Ag Dvc30:good Deal Or Not?
 

i hesitate between a ag-dvc30 and a vx2100.
use mainly for short movies and music videos.
to me the advantage of the pana to the sony is its cine like gamma but is it really worthwhile? isn't it an effect you can get on post? beacuse i think the pana's price is a little high.

thanx

The AG-DVC30 is priced high in my opinion. I think it's a cam with a great set of features (longer lens, cine-gamma and 30fps frame mode that the vx2100 does not have) but I would like to see it several hundred dollars less given it's 1/4" CCDs.

If your goal is to shoot short films and music videos, then I don't think I even need to say what camera you should "really" get.

Hint hint. . . and no it's not the dvc30 ,vx2100, gl2, xl1, or pd170, either. . . hmmmmmmm

i don't have the money for dvx100 so i need an alternative.

If your projects are short enough (mostly under 15 minutes, average around 3 minutes) you might consider even less money so you don't stretch your money.

Shoot 60i with a cam with native 16:9 (3-4 cams out there, PDX10, Optura PI, Panasonic PDV953 etc) and deinterlace with DVFilmmaker v2 (runs around $100).

This will give you 24p output better quality 16:9 than from any cam other than DVX100a or the other cams with anamorphic adaptors.

The rendering is a pain for long doc or feature projects, but for short films and music videos, it works well.

ok for the 24p but all the cameras you named suck in low light(i work mainly with natural light) plus they don't have cine gamma. as for the 24p, what's the advantage working on post? why not set directly the 24 shutter speed on your camera? this is something i never understood

thanx

I agree, the DVC30 is over-priced. (It's too bad.)

The Sony PDX10 also has good widescreen and its CCDs are just a tad smaller: 1/4.7" verses 1/4", or .21" verses .25".

CineGamma can somewhat be replicated in post.

Per low light & natural light - I think this quality is overrated for narrative filmmaking. Low light specs for video is really more applicable to event and news shooter. Shadow and darkness and great image tools. Otherwise film shooters would have been dead in the water years ago :)

I've found in shooting DV, I'm always reducing light, rarely increasing for a naturalistic style. I never use gain but often used ND.

1/24th shutter speed has nothing do with 24 frames per second othe than the number. I suggest you do spend some time learning much more about this first as it a pretty complicated issue, but in very, very short.

1/24th shutter speed means each frame is exposed for 1/24th of a second. 24 frames per second means that the camera capture 24 individual frames per second.

Shutter speed controls the amount of motion blur in each frame (as well as controlling amount of light). 1/1000th is a high speed shutter used to eliminate motion blur, but when used with moving images gives a stuttering quality (think Saving Private Ryan). Many digital camcorders have a slow shutter but this is a digital effect to create low light but creates excessive motion blur cause softeness and smearing.

Frames per second gives the moving image it's motion temporal quality - 24fps is films rate, video is 25fps PAL, 30 fps NTSC - however, normal PAL and NTSC used interlacing (each frame split into interlocking halves of alternating horizontal lines) to create a picture, so there temporal quality is actual 50fps PAL and 60fps NTSC (the 60i you hear talked about). The actually frame rates differ due to drop frames, but that another story...

The relationship between shutter speed and frames per second is this. You cannot create a normal exposure longer than the frame per second increment you are shooting e.g:

At 24fps, you can only shoot at 1/24th or faster, normal 1/48th is used, not 1/20th etc.
At 30fps, you can only shoot 1/30th or faster
At 60i, you can only shoot 1/60th or faster.

If you use the digital slow shutter at 60i, again, you will get motion blur smearing though it can be used for effect.

pdx10
 

i must admit i never considered the pdx10. i didn't know about the real 16/9 thing. i owned a pd100 and the 16/9 was just a fake one. that's pretty amazing to have a real 16/9 mode at this price cuz i saw that anamorphic lenses were damn expensive. with the 16/9 mode, the field is so wide that you don't even need a wide angle do you?
i'm still concerned about this low light issue, how do the pd100 and the pdx10 compare in that field?

John Beale posted some comparisons between the TRV900 and the TRV950 (which is basically the same as the PDX10). The articles on his site basically show that the TRV950/PDX10 is about a stop darker under low light conditions than the TRV900/PD100 was.

www.bealecorner.com

Yohann, this discussion is starting to wander away from the DVX-100 forum, you might want to continue it in the PDX-10 forum. But the PDX-10 has a pretty narrow lens to start off with. Switching to 16:9 mode expands the field of view a bit, but personally I often feel the need for a wide angle lens. Tthe nice thing is that they're very inexpensive due to the 37mm threads. Browse back though the PDX-10 forum for extensive discussion on this topic.