HG10 vs HV20 for outdoor sports
 

I'm leaning towards purchasing the HG10, but I have concerns about some of the reviews regarding moving objects and panning.

I'm not an expert and will never use 24P (I don't think anyway). I really just want to be able to take high quality video, store on my computer and occasionally make a DVD movie. I know the DVDs will be standard definition, but I'll still have the HD available in some format. I think my plan would be to record in AVCHD and the downgrade on the computer.

Has anyone seen HG10 video for fast moving outdoor sports? It will be mostly soccer, and I want to see clear foot movement and be able to pan quickly. Is the autofocus fast enough to handle this type of movement?

Will I even notice any of this stuff as a novice?

Assuming the HG1 is set up just like the HV20, Instant auto focus is part of the package. It does a good job of focusing in most situations, but can be fooled. It reacts very quickly, and assuming your subject is centered in the right area, will react pretty quickly. But it works as good as any other autofocus out there.

I hate to be a recurring pest, but we bought the HG10 as a b cam for sports, some indoor and others outdoor. At 24p, it wasn't acceptable.

^^^but how was the interlaced footage?

24p footage from any source is going to have issues in sports. If you are panning and shooting fast action, you should be in 60 i. With the HV20, I shot a children's soccer game, in 24p, just to find out what kind of results I could expect. As I expected, with whip pans, and jerky movement, you have the motion issues associated with any 24p. I've even seen it in pans with 35mm films....

Shooting in 60i will improve thing. In the case of the HG10, the question becomes in 60i, is the more compressed ACVHD up to the task. I have used it yet... so I'm looking for comments too...

Still testing...
 

Hi Bob,

I've been looking into the 24p capabilities of the HG10, and would say that you don't want to be using that for sports. As part of my testing comparisons, I'm doing some limited shooting/testing in 60i. I can say that for me the AVCHD compression is not an issue in 60i, the picture looks good. I'm no expert, just a home user, but would think that the HG10 would be at least as good as any *consumer* cam on the market. I do think the 60i footage plays much smoother than the 24p footage, but for most of what I'm shooting I want the full-size progressive frames. With all the new displays being progressive, interlacing's days are numbered. Now if they could only bump it to 30p, that would even the field. :P

Oh yeah, and you most likely know this already, but the more light/faster shutter speed you can get, the clearer the picture will be.

One of the "cool" things I've done while testing is take a 60i video (the cam records it at 1440x1080) and deinterlace it with Windows Media Encoder (WME) and the CoreAVC codec v1.5 using half-size frames (1440x540) at double speed and then having WME scale the output to the proper aspect ratio. This results in a 960x540 resolution progressive 60fps .WMV video for playback. This is greater than DVD resolution, although only 1/4 of HD resolution. However, it's pretty wild, motion is so smooth it almost seems unreal, as if the clip is playing back in slo-mo, but yet at full speed. This will play back on a computer, but DVD will not support 60fps. I have a computer connected to a projector for viewing, so this works well for me. Just an interesting thing I noticed while playing. Also, this wouldn't be exclusive to the HG10 in any way, any interlaced cam footage transferred to a computer should do this.

mike@slavis.com

We shoot all our sports with a HVX200 at 24p.

Despite the comments above, our clients for almost two years are thrilled by what we give them.

At 24p, which we need to match our Panny, the HG10 exhibited severe strobing.

David:

How did you handle pull down with that material. One thing to be aware of is there are only specific application that can detect the cadence for pull down purposes in 24p material from the HV20, and I believe that holds true for the HG10, based on some limited experimentation with a downloaded raw file.

Cineform's NeoHDV on the PC side is what I use.

I have tried just rendering to a 24p file in Vegas, and get the strobing spoken of.