question about "artificial" feel of recordings
 

Hi all,

I have a question. We want to buy a camcorder as we have a 5 month old baby girl, and offcourse we want to gather as much memories as possible. Currently we have no HD TV yet, but are still thinking about a HD camcorder . This because i feel that it is the future and i would regret having SD images later to look back at.

However Looking at example movies on vimeo i am gtting the idea i see some issues around HD cam's. I have the idea that i see artifacts around faster moving objects and/or a unnatural feel of the images.

As example:

with this one i'm looking at the stutter in the panning and the feet/legs of the girls running:
http://www.vimeo.com/934978

With this one i mean the splashing of the water with the hand (for instance around 2:19), the non fluent moving with bouncing up and down and the look of the baby's face around 0:40.
http://www.vimeo.com/978186

Is this a playback problem, an encoding issue, or one of the things that just goes with avchd ?

Regards,

René

I'm going to go with bad encoding... or playback issues. The pool video in particular looks pretty bad to me.

I shot some stuff with my kids running full tilt, and have noticed that playback in prieview (In Sony Vegas 8) can look simply atrocious and unusable, until I turn the preview quality down, then it looks fine, and the final renders are good so far. Keep in mind that movement/motion is always a tricky part of video!

AVCHD is probably about 2/3 'rds of the way to "prime time" as far as the editing and computer horsepower being readily available. Most of the twitchiness I see reminds me of the teething problems with HDV, but I'm getting cleaner less noisy video with my SR11, and better final results, with a little patience...

As far as shooting HD goes, the following always apply:

Bad camera work = bad video
keep camera steady
don't move camera too agressively

CMOS specific issues (most consumer cams):
You may get some skew, stretch or other rolling shutter issues, again the above rules help reduce these.

HD is much less forgiving of sloppy camera handling, but you have to expect that with the higher resolution and detail. AVCHD handling is an evolving situation, but I'd expect it to get better both in software and hardware.

Waiting for avchd to get better... Is that for the camcorder part, pc(hw &sw) part or both ?

In other words.. If i now buy an sr12 and keep the original files on a harddrive or dvd and use a ps3 for playing unedited movies until i can edit them in the future, will this get rid of the isues or is it also a cam issue ?

Regards,

René

encoding/shutter
 

look like it my be part from encoding. Don't know if the camera have any way to control shutter speed..that should help with fast motions. If its on auto...that will make motion blur.

Osmany

Rene, If your computer and software will edit AVCHD you might be able to watch edited movies on your PS3 now.

A modern dual core processor with reasonably fast clock speed and Pinnacle Studio 11 plus will edit 1440x1080 easily and render the edit to an AVCHD disk that is BluRay compliant and will play in BluRay players or PS3. Pinnacle states quad core at 2.66GHz as a minimum for 1920x1080.

We're getting there.

When viewing on an HDTV such as a plasma (not a computer monitor), the motion on my SR12 when shooting in 60i is as fluid as any network production you'll see.

Are you looking at the flash embedded in VIMEO or did you download the source files to view?

Vimeo flash is at 24 fps. Frames are getting dropped by the Vimeo flash conversion process. They did do 30 fps as an experiment - because a lot of people couldn't play 30 fps and threw their hands up and yelled.

Looking at these HD videos on CRTs or regular flat panels produce different type of videos for me. Flat panels for me produce more glitching on pans.

Yet high speed action appears to blur together better. On my CRT at home, there is no blur happening - and I'm looking at entire frames flashing by.. very annoying.

It's not the camera, from my experience. My final renders at 1080 24P play back smooth and without any glitching on my Windows Media player on my machine - look great. Final rendered output at 720x480 24p (SD), also look marvelous.

I may be crazy, but I think I get better end results from the AVCHD cams than I did with tape based. The SR11 in particular is very very clean picture quality wise.

It's the software/hardware that still could use some fine tuning IMO. Sony Vegas preview is unusable in higher quality playback modes (so turn the quality down a few notches and edit anyway, no big deal, still plenty of resolution to work with!). HDV was similar until the software was fine tuned and I got a faster machine... both made significant improvements.

Rendering times are a bit loooong, BUT the results are great, and a new Quad core Q6600/MB/Ram is pretty reasonable in price and will improve that issue substantially.

I think that people who have not had much time with shooting or editing/rendering HD in ANY flavor can manage to butcher it pretty well beyond recognition - that swimming pool video looked almost SD to me... NOT what I'd expect from the SR11.

You can shoot now, put the files on DVD and supposedly play back on BluRay (haven't tried it yet, waiting for BR to drop), should look great, you can edit, render, etc. Plan on a bt of a learning curve, and if needed a computer upgrade and the software should improve in due time.

Yes you can Dave, and the results are exactly the same as had you played back your footage directly from your cam to the HDTV. Really nice!

I was looking at the source files and not the flash version. I wanted to see the best possible file.. Just wondering if it is my setup. It is a shame that there are no possibilities here in the Netherlands to shoot a bit of film and play it back on a tv.

regards,

René
BTW all of you... thanks for helping me with this !!

I don't think you're crazy Dave, I feel the same way! Of course we may both be crazy. ;)