Robert, what was wrong with your HV20?

And yes, the chart resolution looks promising.

The camera's sensor (or electronics) went south. I really think it was the sensor. It's a consumer camera, so not that surprised. Disappointed how long it's taking.. 5 weeks now? *shakes head*

http://dvinfo.net/conf/showthread.php?t=98298

Anyhow, an HDMI w/CINE example of subtle detail would be great!

this may wet your whisle...for now
Ill let Stu do his thing with the images...look to Prolost for the full (size) info

http://www.salatar.com/hv20chart/charttest2.jpg

Salah, you tease! Yes, those should do nicely!

the phoenix rises
 

Just to fan the embers, or probably more like the ash at this point, I think the above quote has it exactly backwards. Depth of field is a subjective choice in shooting. It is the other things, especially the 24 fps with whole frames (24p) that help distinguish film as film. All theatrical films run at 24 fps, period. Their is no deviation from this excpet with some specialty venue films (some IMAX and others).

Douglas Trumbull, no slouch when it comes to knowing a thing or two about film engineering, pushed for years to make a 60 fps camera and projector system that, to his eye, was inherently better than the 24fps standard. This did not exactly take the industry by storm. When folks think "film" one of the biggest aspects they are thinking of is 24fps.

Edging back from the cliff of what ALWAYS constitutes a film look is the 1/48th shutter speed. Most film is shot at this shutter speed and this creates a temporal feel that says film to our eyes.

To try and make a long post end - the notion that a shallow depth of field is a signature look of FILM is just wrong (sorry Stu)!

It is certainly a powerful creative shoice, but I would imagine that not too many folks would argue with the statement "Citizen Kane is a very cinematic film". It did win an Oscar for cinematogrpahy, and is pretty much at the top, or very near, of every list of "greatest films ever made" etc.
Well, Greg Toland and Orson Welles put a LOT of work into getting very sharp focus for both near and far objects in their film. It was something truly unique for it's time. That look has been emulated and improved upon ever since. Shallow DOF is a creative choice, but by no means a defining one for what makes film "filmic".

I just had to get that off my chest. sorry.

Oh - and I agree that cinemode is so the way to go with the HV20, nothing about legacy looks or anything like that. Simply about having the most picture latitude to play with after shooting. As stated before, the RED camera's frames, straight from the camera with no tweaking, also look flat and soft. This is what you want if you care about controlling the look of your footage. If not, then auto everything is the way to go. Sharp video edges are certainly not "the look of the future", they are the look of the bad home video past.

R.I.P.

Sam DeWitt

couldnt have said it better
hear hear

Double well said! Michael Mann is a modern director that shoots a lot of deep DOF in his features and IMHO his movies look amazing. I'd say shutter speed is more important to matching features than DOF.

Great example! And on the other end is David Fincher using very similar technology (without tape though!!!!)in The Zodiac, and getting a look that harks back to the classic films of the 70's in terms of DOF but especially in terms of the use of shadows and letting detail fall off in the shadows. Both are really beautiful examples of what this new technology can do in the hands of artists.

Sam

Shallow depth of field an obsession...
 

My hat is completely off to you Sam for telling the crowd that the emperor has no clothes. Talk about a herd instinct -- this shallow depth of field mania.

I have long harped against the obsession with shallow depth of field. I remember having dinner with DP and HDCAM owner who brought up your same Citizen Kane example and I couldn't have agreed more with him.

What I don't like about shallow depth of field is that it is often used to eliminate the viewer's choice about what to look at. I consider the viewer to be the final part of the creative chain, a participant whose viewing choices ultimately define his or her experience. In Citizen Kane your eye can range over the frame, perhaps enjoying a background element for a beat, then returning to an actor, then the other actors reaction and so forth. But with a shallow depth of field you are stuck in one focal plane, and it is not of your choosing as a viewer.

And worse, what I think has been done to death is using rack focus to shift attention from one actor downframe to the other who is in closer. And back and forth, back and forth. This completely makes me aware of process and takes me out of the dream, let alone completely stripping me of any creative choices as a viewer.

I remember working on a crew where the DP set a camera about 40 feet from an interview subject so he could go to the long end of the lens to get shallow depth of field. He didn't care that he was foreshortening and flattening the person's features. In other words, how the subject looked -- much worse -- was subordinate to having the background blurred. Arrrrggghhhh!

So Sam, your post is so important as it says something that needed so badly to be said.

Tip McPartland

I think you guys are missing something else about the 35mm adapter. In a good many shots, with such an adapter, your not looking so much for shallow depth of field. Rather the intent is to impart a more organic feel to the footage. If done right, the grain and slightly out of focus background will remove that "electronic" video feel from the footage. If that is what you are shooting for, then you don't need a 35mm adapter. Razor sharp focus through out the frame will definitely, in my view, distract the viewer in many shots. If you want the viewer to be concentrating on whether the lamp in the background is like the one he or she bought at Target last week, then go for it. You'll get what you want without the adapter. The point is, however, that this is another tool to paint the screen, and if you don't want to learn this particular tool, then your arsenal of tools will be less than the guy that does.

I'm with Chris on this one - I just shot a project with my 35mm adapter, and I think the adapter can only help. Video is so sharp, the adapter helps mold the image to something we're more comfortable with on a larger screen. Also, different lenses.

But nothing wrong with DOF! And, I agree with Sam, the film look is far more than just DOF, which is what someone else suggested.

Latitude cannot be overlooked!

Regardless, long live the HV20.

People continually want to reduce the "film-look" to one single technique, to a filter in a NLE. You can't push a button, or buy a certain camera, and have the "film-look."

- 24F: Every big-budget "quality" film that every viewer for the last 100 years has watched on the big screen has been 24F. If you don't think this has an incredibly powerful sumblininal effect, you're just being silly/belligerent/stupid.

- Shutter speed: There is no magic shutter speed that works for every instance, but in general, 48/sec matches the average shutter angle. Unless you are doing something creative (Private Ryan, Gladiator, slow motion,) that's where you stay.

- CONTROLLABLE DOF: Not SHALLOW DOF. Everybody always says SHALLOW, but that's not always what you need. What makes DOF cinematic, narrative, is the ability to control it to help tell the story. Get rid of the background to focus on an actor, rack focus between the actor's face and the hidden object, show the entirety a bustling market in Marakesh, etc.

- PROPER exposure: Lattitude is nice, but most people look to it as a crutch so as to not have to properly light and expose a scene. A huge part of the "film" look is good lighting by talented professionals.

- Lack of RGB noise: Not organic noise ... film grain, especially fast films and/or low light is noise ... but rather RGB noise: pure red, green and blue sparklies. If you can't avoid it, remove it in post. It's easy to get rid of color noise (leaving monochromtic noise) even in the noisiest of footage.

- Lack of artifical edge sharpening: Not to be confused with a lack of detail.

- etc., etc., etc.

I agree with this whole-heartedly, there is an excellent article in the April 2007 American Cinematographer where Harris Savides, the cinematographer, talks about working with the viper digital camera. Here is a quote where he is talking about how he lit for this camera -

"I was impressed, but I was still concerned about the Viper in terms of the contrast it could deal with and especially the shoulder, because it did not perform as well with overexposure as it did in low-light situations. To gain more control, I could have dumbed the process down, lit everything very flat and gone into the post suite and played around with the RAW files, similar to what is going on in digital still photography now. In the end, I was happy with the images we were getting with our RAW files at TDI with Stephen Nakamura."

Cinematography is truly an art form, one that takes years, even a lifetime, to master. Buying an HV20 and a 35mm lens adapter will not do much for you if you have no notion how all the things COMBINED in Joseph's post conspire to create a great image, and more importantly, conspire to help tell a story. The greatest achievements in cinematography are the ones that the audience is not even aware of, because they are helping to immerse the audience in the story, not distracting them from it.

For the record, I love the shallow DOF look, just when it is used for a reason, not so that "now my video looks like film".

Sam

I've been using cinemode for increased - or should I say unaltered - latitude. I do see the low frequency detail being chewed up by HDV compression in cinemode, and I also see highlight clipping worsening when I switch to Tv mode.

Unless you are capturing live HDMI feed you always have to make a trade between low frequency detail and latitude, neither of which is recovable. I chose latitude because it weighs more when it comes to picture quality I prefer, and I am ever so grateful to Canon's film-geek who pursuaded his company to create a consumer camera with 24p and cinemode. ;)

if anyone is interested, im doing some tests with my hv20 regarding sharpness and latitude in tv and cine modes. i shot some charts and ran them through imatest and without going into too much detail, im getting mtf50 numbers around 590 for cine and 670 for tv, but when sharpening is normalized the cine jumps to 650 and tv doesnt change much. so what this seems to say is that cine mode is that cinemode does seem to lose real sharpness, but not nearly as much as it appears to. im no pro at these tests, but it looks about right and im trrying to keep it very simple. now to see how the latitude/response curves come out (i did some quick latitude tests a while back but this will be a comparison between tv and cine and hopefully more carefully performed). i shot in a lot of different modes with various sharpening and contrast settings and those were just preliminary tests in both modes with -1 sharpening and -1 contrast.

What's the point?
 

I don't see what's the point in Cinemode anyway. It is unusable. You cannot combine it with Shutter Priority, thus you cannot lock shutter speed and have cine gamma. Canon: bad, bad, bad design.

Many scenes in Ronin were shot with wide angle lens and deep DOF. Still does not look like video.

It's not bad design since this isn't what the camera was designed for! We're all abusing it do do our bidding, trying to turn it into a semi-pro camera, so we shouldn't really be surprised when doing so isn't as straight-forward as we would like.

That said Tv mode, with all of the adjustments turned down is relatively close to CINE mode, so I think that they both have their place in an indie toolkit.

I'm a fan of a lot of Mann's work, but "Miami Vice"s infinite DOF video look blows for dramatic storytelling. (Conversely, the low light ability of HD really helped "Colateral.") Miami Vice looked plain lazy. The extra walking down the street 50 feet away, and the boat in the harbor 500 feet away, aren't as important to the story as the actor 5 feet away. Controllable DOF is all about creative choice, and the ability to direct the viewers eye, to filter the scene and focus attention where it matters. That's the difference between a CINEMATOGRAPHER and a guy with a camera.

It is bad design because Cinemode is orthogonal to Av or Tv and nothing should prevent from using Cinemode (image enhancement setting) with either Av or Tv. In computer-speak, instead of a checkbox group Canon created a radio group. Bad user interface. Canon either deliberately crippled the camera settings or haven't given a good thought to it at all. Both is equally bad. Don't even get me started about its two-layer menu.

They did everything else right: the lens, the tape transport, the codec, the price. The menu is the simplest and cheapest thing to design, it does not add features, it simply allows using existing features ergonomically and flexibly. But Canon screwed it up.

I'll wait till next model, hopefully they fix it. If not, and they will start taking out features like they did with DV cameras, I will buy one of the last HV20 left.

CINE mode is not just CINE gamma ... which is what you (and I and everyone else) wishes we had independent access to. CINE mode a combination of features glommed together into a mostly automatic consumer MODE.

Of course it is deliberately crippled ... the HV20 shares the same electronics as in a camera that costs three times as much! Sure it sucks, but it's not as if Sony et. all don't do the exact same thing. Again, that's the game you play with a sub $1k consumer device.

I guess I should've said high frequency not low. Anyhow...

Noah, can you tell me how you normalized sharpness? Did you get 590 under cinemode with sharpness -1 and 650 with sharpness 0?

Thanks for doing the test.

Actually the software used to do the test adds sharpening to the images to make them (ideally) equal in terms of digital sharpening. The result is the measured resolution gets much higher for cine mode and very slightly higher for the Tv stuff that is already sharpened more than cine. So it becomes more obvious that while cine is soft, it has almost as much actual resolution as Tv, but does still appear to be overall a bit less able to resolve detail. Once i get around to analyzing the latitude tests and gamma curves, it might be able to tell me a bit more about whether the contrast has a significant effect on sharpness. It does seem likely that some sharpness is lost from cine mode fitting so much dynamic range into so few bits. It may lose some of its ability to resolve low contrast detail as i believe someone has mentioned. still seems like something else is going on though... i dont think yet that the softness of cine mode is explained entirely in its lack of sharpening and low contrast.

HDMI Live 1080i Video Capture - TV vs Cine Modes
 

I did a near-uncompressed 4:2:2 capture-compare test a few months ago between TV and CINE.

I had the HV20 on sticks in a low-light environment, captured the feed uncompressed digitally and saved to the computer as ProRes HQ 422. Between the two PNG shots, I only changed the modes between TV and CINE - this makes it perfect for you to open the shots up in Photoshop, drop each onto a seperate layer, and switch between the layers looking for differences.

My own findings: a) more detail in TV mode b) less detail, and more latitude in CINE mode b) distracting grain in TV mode, next to no grain in CINE mode. The latitude in CINE mode is very apparent in these tests - to the left, you see that there is less blow out near the lamp's light, and you can ALSO see into the shadows under the television and speaker on the right in CINE.

EDIT: The uploads of these PNG files have failed 4x in a row.. I'm not over the size limit, so.. not sure what's up.

EDIT 2: I've spent 30 minutes trying to upload.. switched to smaller JPGs, didn't help.

EDIT 3: Finally.. the images are up.

Grain...
 

I didn't like my new HV20 much because of terrible grain in even moderate low light conditions. But when I tried Cinemode, the grain was so much improved that I now love the camera. I've been watching this thread to see what the tradeoff is under close evaluation, but to my reasonably experienced eye, if Cinemode gives greatly reduced noise and only slightly reduced resolution, I'm fine with that.

The question becomes: Is there a way to get the better resolution of TV mode and the noise reduction of Cinemode for the best of both worlds?

Tip McPartland

Judging by your pictures I did not notice more detail in Tv mode, it simply looks oversharpened. I bet that sharpening is a major contributor to the noisy picture.

My undestanding is that Cinemode is useless in 60i because the camera does not try to hold on to 1/60 shutter speed, it changes shutter speed to its liking. Cinemode plays nice only in 24p mode. I'll wait for HV30 in hope that they fix HV20's peculiarities.

You snooze, you lose. If history is any lesson, my bet is that HV30 will have less professional capabilities than the HV20, more like tje HG10, and much like Sony did going from HC1 to HC3. They don't like us candidates for the A1 or H1 messing with their consumer cameras in place of those.

True, therefore my plan is actually to buy the HV20 sometime next January and keep it sitting in the box unopened. If something better comes up from Canon, I will just return the HV20 and will not pay restocking fee. If not, then I will keep the HV20. This will work for me because I don't really NEED a high-def camera right now, so I can wait. Also, there are so many HV20's around, I am pretty sure it we be available from eBay and other online retailers for some time.

In regards to HG10, what exactly is it missing? Manual audio level control? And a thumbwheel replaced with iPod-wheel? Does not seem to have lost a lot compared to the HV20.

The Cine screenshot above looks really smooth and nice. I wonder can Tv be brought closer by decreasing sharpening? Sharpening and contrast are related, cannot get sharp image with low contrast, so I hope that less sharpening can bring down noise as well as smoothen gamma curve.

---
Canon Elura User Pages

I tend to shoot cine and sharpen in post which suits most situations. I do use TV mode for specifying the shutter sometimes which is useful but even with -1 brightness and -1 contrast it looks blow out and more video like.

While I haven't actually used the HG10, the issue is with focus. According to Chris Hurd, you have to have LCD open to focus, so if you are going viewfinder, that out. Even with LCD open, I wonder about exerting the pressure against the extended lcd, and how that will transmit to the axial movement of the camera. With the HV20, some of us added an adapter wheel to turn the thumb wheel to create an easier focus process.

If the HV20's controls are anything like on a standard TV, then to flatten gamma you actually need to increase brightness (black level), not to decrease it. By decreasing black level you simply are losing near-black information.

The HV20 controls are not like a standard tv where brightness is just black level. in the HV20, brightness controls how the camera sets exposure when autoexposure is on.

Thanks Robert for doing the test. I agree with Michael and i don't think Tv mode actually holds more detail, but just has higher contrast. I suspect that if you look at the uncompressed screen the difference would be even smaller.

I know i'm kinda late coming in on this topic, but i just spent the last hour reading this thread from start to finish and i couldn't help saying a few things.

I was very surprised that this thread went as far as it did without trying it using uncompressed capture. IMO that is the only way to get what the sensor is actually trying to give us. So much more time was spent worrying about image compression - jpg over png - than the source compression! HDV is FAR worse than JPEG (obviously that depends on the level of JPEG compression).

HDV DESTROYS images.. it completely ruins them IMO. Talk about latitude, the first time i captured uncompressed and took it into post, i couldn't believe how much data was actually intact. It was mind-blowing. I don't know much about encoding algorithms and all that, but i do know that there is more than a substantial difference between 4:2:0 and 4:2:2. Keep in mind 1920 over 1440 and 100 mb/s over 3. Obviously the 100mb isn't necessary, but still.

I hooked up my HV20 and shot it at a faucet really close. I don't like grain or the HV20 trying to boost gain. So i set the camera to TV and set it to 1/48th, then pointed it at a light and locked the exposure. I then bumped the exposure up to open the aperture as wide as it would go. I wanted a clean noiseless image. I captured a couple seconds via HDMI fully uncompressed through my blackmagic intensity. Then i went and changed it to Cinemode. I dropped the exposure a bit to match the other test a little more and captured a couple more seconds.

I then captured full-res stills from the video. I put them into photoshop and checked and unchecked the layers over and over.

If anything... Cinemode has more detail - if there is any difference at all. The difference is so slight. You know the rest, you know what the differences are.. but know that no detail is "lost" either way. And if you're recording uncompressed or with a decent codec like cineform of prores or whatever at 4:2:2 8 bit, don't worry about losing information - that is unless of course you over or severely underexpose things.

But if you're recording to HDV... you have my prayers. (sorry to sound so melodramatic, but i've seen the light)

Here's a link for those who are interested... i may have jumbled things around, i may not have... but can you tell what is what? (Note: this isn't a chart or whatever, but who often do we film charts when we're making movies?)

www.dalebackus.com/allfoursmall.png

and if you really need the full res version (10mb)

www.dalebackus.com/allfour.png

Dale

An example of what i was talking about earlier...

The darker one is actually how it was captured. It was a fairly low-light situation and i had it on Tv mode 1/48th and exp +11 with no gain.

www.dalebackus.com/moescupuncorrected.png

Took it into photoshop and the only adjustment made was levels.

www.dalebackus.com/moescupuncorrected.png

Just fyi.

Here's another interesting tidbit. I currently don't have a mini-sd card, so i can't really tell what's going on - but i shot two different takes, both using cinemode. One i pointed into the light, locked the exposure and bumped it up to get it as bright as i could. The second, i just let cinemode do everything - i guess "auto cinemode".

To me, the auto cinemode looks quite a bit better. Anyone know why?

www.dalebackus.com/moescup_cinemanual.png

www.dalebackus.com/moescup_cineauto.png

While i'm at it... here it is using Tv Auto. (no manual exposure)

www.dalebackus.com/moescup_tvauto.png

and cinemode auto

www.dalebackus.com/moescup_cinemanual.png

I really think the cinemode wins. It doesn't have any LESS detail and it's just a much cleaner looking image to me. The Tv image just looks like it has unnecessary grain and isn't actual detail.

However, i'm now further convinced by these two pictures, that cinemode does have greater latitude. Look at the right side of both images on the wall under the mirror. Depending on your monitor probably, you can see a VERY slight gradient (from left to right) from light to dark in the Cine image. With the Tv image, you can't quite discern it as well. However i wanted to really test it, so i exaggerated the levels by quite a bit to really see what happens. The results are what i expected.

www.dalebackus.com/moescup_tv_latitude.png
www.dalebackus.com/moescup_cine_latitude.png

I guess if you're making a movie about wood grain or something, having the sharpened more contrasty image might be the better option.

But for me, as a result of these test i did just tonight indoors... cinemode wins.

More testing in more conditions will follow.

But remember, this is all using UNCOMPRESSED capture via the Blackmagic Intensity. Get yours today...

Because the shutter speed is faster if you lock it with a bright light. The camera will get less light = more gain to get brightness = more grain.

I really, really don't think you guys should compare any images that have gain because the smoothness of cinemode will get rid of it. Go outside to a bright place and then make comparisons as there would be no gain. Unless ofcourse you basically shoot in low-light.

Also, I really think you should get a mini SD card so that you can actually see what you are doing. Just pointing to a light source and then bumping up the exposure does not mean at some point you are not introducing gain Not all ight sources are equal so that would mean the same for your results.

Now if we had a way to exert perfect control over shutter speed, gain and fstop in the mode, we would be set..