Sony would do better. The only thing going against it is a total lack of progressive scan, which is a dissapointment. Even 30p would have been great. I have no experience working with 1080i, hopefully it de-interlaces better than 480i.

Just curious, do you see a lot of these problems in satellite, OTA, or cable HDTV broadcasts? I watch a ton of ESPN HD on a very large HD screen (100"), and I can't remember the last time I wasn't in awe of the picture. As you can imagine, ESPN HD has a ton of fast moving images :) And that is MPEG2 encoded at a substantially lower bitrate (10 - 15 Mbps) than HDV*. We also test our HDV projects (shot on the HD10) on that same screen, and they all look very nice (much better than our footage from a Sony PD-150, that is for sure).

Just some food for thought.

Ben

*Of course the stuff on ESPN HD is shot at 720/60p on high end HD studio cameras. However, if the compression of MPEG2 was a problem, then you would see those compression problems regardless of the originating format.

[Anhar Miah]

just to add, maybe its me but WMV codec seems to make everything smudgey, i've encoded lots of stuff using wmv9 and the results seem (to me anyway) to lose detail, i think its because wmv trys to apply some kind of smoother filter to it, so it can encode more effeicintly , in my view Quick Time seems to be better in that respect.

[Les Dit]

It all depends on the bitrate. 5 mbps is a low bit rate for those clips.


<<<-- Originally posted by Anhar Miah : just to add, maybe its me but WMV codec seems to make everything smudgey, i've encoded lots of stuff using wmv9 and the results seem (to me anyway) to lose detail, i think its because wmv trys to apply some kind of smoother filter to it, so it can encode more effeicintly , in my view Quick Time seems to be better in that respect. -->>>

[Wayne Orr]

Three or four posts about the Sony FX1 and still no one bites, eh Don? It could just be that the folks here know that Canon is one of your top clients.