Announcing the Texas HD Shootout
 

Howdy from Texas,

Starting today, powerful forces are converging on Austin, Texas for a four-day round up of all the major HD camcorders you guys like to discuss so much around here.

Adam Wilt of DV Magazine, Mike Curtis of the popular "HD For Indies" mega-blog, and elements of the DV Info Net team will convene in a series of studio and location camera tests in a variety of different situations. Everything will be recorded, of course, and the plan is to offer feedback to interested parties through Adam's articles for DV Magazine, Mike's online journal at HD For Indies, and right here on our message boards at DV Info Net.

The camera line-up includes the Panasonic AG-HVX200 DVCPRO HD P2 camcorder, the Canon XL H1, JVC GY-HD100 "A" with 16x and 13x lenses, and Sony HVR-Z1U HDV camcorders, and the Sony PDW-F350 XDCAM HD camcorder. Plus we'll also have a Panasonic AJ-HDC27 "H" VariCam DVCPRO HD camcorder for reference.

Adam is our technical lead and will be directing with Nate Weaver assisting. Mike is co-directing and managing a truckload of uncompressed capture stations, and DV Info Net regulars Boyd Ostroff, Greg Boston, Pete Bauer and Mike Devlin are lending a hand with all of the cameras and other production requirements. There are a lot of other folks involved who are helping out in several capacities. I can't wait to tell you more about them. We'll keep you guys advised on how this is going day by day.

Meanwhile, although I can't promise this will happen, I'd like to encourage any Austin area members who might be up for dinner and drinks on Friday or Saturday night to please shoot me a private email. Our crew is already talking about going long, so a public get-together might not actually happen, but let me know at least if you're interested and if we can pull it off then we'll manage that by email. Hopefully we can get some Shiner Bock flowing.

Updates follow as this thing progresses -- and be sure to also watch for Mike's entries over at his site, http://www.hdforindies.com.

And now it's been posted on Mike's blog, although at present it's just a copy of my announcement above. Keep an eye on it though, as Mike will be reporting his end of things in addition to what goes on here.

Chris: this is good news! In addition to any standard resolution tests, etc., can you arrange to get some "real world" footage of the same scenes taken at the same time under the same conditions? I tried to do this in Sacramento back in February, but didn't have the time or resources to get very far with it. An example of my results is here:

http://www.videomem.com/camera_compa...-15/index.html

Definitely interested in how these cameras perform under dim lighting conditions, and what settings work best with each one for that.

Kevin:

Great comparison shots.

Question: What was with the JVC HD100U--- seemed awful washed out. Was there a setting problem on that cam ?

Any chance of including the Andromeda mod?
 

I'd love to see how it compares.

www.reel-stream.com

I don't know how others feel but I would be willing to make a donation to help offset the cost of this test.

Chris, where on DVinfo might we access the results? This page?
Once again, thanks for the fantastic resources that you're providing.

Among all the activities taking place, I will be shooting some behind the scenes stuff with the Canon Xl-2. We may also include some reference shots with the XL-2 so you can see how well it stacks up when uprezzed.

It's going to be a busy weekend but a very productive one. I may test out some daily video uploads to DV-INFO servers so you guys can get a daily 'highlights reel' if time permits.

-gb-

Greg, that's a great idea. I have in the past uprezed XL2 footage- albeit in a quite unorthodox manner- and the results were excellent- leaving a TIFF image sequence in 1280X720 4:4:4 16 bit for ingest to the codec of choice for effect work, etc . In fact I had thought about asking our "shootout" shooters to consider including this option but didn't have the heart since their workload seems quite heavy.
Greg, which method did you use to uprez the XL2 footage?

I would be another one who would like to see a comparison with some uprezzed XL2 footage. Please include that if at all possible!

If we can work in a side-by with the XL2 then we'll try... but to be fair we should do this with the DVX & HVX, etc. Lots to do and very little time, but we've got some make-up hours on Sunday afternoon that will be devoted to getting stuff we might have missed. Craig Chartier told me we should do a macro test. Plenty of great ideas but only a couple of days to get everything done.

I don't know how Mike Curtis can do it, but after putting in an 18 hour day he still finds time to write about everything. See his notes about Day Zero (Thursday) and Day One (Friday) on HD For Indies:

http://www.hdforindies.com/2006/04/t...ne-of-shooting

And some of his photos of this event:

http://web.mac.com/mikedcurtis/iWeb/...OutDayOne.html

My photos probably won't go up until I'm back in the office next Tuesday.

I also edited down the behind the scenes video that was shot yesterday. Will upload when time permits.

-gb-

Coo-hoo-hool!

Camera shootouts are always fun!

A1
 

have u tested A1u..i want to see how a1 can compete with xlh1

this is hc1 footage
canopus hq codec... upsize to 1920...


http://www.dvuser.co.kr/zboard/data/pds/canopus.avi

Jung,

Unfortunately, the A1u is not included in this test.

-gb-