Manual control, just isn't that difficult. You shoot everything a 1/48 using Cine mode, and adjust using exposure slider, checking exposure with the photo button trick. You provide enough gain so that the 1/48 shutter speed works, and you are avoiding gain. Simple

Its different that turning a dial or an aperature ring, but the same principles are involved.

. . . but Cine mode is so soft !!

Even with extensive post using every trick in the book it never comes close to the clarity of TV or AV modes - for me at least.

Perhaps the softness it part of the appeal, but I would love to get Cine mode's relatively flat latitude (relative to TV and AV) but without the softness.

To me, here's a simple case you can make:

Ignore for a second the issue of picture quality.

The crew wants to use HV20s. The crew is comfortable with the HV20 and is familiar with it's quirks and limitations, and can work with them and around them.

But more importantly, we have two of them available to us. This allows us to complete the filming with less time and money because we can film scenes from two different angles at once. With ONE PD170, we have to reshoot the scene for every angle. Furthermore, there may be subtle continuity errors between those takes.

The PD170 is a good camera, but if the goal is to complete the best movie possible, then let the crew use the tools that they are most comfortable and familiar with.

Of course, you can always take the PD170, stow it in a trunk, and shoot the movie with the HV20s anyway. I hardly think that they'd notice from the finished product.

:D

I like it !


The only thing is they might be wondering why the PD170 footage is looking so good !

Sorry for dissapearing so much... :S
 

Hi everyone. I'm sorry I dissapeared like this... The production tool all of my time. And, we ended up using the PD-170 instead of the HV20, being the lower sensitivity of the latest (measured by our coordinating professor between 2 and 3 f-stops slower...) the main reason fot taking this decision. The HV20 did do some backstage shots, though... (how crazy is that?).

It was a great experience, and the things we learned doing this we couldn't have learnt otherwise. Very tiring indeed (it was 33 shooting days and 7 real weeks of production work), but all the hard work, I believe, is and will be showing.

For now, here's the first trailer (more of a teaser, really). Please tell me what you think, or ask anything you want if you like.


Stream on blip.tv: El Peso - Trailer 1

Download: http://blip.tv/file/get/ElPeso-ElPesoTrailer1742.avi


Hope you like it. But please be hard if you have to. It helps our growth out.

I think I'll have a bit of more time to answer now. ^_^
Regards!

Ernesto,

I'm not at all surprised. I have an HV-20 and like it a lot. But there is no way I'd ever try to shoot a feature film for 33 days with it. I'd beg borrow or steal an XH-A1.

The titling looks really great, and the use of music added alot to the presentation. I'd say the first third of it looked like it could be a totally professional feature film trailer.

The later part of the trailer looked a little more home made, perhaps because with the handheld shots you can really tell that the camera is small and light - it moves differently than a professional cameraman wearing a glidecam vest etc.

Alot of professional trailers will finish with a rapid succession of cuts. You could condense the final 30 second of the trailer into 10 seconds, making each cut faster for greater impact and sense of excitement.

Great work - congratulations! I really like the titling with the fuzzy image in back and the accompanying music. Very stylish.

We shot a feature film (which is premiering next week at the San Diego Film Festival) with a pd150 a pd170 and several scenes with the HV30. The footage from the pd1x0s was uprezzed to HD, and some look even better than the HV30, which tends to be noisy or contaiins artifacts (not good for projection), but this is tru for all HDV (including the z1). The pd170 (pd150) produces very clean footage, free from mpeg artifacts and they are amazing in low light. The HV30 was used only in daylight. Once the pds footage is properly uprezzed to HD it very hard to tell the difference. Additionally, for fast moving scenes, the pd170 produces far better results with les motion artifacts and better resolution.

Daniel
"The Appearance of a Man"
Trailer: YouTube - The Appearance of a Man - Film Trailer

Daniel:

I am curious about the work flow in which you are runing into artifacts on the 30-- I have versions of all three cameras you reference- VX2000, HV20, FX1 to be exact, and would not put the final output capabiities of the VX2000 over the HDV cams.

Second, while I have uprezzed material out of my VX2000 to HD, I have not seen any thing that puts that footage in an equal class in terms of resolution. To be fair, I do edit all my HDV material with Cineform's intermediate codec, because you tend to lose quaility in reediting and color correcting hdv material....

I've been using digital video cams since the VX-1000, including the PD-150, 170, VX2000, Z1U, FX1, HV20, HV30.. and bigger and better cameras.

I find your claims fishy, Daniel. If the HV30 was only used in daylight (where it excels) how could the PD-170 produce far better results - *especially* when uprezzing a low-res source to HD? Was the HV30 even shooting HD, or was it shooting SD too. And you say the PD-170 has better resolution than an HV30?

I'm sorry Daniel, but what you say sounds like quite a fallacy (in the meaning of "facts that are refuted by actual fact, so never a fact to begin with"... hope I'm being clear...).
If anything, the artifacts on the HV30 footage must be due to a bad workflow, because honestly, editing (on many generations, even) and color correcting using a codec like Cineform (instead of the native MPEG2) is almost flawless. And from my experience (and the tests we made, which I'll try to post somehow) the HV30 not only has fairly noticeable higher resolution, but also wins in terms of noise (in the same lighting conditions corresponding to each camera's capabilities). In fact, the PD-170 has a really bothersome noise that is present even on DAYLIGHT (and of course well exposed) footage. When I found out that my coordinating professor (in charge of, in a way, deciding which camera we would use) knew about this everpresent noise, I was a bit mad. HV20's images are so much better.