Fast Motion Pixelation
 

I've noticed I get tape pixelations whenever the Camera Whips or Pans quickly. Sometimes the move is not highly exxagerated, yet the pixelations happen anyway. Any thoughts on why this happens, or could it be a digitizing (into my NLE) problem? I don;t have a full rez HD monitor to watch my footage on, so I cannot eliminate on possibility or the other.

Never noticed it on my cam, but maybe you found out the limitations of the HDV format.

Your using cineform right? WIth what NLE?? Once we have that info we might be able to help.

Whip pans are an HDV torture test. The format is not designed to hold up to that sort of abuse!

MPEG Streamclip into Quicktimes into AXP 5.5
 

My workflow is Cineform into m2t's-MPEG Streamclip into Quicktimes-Import into AXP 5.5. I work off of Seagate eSATA 3.0Gb/s drives.

Off Subject
 

Hi Brad,

Sorry to go off subject, but do you have any relatives out of the Topeka, Kansas area ??

Harold Schreiber, Jr.

You have to take it all in context. I think HDV breaks down more on intense, constant and random high frequency motion like a close up of rushing, frothing water(I've personally tested this comparing HDV and SDI on the same scene). But you have to freeze frame for it to be terribly noticeable. The F modes handle this kind of thing better than 1080i HDV (whip pans especially) because of progressive encoding, which is much more efficient with MPEG2, and actually 24F does the best because it gets the most bits per frame.

This is why SDI is important for acquisition. You can use it exclusively for scenes that might break the HDV codec. If you look to the SDI port for acquisition you can think of the camera as format agnostic.

We need a laptop SDI card or Firestore SDI (not holding my breath) and this sort of problem will be a thing of the past.

Do you get the pixelation on the raw M2T's, Ive seen some software codecs introduce errors. Also be sure the tape heads are clean. Dirty heads will lead to increased use of error correction which will fall over during high data scenes. I've never seen pixelation on a clean M2T, only an increase in artifacts and blocking. I suggest you are getting an error introduced somewhere.

Possible Cause
 

I just heard from a friend of mine who is a Post Supervisor. He has postulated the artifacting I see is caused by playback issues (coming from my PC), not issues with the image itself. I do not have an HD client monitor, so I will have to hope that this is the case.

I had several whip pans in a recent shoot @30F and i have to say that my eye was not able to catch the HDV at work at all during playback, I was very impressed, there's so many "no-no's" associated with HDV that i'm always a little nervous to push the camera but pretty much every time i do i'm happy with the results... a BIG step from sony.