HMC-40 goes to a tea party

[Sherri Nestico]

Videos: Martin County Tea Party - Treasure Coast, FL | TCPalm.com


Today we had tax day tea party rallies in our area. This one in Hobe Sound was pretty well attended. Among the speakers were a 14-year-old political activist and an 89-year-old tea party supporter who collapsed (presumably from the heat) right before she took the microphone. She recovered long enough to make a pretty good speech, but then the paramedics carted her off to the hospital.

I'm not terribly happy with the quality of today's video. The raw files were transcoded with NeoHD and they look great. But after the compression, the clip of the woman at the podium and the last video of the elderly man I interviewed - both of those look smeared or noisy or something. And both of those clips are pristine prior to encoding. The vertical lines running on the speaker next to the stage, those are in the transcoded original, so I'm not referring to that kind of noise. Anyone got any ideas what's wrong?

[Tony Spring]

Hi Sherri

I really enjoy watching your videos.

I can't help you with the image quality issue I'm afraid but I do feel some of your footage could benefit from some stabilization software like Mercalli.

Do you think you might upgrade to the new HMC80?

Tony

[Sherri Nestico]

Hey Tony,

Thanks for watching. And thanks for mentioning Mercalli, I didn't even know plug-ins like that existed. I'm going to check it out. I use a monopod most of the time, but for outdoor stuff when it's windy, even a monopod isn't too stable (or should I say I'm not too stable in high winds...lol...)

And no, I probably won't go for the HMC-80. I have a Sony AX-2000 that I'm still paying off...:)

[Tony Spring]

Mercalli works wonders with the right setting, I advice adding a very light sharpen filter with it and crop the borders off. It particularly works well with progressive scan footage.