I have searched high and low for pleasing video from the EX3, and for that matter all other 6-9k $ shoulder mount HD cams and I must be missing something or the internet or my monitor or something must be causing the jittering I am seeing, it's just not smooth and focus is terrible.

I have a core 2 duo, GT9800 and cable. I have watched video of the EX3 on the DVi forum and I watch video from other websites. What am I doing wrong ?? I know that it is probably my computer, why do the prosumer HD camcorders always appear jittery to me ??

I am going to say that I have not seen any EX3 xlh1 footage of any type that is pleasing. The problem I have is not only jittery but the main subject focus always appears terrible. Such as the first youtube video at asmusement park. As the ride starts the clarity of the moving parts is just poor.

Am I expecting to much ?? seeing artifacts caused by the internet, poor camera operator, or poor editing. I am trying to sink 10k back into a video business and searching for a camera has been dissapointing. my apology if I offended anyone, it was not meant to, this has just been my gut reaction to the video I have seen so far.

Thanks for any comments or suggestions.





YouTube - Alice In Wonderland - Official Trailer [HD] (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DeWsZ2b_pK4) appears good, obviously shot on very exp cam

YouTube - Fairground Ride HD - Filmed with Sony PMW EX3 (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Dgt9pC4Fhro) appears jittery ex3 footage

YouTube - Redemption Scene 13: The Confrontation [PMW-EX3] (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rbs3ZTbtoNA) EX3

Sony PMW-EX3 Test footage on Vimeo EX3 not youtube

Look at Phil Bloom's work amongst others.
A camera is only as good as the DP/Cinematographer/Operator.

There's lots of people who go cheap on the tripod, have no clue how steady a camera has to be when zoomed in, can't execute a proper pan when shooting 24p, have no idea how to focus or handle a shallower depth of field.

If you can't find any good EX footage, you haven't looked enough. There plenty out there and the aforementioned Phil Boom is one of many good examples.

Remember that youtube and others are highly compressed and look terrible compared to the original.
One cannot really compare movie trailers as they are done using sofisticated software/hardware that the average person does not possess.
Youtube doesn't even play at full frame rate as far as i know.

I have searched high and low for pleasing video from the EX3,

I'll stand by the quality of these videos. Shot with my EX1 and EX3, which essentially are the same camera.

2009 Rhode Island Air Show Highlights on Vimeo

Southwest National Parks - HD Version on Vimeo

Doug
Beautiful images, great editing.
It doesn't get any better than that.
What data rate do you use for this type of Flash publishing?

Awesome vids Doug!

There's a ton of good work out there on Vimeo and ExposureRoom. Vimeo even has a couple of Groups dedicated to videos made with the EX1/3. YouTube is generally the last place I look for professional cinematography work. Not that it isn't there, it's just easier to find elsewhere.

Doug:

FWIW, it was these two videos that sealed the deal on me buying an EX3. Sony should give you a commission.

I should mention that the pans stutter somewhat when played back on my computer. But there definitely aren't any focus issues.

Oh yeah....almost forgot my shameless plug for Doug and Vortex Media. An absolute necessity if you get one of these cameras! Thx Doug!

Thanks Doug, it is obviously my computer. even your video has slight hesitations that i can visibly see. I updated flashplayer and same thing. the video appears to load ahead of the player well enough but the video has a very slight hesitation in places.

I have vista 64 and a core 2 duo e7500 on an asus pq5 pro with 8 gigs of ram and a pny 9800 gt 1 gig vid card, but somehow I am stuttering video. Thanks for the post I will have to look deeper into my computer.

Vimeo allows one to download their compressed file or the uploaded file if the user has a Pro account. Why not download and see how it plays on your desktop.

Check to see what else is running in the background. Your hardware seems more than adequate.
You might also try VLC as a sanity check on any videos you can download. If VLC is choppy then you've ruled out the playback interface as the issue typically.

What data rate do you use for this type of Flash publishing?

Thank you everyone for the kind comments. It is very much appreciated.

I'm not sure what my settings are for Vimeo. About a year ago I found a tutorial on their website that outlined the best settings for 720P, and I then created a preset with those settings in Compressor. If you can't find that tutorial, let me know and I'll take a look at the details of the preset and see what the settings are. However, it's probably outdated now that Vimeo allows 1080P.

The actual editing, before compression, is just done on a 1080/30P XDCAM timeline. I'm still surprised at how easy it is to edit XDCAM on Final Cut Pro. It's amazing how far the technology has advanced in just a few years.

Doug, were most of those shots taken on sticks? How easy did you find it tracking aircraft using the EX1's viewfinder?

Craig, all of the shots on both videos were taken on sticks.

I didn't try tracking any aircraft with the EX1 because the air show video was shot entirely with my EX3. With that camera, it is extremely easy to track motion and follow-focus. I'd say the EX3 with my 18x5.5 Fujinon lens is just as easy to shoot with (on sticks) as any camera I've ever owned, and that goes back 30 years.

If the only camera I had was an EX1, I probably would not have even attempted the air show shooting because it would have been the wrong tool for the job. The limitations of the EX1's viewfinder and the ergonomics (not optical quality or focal length) of the lens stock lens would have made it too hard to get the results I wanted. The EX1 is great for some things but totally wrong for others.

Right you are Doug... Tried to do an airshow with the EX1 and this operator had one heck of a time trying to keep up while hand holding the camera... The only time the EX1 was not the right tool for me.

Thanks Doug, it is obviously my computer. even your video has slight hesitations that i can visibly see. I updated flashplayer and same thing. the video appears to load ahead of the player well enough but the video has a very slight hesitation in places.

I have vista 64 and a core 2 duo e7500 on an asus pq5 pro with 8 gigs of ram and a pny 9800 gt 1 gig vid card, but somehow I am stuttering video. Thanks for the post I will have to look deeper into my computer.

I have been investigating this behavior on my systems as well. I see stuttering during Flash video playback. I think it has to do with Flash iteslf as my system is an i7 windows 7 box with 12bg of ram.

This is sort of driving me crazy as well. Does internet video always have stutter? Should we not expect true video playback?

This happens even after the file has been completely downloaded into the internet browser.

Any others see this?

I went through everything, new drivers, flash, I still have it.

I read all the previous posts but I didn't see where anyone mentioned that shooting 1080p30 will exhibit a slight stutter effect even when optimized for Vimeo.

I noticed it right off on my first shoot and wondered what was going on. Before my EX-1 all I shot was SD interlaced with my Sony VX2000. So, maybe those who have been shooting Hi-def longer might have gotten used to the stutter, or are not shooting 108p30 with the shutter speed of 1/60th.

I think I am going to start going with 720p24 for normal action scenes and 720p60 for sports and the like. 1080i60 is a good format if you are going to DVD (so I am told).

My 2 cents worth, Rob

I've been plonking video on the web for, sheesh, over 10 years now - starting off with embedding old fashioned QuickTime movies the hard way. Dealing with all that cross-platform, cross-browser rubbish.

From pretty inauspicious beginnings, Flash has given us a fairly robust platform to play back Spark, then On2, and now H.264 movies. I still preferred QuickTime playback, but just like the VHS/Beta wars, the better format lost out. Mainly because Apple started insisting in stupid things like 'Download 40 MB of iTunes before you can watch this movie that you probably won't like anyway'.

Flash is, IMHO, the root cause of this stuttering (if we leave aside the issues of watching 24p, 25p and to a lesser extent 29.97p on a 60p device), it has always been there, and despite its squeaks and judders, we accept it because 'it just works' - after a fashion.

Whilst HTML5 as a playback engine is probably a good way to go, it's not up to even Flash standards yet. I'd say 'it's the Flash based player' more than 'it's the internet'.

Hey Matt,

If you wanted the best video playback and quality for two different situations, which file format would you choose?

1) for streaming playback

2) for full download and local playback

These would need to cover Mac & PC

I am interested in your choices. I am on a PC and the .f4v files look the best, but Windows media plays the best. I have not tested Quicktime although I thought Quicktime streamed now...

Thanks

Okay, right now, I'm using Flash 8 (the On2 codec) for the widest compatibility, the least problems. I'm also using PC/SnowLeopard gamma. My main audience is still PC based, a lot of them behind corporate firewalls. Flash gets through, uses a widely available plugin, and doesn't need the user to upgrade to the latest and greatest (important in the corporate world where user installs are usually verboten.

Again, many of my corporate clients (especially local government) are banned from visiting YouTube, Vimeo and the like, so I regularly host video on my own server - as Progressive Download. Again, almost exclusively On2 FLV.

A couple of corporate clients require WMV, and whilst the quality can be very good, it doesn't 'do' progressive download very well. Streaming it requires a potentially costly third party server and can cause Mac users problems.

I'm seeing a slow uptake of H.264. A couple of clients want it for internal use for its compactness. Nobody's particularly desirous of iPhone/iPod versions - or iPad for that matter - but I am on the search for a good HTML5 implementation.

So really, in my corporate market, it's a case of staying about half a mile from the front line with On2 in a Flash player - not exactly stunning playback but it will do. 512x288 at 512-750kbps seems about average. The next transition will be H.264 in an HTML5 framework.

For streaming media (live streams), I have looked at Flash, but Windows Streaming Media can't be beaten for the corporate market, mainly because it's main forte is embedding cues in a live stream assuring synchronised events with no latency issues (IOW, slides change at the right time). Flash streaming is possible, but the costs involved are higher OR the reliability is lower OR the flexibility is less.

Encoding is always a bit of a bear, and it can come down to things like 2 pass spotting the bumps that can cause stutter where 1 pass doesn't, or there's predictive vs. auto keyframes (and the balance thereof), and the optimism of trying to do HD in 1 Mbit with fast camera moves, grain, non-steadied handheld footage with lots of zingy detail and oversharpened aliased edges for the codec to waste time and bitrate with.

H.264 is a mathematically complex codec. There's the amount of time it takes to pull it off storage and shove it in RAM, then there's the amount of time it takes to decode the data to a display format and whack it up on screen, and the more it's COMPRESSED, the harder it is to DECOMPRESS. There's a penalty to squeezing the video till the pips squeak. When H.264 first got out in public, my Mac couldn't handle 1280x720, and only just (JUST) did 640x360. The bandwidth wasn't at fault, it was the processing power.

Then there's the problem that computer screens do 60fps, no matter what your source footage is at, so you can see ripping or judderiness in unassisted data output. You may also be seeing the movie scaled so pixels are not mapped 1:1. Hence the reason why hardware such as the MXO is so popular. It drives the screen correctly, so what you see is what you get.

So You may wish to try this experiment with some EX3 footage, checked out as a BluRay disk or downconverted to a DVD and checked on a monitor. The slight narcolepsy that's synonymous with web video has gone.

So how do the trailers on Apple's site look so good? Darn good (and probably publically unavailable) encoding software that allows frame by frame access to keyframes and bitrate, high bitrates for a given movie size, lots of stuff like denoising, level control, bit of blur on downscales before encoding, time, more time, loads of skill, and some trickery.

Even vimeo charges you for 2 pass encodes. I like to be in control of my encodes, so I like self hosting. But YouTube is where the consumer/mass audience is, and rarely do they notice the niceties of good encoding.

BTW, don't forget the effect of, erm - is it called 'Specificity'? The idea is that if you're looking hard at the faults of the EX line on web video, suddenly the world is full of examples of it (I've published a few!). Whereas these are a fraction of a percentage of the great stuff these - and loads of other - cameras are generating.

And now my renders have finished. Sorry for the length of post...

Matt,

Thanks for your reply.

I am busy right now but would like to discuss this with you.

Any ideas on embedding Quicktime files for progressive download instead of Flash?

Any ideas on embedding Quicktime files for progressive download instead of Flash?

It's going to sound harsh if I say 'try googling it' but I too am busy. :)

I don't know your HTML, PHP or other scripting skills. A bit of googling can get you copy-paste solutions if you know about creating HTML pages at code level.

I am a bit out of practice with the old-style stuff as right now I am concentrating on the FLV/On2 delivery solutions, and prepping my own HTML5 solution.

Hey Matt,

I wasn't looking for a how to, but more of your opinion.

I thought Apple had reached a milestone recently by making quicktime progressive download friendly rather than complete download before playback.

I have googled it but a lot of the posts were from a few years ago.

I guess I'll take not much information available to mean it is not being used all that often?