Canon xl1s / gl2 / Sony hd
 

I curently own a canon xl1s and a gl2 was thinking of purchasing a sony hd camera, My question is can the footage from the canons be edited together with the hd footage?

Also how is the low light footage of the sony?

Eddie

Are you Mac or PC? So I can move this to the proper editing forum.

PC

Sorry
Eddie

Post moved to HDV Editing Solutions...

Also Eddie, please search the FX1 / Z1 board for "low light" because it has been discussed there previously.

Nice to see another CenTex member here! Welcome aboard,

You're right Chris - this question does come up frequently. So I've put together a list of some threads that discuss the low light characteristics of the FX1 and Z1 and have made it a "sticky"!

http://www.dvinfo.net/conf/showthread.php?p=383176

Once your video is captured to your PC, it can be cut, spliced and diced with gay abandon... regardless of the brand type of the source camera.

Mind you, if you don't keep an eye out on the obvious and logical - like the differences in optics, resolution, colour handling... essentially everything that would make clips from one type of camcorder stand out like dog's gonads from clips captured from a different brand - you'll end up with a distracting, visually disparate nightmare.

If you could avoid mixing it'd be easier. If you must; you must. Don't expect to be able to 'up' your Canon material... you'll have to 'down' the HDV stuff, or shoot only DV with the Sony (until you were ready to go full HD/HDV) if you want to get the most mixeable, time-efficient solution to mixing video out of these cameras.

I've mixed footage from a Sony FX1 and Canon GL1/GL2, and after doing that I went and got another FX1. The FX1 footage is so much clearer it's hard to mix without being obvious, and dealing with widescreen versus 4x3 format issues can be a pain. You could capture the FX1 footage in 4x3 format and probably make that work, but once you start shooting in HDV it's tempting to shoot everything that way.

I have the same set up and shot fx1 in DV mode,mostly because of editing issues (no hd editing set up yet). I didnt' see much difference in DV mode. Are you seeing the difference when you shoot HDV in close up or in all zoom levels

Canon / sony
 

We shoot hunting /Fishing videos we have a team in Indiana a team in kansas and i live in Texas We do not wish to buy 3 cameras The terain and colors are very differant from one place to the other other than the color being a bit better any other problems blending them Can you film in hd and then capture in dv?

Eddie

Yes you can shoot in HDV mode and then set a menu item so the firewire port sends out standard definition DV (i.Link Downconvert). Or you could just set the camera to shoot in standard definition mode. If you do that then the tapes will also play in your Canon camcorders (as long as you don't shoot in DVCAM on the Z1). However if you shoot in HDV mode then those tapes will only play on an HDV camcorder or deck, and not on your Canons.

But Kevin makes a good point; your Canon's are 4:3 native camcorders and the FX1/Z1 are 16:9 native. Are you working in 16:9? Even in standard definition mode the FX1 widescreen footage will look a lot better than the Canons that you have. You could shoot in 4:3 on the FX1, but then I'd question why you'd want to buy it in the first place... Maybe a PD-170 would suit your needs better?

Reason for buying
 

the reason i was thinking of the hd camera, i figured everything was heading that way and may want to replace the other 2 later, just not all at one time. I do have the capability to edit in hd just not ready to replace all 3 cameras at one time.

Eddie

Bottom line.

How bad do you want to 'get into' HD/HDV? Because; if you really want to make a start with HD/HDV, there's workarounds and solutions to what you have identified for yourself as 'the problem' to going HDV - even in a small way to begin with.

Of course; if you do get a HDV camera, your camera men in Indiana and Kansas are gonna get a big bit jealous!!

Maybe for the sake of 'corporate harmony' you should all just stick to DV... :)

I did some tests recently and concluded that shooting and editing HDV at full resolution yields better results even for SD output than shooting/capturing DV. The difference may not be significant for many purposes, but if you want the best quality it's worth waiting until the end of a project to downsample to SD.