Sony HDV footage online

[David Walding]

Just found this on the vegas user forum one of their employees which is now owned by sony has put some footage online of the new Sony HDV camera. Looks pretty good but I was wondering if the XL2 could reproduce similar results although at slightly lower resolution?

Here is the link.

http://mediasoftware.sonypictures.co...lies=15&Page=0

[Jed Williamson]

Wow, I feel honored to be living in the same city as a Prototype of the Sony HDV camera

:)

[David Lach]

The footage sure looks a whole lot better than the JVC, well the colors anyway, although you can still see white clipping in some of the sequences.

Shame it doesn't do progressive scan, because even with all that resolution, it'll still have that ugly video look I despise when there's some movement in the frame. This comes from the 50i acquisition, there's no way around it.

Why can't we just get rid of interlaced images? (ok I know why, and this is obviously one very biased point of view based on personal preferences).

[Jaime Valles]

Looks fine, but I'm more impressed with Barry's XL2 footage (see below) than this HDV.

http://www.dvinfo.net/conf/showthrea...threadid=31660

I think HDV has a way to go before it reaches its full potential. MiniDV seems to have reached the pinnnacle with the XL2 and the DVX100A. I know Canon is working (presumably) on HDV cameras, but Panasonic seems to be sticking to MiniDV/DVCPro50-100. It'll be very interesting to see what they come up with as an answer to these Canon and Sony products.

[Ben Buie]

<<<-- Originally posted by Jaime Valles : Looks fine, but I'm more impressed with Barry's XL2 footage (see below) than this HDV.

I think you might want to look again . . .

Take the clip from the new Sony and display it "full screen" on a monitor with 1280x720 resolution, or better yet feed the DVI or RGB output of your display to a large screen HDTV.

Then take the XL2 clip and do the same thing.

I think you will see what I'm talking about.

And this is the first and only footage from the Sony we have seen . . . and after being compressed to Windows Media HD at 1280x720!

As someone who works with the HD10 on a regular basis (and is used to editing HDV), I am extremely excited about that footage from the Sony.

I do wish they would have given us a "true" 30p option though.

One more thing . . .

Sometimes the 24p thing baffles me. If I'm trying to shop my product to potential distributors, the ability to demo my "film" on a large screen is of primary importance. Since I'm not going to spend my own money printing the project to film anyway, most likely that means I will be using digital projection to demo my product. Thus, I want the highest resolution I can afford so my film doesn't look like shat on the "big screen".

Thus, 24p doesn't become a factor to the very end game. If you honestly think a distributor or studio is going to say, after they've already fell in love with your movie, "sorry, you shot in 30p and converting to 24p is just not going to work for us", you are smoking some serious crack. We've already seen what products like Twixtor can do with 30p to 24p conversion, and you can bet the studio or distributor will be willing to spend the relatively small cost to perform that quality conversion or better before printing to film.

The idea is to maximize quality and minimize costs before you get a deal; after you get the deal, the money will be there to overcome small technical issues.

Of course, there are still a lot of people who shoot their "spec" work (i.e., fronting the money themselves) on 16 or 35mm, spend a fortune flying to film festivals shopping their work, and then wonder why they are "starving artists". So I guess shooting 24p is a whole lot better than that :)

Rant over. To be fair, if there is a large subset of people who think the "look" of 24p is a key factor in their production, then who am I to say otherwise.

P.S. I will admit that with the HD10 the only advantage over the DVX100 or XL2 was resolution, so the argument could be made that the DVX100 and/or XL2 produces a better overall picture. However, with the Sony the advantages are better resolution along with equal or better color accuracy, low light performance, etc.

[Michael Pappas]

Also remember this WMV9 clip doesn't even have the full original resolution of the material. So the footage would even be better if it was the original file size. It's amazing how well the WMV9 performs playing HD though!

Michael

[Joe Carney]

Doesn't WM9 support up to 1080p?

[Mark Kubat]

Hi folks - as posted in another thread, I've downloaded this footage, imported into vegas 5, re-rendered out to avi so I can play through firewire on my preview t.v. monitor (non-HD) to have a look. Despite the down-rezzing and compression etc., it still beats the XL2 hands down! There is more detail, more sharpness - the tiny wide shot of the the guys on the park bench (near the end) has more detail than typical mini-dv wide-shots... Even if my final product was SD mini DV, I'd take this cam over the XL2, shoot in HDV 1080i, down-rez to SD DVD and still have stuff that I think would look better than XL2... It's sharper. It's the same idea as if you shot on film and scanned it down to mini-dv.

I'm glad there is healthy skepticism out there, but come on. If 1080i HDV on mpeg2 wasn't a winner, could Sony afford to put it out to compete against the XL2 and the Panny DVX100/A? Surely if it didn't live up to and exceed expectations, they wouldn't bother releasing it - would they?

I'm more inclined to believe some of the recent posts on other sites from Dutch engineers who've had the privilege to test the cam in a head-to-head against the Varicam and the XL2. What is key to me as an indie filmmaker/wedding videographer is that this new Sony cam is bound to meet all my expectations. Finally, I will be able to shoot and project on the big screen; at least that is the consensus from early reports. The detail that 1080i alone provides makes it worth for me as a wedding videographer to get this cam. This footage alone has sold me on this - of course, I will want to hold it and see for myself in Oct. or Nov. or whenever.

I was a long time Canon XL1 user but switched to the DVX100 when development from Canon seemed to grind to a halt. Now again I felt let down when the rumours of the XL2 being HDV didn't pan out. I think Canon is now back where they were before the XL2 was announced - instead now behind Panny's 8-ball, they are behind Sony's...

Sony is so aggressive with this line of marketing. The world is changing so quickly and now in digital video you have to be a leader to stay in the game. We video guys are gearheads - we want the latest and the best. Panasonic was out of the running for years and then they brought out 24p in the DVX100 and went from "zero" to "hero" almost overnight. All thanks to one sexy feature and great marketing. Let's face it, JVC blew it when they didn't go 3-chip with their HD mini dv offering. 1-chip 720p vs. 3-chip 24p SD? the former requiring about 35 lux min to be effective? Sorry.

The only saving grace for Canon is that they are part of the HDV consortium. They will respond in time to what the market wants as they always have - but why did we really have to wait so long to get an XL2 with 16:9 native 24p and a 2-inch flip-up semi LCD? Couldn't that have come out last year? Hopefully their response to HDV will be faster or they will be toast... again.

Now I bet Panasonic/Matsushita is scratching their heads wondering what to do next. They are definitely about to lose their crown, I think... The XL2 maybe wasn't scary enough but the HDR-FX1 I think is....

Hey, I've had a drink, all right? Just thinking out loud.

If the pro Sony HDV is in fact close to US$7000 and it's only improved offering are XLR and 720p, I don't think they'll sell many. I think it will be more like and HD1 vs. HD10u situation where the "pro" version will only be slightly more than the consumer - here's hoping at least. So, I'd like use the cheap Sony HDV-FX1 for picture and lug around an XL2 to use for XLR audio and sync it all using a slate just like in film!

[Don Berube]

Curious why the footage shows little or no motion.

- don

[Paul Mogg]

As I posted on another forum, while I think the color of this demo footage shows much less chroma noise than the JVC HD cam typically does, I'm dissapointed with the image detail level. It doesn't look anywhere close to the image detail of 1080i footage I've seen from professional HD cams, and when I did a side by side on my Apple cinema display with JVC footage, the JVC footage appeared to have more detail present. So I wonder what's going on here? I know the footage was converted to 1280*720 wm9 and I wonder why?? I'd really want to see more native footage from the camera before I jumped on the bandwagon of saying that this is a major step up from the JVC cam, although the color looks to be, and the manual controls are just great from what I can see. I hope someone post some unaltered footage from the camera soon. The demo footage is also extremely flat in every shot by the way. I would wait and see. It's bound to be crippled in some way, otherwise it would be too much competition for their high end cams.

[Aaron Koolen]

Yeah it just seems like a waste of time to post anything other than native res and native format footage.

Aaron

[Michael Pappas]

I'm glad they posted the footage but I as well look forward to full 25mbps footage not re-compressed 5mbps. We might be only seeing 1/5th the data on those WMV9 Clips. Still, those clips look very good. I remember when the DVX100 came out in 2002. Everyone was waiting for clips, then the beacch/bird footage surfaced, Soon HD-FX1 clips at there full scope will be online. For me this is a great time. I first got to use HD back in 1987. These cameras were so different then. They used Saticon or Plumbicon tubes not ccd's. Ever since then HD was a dream technology for me to use for film. In 1986 I was keeping an eye on a movie that was in production being shot in a prototype HD camera that took over an hour to warm up before use. The movie was Julia Julia staring Sting and Kathleen Turner. It was released in 1987. I remember being at the Edward's Town center movie theater in OC,CA. Just a teenager at the time here I was sitting in the projection booth, telling everyone this movie was made with video cameras. Nobody cared, and they still don't. Since that night, I have waited for it to become affordable. We have finally reached that moment. In my opinion, this will have a much much bigger wave then the Mini DV one of 96-97-98-99 did.

Michael Pappas

[Frederic Otis]

I work at small digital indie movie theater. We play classics, documentaries and foreign movies. We've got a high-end digital projector and we usually play dvds which are the same resolution as mini-dv (720x480). It's actually very impressive the way it looks good.

I put this HDV footage on our movie server and played it on the big screen. It looked FANTASTIC. It looked as sharp and precise as film (okay maybe I'm exagerating, but still...). I can't wait for those cameras to come out so I can shoot my movies and know the quality will be good enough for the big screen!

[Daymon Hoffman]

<<<-- Originally posted by Paul Mogg : As I posted on another forum, while I think the color of this demo footage shows much less chroma noise than the JVC HD cam typically does, I'm dissapointed with the image detail level. It doesn't look anywhere close to the image detail of 1080i footage I've seen from professional HD cams, and when I did a side by side on my Apple cinema display with JVC footage, the JVC footage appeared to have more detail present. So I wonder what's going on here? I know the footage was converted to 1280*720 wm9 and I wonder why?? -->>>

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?).

Sure the footage is far better then my lowly SD miniDV cam but far from fullfilling the potential of 2MP video resolution (and no wonder when there's only 1MP being used and none-square pixels 1.5:1!).

[Greg Harris]

I dont mean to be one of those people, but i typed in dude as the user name and Sweetn3ss for the password and it didn't work.