A Panasonic HDC-Z10000 to play with

[Neil Richards]

Finally, I have one in my possession, albeit only for a few days, as I picked it up on loan this afternoon. I didn't even have any time to try it before I went out with it to film a friend playing a gig in a Blues Brothers band this evening, so it was definitely a case of in at the deep end. Fortunately it was only a test shoot for the camera not a commercial video so I have room for error :)

First impressions are that it's a very compact and smart little camera chock full of features, nicely balanced and very easy to use handheld. It looks very small alongside the AG-AC160 I also saw today.

I have a 3DA1 and also a couple of SDT750's and the Z10000 is a curious mixture of the two in many ways. It has all the 3D, controls, XLR's, pro features, etc of the 3DA1 mixed up with features straight out of the consumer cams: the menu structure is familiar from the consumer cams, the OIS, IA etc are all from there too.

As I've just got back in and haven't even had time to review the clips on a big screen yet I'll wait and post a longer review over the weekend but the things that stood out tonight when I used it were:

- the 3D autostereo LCD is great and I used it more than I thought I would (you can have it in MIX and OFF as well) plus it really impressed the audience at the gig when I played clips back on it

- the OIS is a huge bonus for doing stuff like live bands and events, works well

- much better low light performance than the 3DA1: my footage tonight will be grainy because the light was pretty poor but it looked like the Z1000 extracted a better image than the 3DA1. It was working at 25-30dB of gain in many situations (crikey!) so I await the full size images with some trepidation...

- being able to get a 3D camera to within a metre of live performers is very liberating :)

- handheld it's a dream to use in situations like tonight and yes I relied on the autofocus a lot

- not sure I got the best image quality I could, need to sit down and play with the camera settings some more. It is a bit oversaturated compared to the "pro" cameras so I need to fiddle with it a bit

Tomorrow I'm going to be doing some outdoor filming (towns and city mostly) and hopefully it will be sunny so I'll see how it behaves then. I also plan to do some night shots in the city centre. I believe it takes timelapse as well so I'll try that out at some point.

I haven't solved the Mac workflow problem yet so apologies as I won't be able to post any footage for a while - I will have to get a friend to convert them from mvc to left/right for me. I'll try and get some pics of the camera itself over the weekend though.

Anyone else had one to play with? What did you think? Anything you want me to try?

Cheers

Neil

[Wolfgang Schmid]

Well, I have my play-tool here since two month, and I agree with all of your comments. What you will see on a big HDTV is that the automatic mode of the camcorder tends to go into red a little bit, and that contrast is less compared with most consumer camcorders. The use of the professional scene files are a great opportinity to adjust that in every way somebody wants.

The convergence wheel is a little bit tiny, and to run the camcorder in the manual mode - here I still think about what functions I should allocate to the 3 manual bottoms. At the moment I have here 3D, Convergence reset and push autofocus.... in addition I would like to have the autofocus assistent, and so I miss one manual bottom. But that is all what I miss with that camcorder.

[Jim Michael]

I checked Vimeo and YouTube and didn't find any, so anyone have some links to nice looking 2D or 3D Z10000 footage? Everything I've seen so far looked very saturated and contrasty with little detail.

[David M. Cole]

My Z10K will be here on Wed. I'll try some comparative shots with the NX3D1 and post the results.

As someone else mentioned, the AVS forum is pretty active on the Panny Z10K camera. See ... Panasonic-hdc-z10000-3d-camcorder - Page 6 - AVS Forum

[Jim Michael]

Thanks David, I'll look forward to seeing the comparison. You'd think Panasonic would put out some example footage.

[David M. Cole]

There's a useful collection of clips on the AVS Forum. Wolfgang, I believe that some are from you, correct?

[Jim Michael]

I saw some links to some MTS files, but they are on some website that throws up a number of popups so I didn't pursue that any farther. Some free file sharing site I suppose.

[David M. Cole]

It's not so bad - just find the download button for the files themselves. It rankled me at first too. It's worth it, however. It's a nice test bracket of settings.

[Jim Michael]

OK I revisited that download site and found the right link. Sneaky devils. Next hurdle, I thought I could just log and transfer that MTS file into FCP 6 (the 2D clip) but no go, have to look into that. Thanks for the tip re the download. I have an old version of Vegas I can upgrade if I decide to proceed with this project.

[Neil Richards]

Hi team, sorry for the long pregnant pause, have been a bit busy.

I finished my 4-day Z10k trial, shot a lot of footage, and have also started filming a 3D educational drama film for a local charity, with both the Z10k and the 3DA1. I've not yet got my edit flow in place but the way I'm proposing to to do this is using VirtualBox from Oracle on the Mac plus WIn7 and then a copy of the 3D Edius trial - very impressed with how straightforward this seems to be to use and it's not expensive (in fact it's free on a 30-day rolling trial at the moment :) ). I like the native format editing straight on the timeline.

Also been to BVE in London for the last few days and had a great time there, even got o play with a 3DP1 finally plus a few mirror rigs. The Holdan stand (i10) was running some of my Z10k footage on a couple of their demo's.

By the way, the little JVC 4K camera is mind-bendingly amazing but oh how I wish they'd put a genlock input on it....!!! The 4K pictures they were running (straight out of the camera, un-edited) were simply gorgeous, even though the 4k projector was $60k ... :)

[Jim Michael]

No luck with those mts files on AVS forum. MPEG Streamclip returns errors when trying to convert which I think means it needs some metadata that isn't present. So if anyone gets around to putting up some footage in a more generic format please let me know.

Also, there were references to 24p footage not being handled by Vegas. Is that still an issue? Should I be looking at Edius?

[Wolfgang Schmid]

For Vegas Pro 11, every Z10000 format can be edited (1080 24p, 1080 50i, 1080 25p for the PAL version for sure, but it will not be different for the NTSC version). There has been a new MVC-Decoder since build 510/511 of Vegas Pro 11.

For earlier versions of Vegas Pro, you are right - the MVC decoder will not handle the Z10000 footage in a correct way (especially not the 1080 24p and the 1080 25p footage), beside the 1080 50i/60i footage what is compatible with the Sony TD10.

If somebody uses Vegas Moviestudio HD Platinum 11, what you can do is to take the MVC-Decoder from the 32 bit version of Vegas Pro 11 - that works fine too.

[Jim Michael]

Thank you. That helps.

[Mark Rosenzweig]

Here is a real Z10000 video, not some brief clips of someone's living room (but no claim to a great piece of art either), so you can better judge what the Z1000 does, in bright light. The scene used is standard HD. Also manual iris, shutter fixed at 1/120th, autoWB.

On Vimeo, you can download the original MVC file that I uploaded, which contains both lens views. Vimeo is playing the 2D left lens video. The 3D video was shot in 108060i, MVC. The uploaded file underwent NO conversion, so it is what the camera produces, given the camera settings. You have to go the site where the video is, and there you can right click 'download this video." The 0.82GB *original* MVC stereo file will then download.

Panasonic Z10000 2D HD Video: Softball Part 1 - Pre-game on Vimeo

To see it in 3D, here is the link to Youtube, which is using a converted 1/2-frame sbs version of the original MVC file:

Panasonic Z10000 3D Test Video: College Softball, Part 1 - Pre-Game - YouTube

[Wolfgang Schmid]

"Here is a real Z10000 video, not some brief clips of someone's living room .... The uploaded file underwent NO conversion, so it is what the camera produces, given the camera settings."

That is not real Z10K footage, but was converted too! For example to anaglyphic material. Sorry to say so but youtube or vimeo are not usefull to assess original footage really.