We shoot with a variety of cameras including the f350 and z1 along with sd gear. I have an ex1 on hold for purchase next week and would like feedback before we take the jump:

1. How well it downcoverts (final cut or vegas) to sd dvd video which still represents the vast majority of our final product. I read somewhere that the z1 actaully does a noticeably better job downcoverted to sd.

2. Without a lanc control what are the options to operate from a jib.

3. Autofocus versus other hand held cameras ie: the z1.

thanks in advance

dave

Auto Focus seems a bit slow but that's not necessarily a bad thing.

It you're tracking a moving object such as people walking past trees in front of them, it'll keep tracking the people and not refocus to each tree. On the other hand, if you jump from object to object it'll take time to lock . . . but that's when I'd use manual focus anyway.

There are controllers on the way.

I’m using auto focus allot... the auto focus will work great as long you point it center in the frame, in other words the ex1 auto focus is limited, and will only look for the center to focus... if you keep this in mind when composing your shot, auto focus will work real fast, until you zoom in all the way, then it will take more time... so be ready to assist manually!

Thanks for the input, any expereince in downcoverted footage quality to sd?
Does it hold up to quality sd cameras such as the dsr 450/500? Or for that matter the f330 or f350?

Thanks for the input, any expereince in downcoverted footage quality to sd?
Does it hold up to quality sd cameras such as the dsr 450/500? Or for that matter the f330 or f350?

That is really hard to say without side to side comparisons but I have downconverted both interlaced and progressive material to PAL using software transcoding in my Avid Media Composer and it looks good to me. As far as SD goes that is... ;-)

I was about to buy the dsr 400-450, but the size was a problem for what I need it, so I got the ex1 for the size and quality. I also got the vortex media: Mastering the PMW-EX1, and believe me "ITS WORTH EVERY PENNY" when I ran into extra deep questions about down convert, I emailed Mr. Douglas Jensen <douglas@vortexmedia.com> and the great fast support I got from him was amazing.

Dear Dave,
I have lots of footage, and I’m willing to put it up somewhere so people can judge, I just don’t know were I can upload it. I can maybe mail you a sd DVD.

So far about how it looks and what I thing is like this:

No SD camera this price and size will give you the control and image touch the ex1 holds on after down converting.

When I see the final sd DVD, the dsr 400/450 in my opinion looks like original pro. great footage and the ex1 looks like down converted stuff which is pretty nice too... and I’m almost certain, I will be able to withstand a test for my self, and with out knowing before, identify original footage, vs. down converted footage... and this fact really bothers me!
Got the idea? And If any one on this forum things I’m wrong, I’m willing to hear why…

Regards

How you do the downconvert can have a major impact on the result. Downconverting HD to SD sounds trivial but it's not. I only have to look at a lot of OTA SD broadcasts that are downconverted HD to see problems and they've got some pretty expensive boxes doing the conversion.

well; i'm using final cut studio2
and the medhood I learned from vortex media Mastering the PMW-EX1, and some do's 'n' dont's here in this forum. and after all my afford, the final picture still looks edgy at the corners, the almost the entire ex1 smoothness is lost.

Joel Klein:
Could you please upload some original and downsized footage?
Would like to see/test how it compares to a convertion using avisynth (with spline36 resize).



regards Dennis

I can do that the moment I know how and were to host it...
as af now i'm working on compressor and trying this and that to get a beter result

You can upload 100Mb files at rapidshare.com


regards Dennis

wow is that free? any hidden tricks? is it a SAFE site (no viruses bug's)?

I’m working now on it.

The funny part of the story is, that I asked vortex media how they did the down convert... and Mr. Douglas Jensen reply’s with the setting he used. It’s the same I did, but for some hidden reason my footage looks crappy

free, no viruses, no tricks ;)

regards Dennis

give me a couple minuts to creat the samples, i'm doing it now

no problem

enjoy and let me know your feedback

http://rapidshare.com/files/85303156/HD_vs_downconvert_SD.zip

Thx, I will try to downconvert it, too.

Which resolution do you want to achieve?

normal SD 720x480 16:9

look at the white table plastic on the edge, and on the first legt child with the colorfull shirt, on his face and the efefct arround him.
it was all shot HQ 1920x1080 30p

as i'm doing more and more try's I found out my 20 dell to give better picture vs. my 24" 1920x1080 wide screen dell... also the vortex media looks worse on my 24"... this metter is going over my head, I can't decide my self...

Your video has 853x480?

H.264 is full 1920x1080
The SD is 720x480

To me the SD looks like highly compressed jpeg artifact

It's quite normal that Video looks worse the bigger the output is. ;)

Believe me, editing SD on a 26" NEC isn't nice :D

H.264 is full 1920x1080
The SD is 720x480

To me the SD looks like highly compressed jpeg artifact

VLC told me wrong values due to the stretching from 4:3 to 16:9 aspect ratio.

Now let’s get back to the main question: don't you believe if I should use a DSR450 and output it to the same dell monitor, the image will look much CLEANER??? That terrible feeling makes me sick...

I don't believe that it would look cleaner, I think it would look even worse.
From my personal experience I can tell you that my downconverted Canon XH-A1 output looks much better than any DV footage I've seen so far.

I've did some tests with your material.
Either artifacts are gone and video looks blurred or there are more artifacts but overall a crispier image.

hmm

thats right "hmm....."

after all i'm not such a pro. and the ex1 is my first normal pro cam
the closer the image the better, the more dist. its worse...

any way my brain is dead for tonight, thanks for your help was a great time working with you, good night, will be back tomarow after school
regards!

We've noticed some issues with downcoverting from the f350 35mb hd to sd. So far, straight out of final cut, sd material (including our dsr 500) seems to look better that our 350 hd dropped to sd. That said our quality issues seem somewhat less with the z1. We've havn't done a lot of side by sides but my concern is the ex1 with cmos may have even more drawbacks when converting to sd.

One of the best ways to evaluate what's going on is to firstly take the camera out of the equation. Use generated media, charts, stills whatever, also try animating it, just panning around a high res still will do, easily done in any NLE. Now run that through your process and view it on the same monitor. You can learn a lot doing this.

bottem line. if your plan is sd than get a pd170 or dsr450

Okay. Here are two frame grabs of downconverted XDCAM EX. One was captured via SDI into a SD project in FC. The other was imported into FC then exported as a self contained QT movie and opened in Combustion 4 to be resized. The original footage was shot at 1080i and pointed at pretty much nothing important.

Well one for now. the C4 version will not upload. I'll try later

Vince

I have resisted suggesting it (because it's time consuming and has other hitches) but I think a program like Combustion or Shake is the best way to downconvert. Their scaling functions are very high quality.

Shake has more than a dozen interpolation schemes for scaling images which you can select from. I've done some really nice DVD's from the HD100 by trying a variety of them and choosing my favorite

If I could ever get the C4 example uploaded you'd see exactly what you just wrote. Combustion scaled the footage very nicely, better than FC and on par with capturing it using the camera as a playback deck and outputting over SDI.

vince

What if the SDI out goes into an hdSDI and then an sd out is taken to dv?