HF S21 or TM700

[Paulo Teixeira]

Today their were multiple new TM700 clips up on Vimeo including this one which is native 1080 50p.

Original Panasonic TM700 1080/50p (pal) Train pan & zoom on Vimeo

The only comparisons the I've seen are comparing the TM700 to the CX550.

sony cx 550 vs panasonic tm700 giorno 2 on Vimeo

Their just haven't been that many HF S21 clips up. At least the videos from Africa are very well made.

[Rob deJong]

I have been really comparing a hundred or more test footage of TM700, HF S series and Sony XR 550.
The panasonic has falllen. I really dislike the blueish tint to almost everything. The Canon has much more realistic natural color reproduction, but in many shots too much yellow/red. I could live with that. The Sony is a bit in between to my taste. Do you guys have any opinion on this.

I am going to combine footage of 550d and the camcorder. So I need the camcorder footage to match the 550d as good as possible. The 550d, in most situations, produces realistic colors.

[Dave Haynie]

Originally Posted by Paulo Teixeira

Panasonic does claim better imaging technology but even if it's just marketing, the much better stabilizer alone will make up for the lower bit rate but then again, if your shooting in 24p, you cannot edit your footage right away like you can with the Canon since you must remove pull-down beforehand.

That's not the problem.. all modern video editors understand 24p with pulldown, and transparently remove it. I can drop this into any of the last several versions of Sony Vegas, for example, and it just knows. This is how 24p was done on every tape-based camcorder, so it's old hat by now.

There are two issues, though. The first is simply waste.. if you're pulling 24p down to 60i, you're adding unnecessary, additional duplicated fields. So the quality is reduced by the need for this extra baggage, or you wind up using more memory.

The second is worse yet -- when you record in HD, HDV or MPEG-4, you're color subsampling in 4:2:0 cadence. In short, the subsamples happen across two scan lines. The problem here is, when you split the progressive video into interlaced fields, this happens before subsampling and compression. Let's look at the first four scan lines of a progressive video. In "native" 24p, your 4:2:0 would run subsampling across lines 1 and 2, then 3 and 4, as a set. Split fields and telecine, and you get lines 1 and 3 together, lines 2 and 4 together. Thus, the chroma distortions effects inherent in color subsampling are made worse.

The sad thing is, this is just a "simple matter of software". Panasonic used to do native 24p in their older camcorders, but now it's a "pro" feature. My HMC40 does native 24p, but on the TM700, it's the old-fashioned, tape-based 24p. Ok, still better than Sony's old fake 24p by a country mile, and yeah, people were overjoyed to get 24p this way on the old Canon HDV models, but there's no reason to do non-native anymore.

Originally Posted by Paulo Teixeira

I like to record events so having a 1080 60p mode is exactly what I need. I'd be able to make 1080p slow-motion sequences plus I love the fact that their a traditional focusing ring. That's why if I had to choose it would definitely be the TM700.

The 1080/60p mode is great for sports and other fast motion stuff. However, in practice, it's work to use. While I can edit it directly (I have a computer that used to be called fast, an Intel Q9550... not so much anymore, but you can only do so many upgrades at once, and this year, it was camcorders), it's far easier to deal converting to Cineform. You'll get about 120GB/hr in Cineform, though, so you want plenty of fast and large HDDs.

Originally Posted by Paulo Teixeira

Still, I waiting to see what the successor of the HMC40 and the GH1 will be like.

It could be some wait... pro-market cameras don't generally get the regular updates that consumer models get... even those based on the consumer models. I bought a Sony HVR-A1 over four years ago... that model is still current, no replacement yet. Despite the consumer models being replaced like 20-something times already.

Panasonic's also doing an interesting thing (just annouced).. they'll have a real, full fledged camcorder using 4/3 system lenses by the end of the year. Way, way pricier than the GH1 and other DSLR-style models, but still, it's pretty clear someone had to do this soon enough.

Originally Posted by Paulo Teixeira

Nero 9 ShowTime will play the files if you have a decent Windows computer but what's surprising is that the Sony PS3 is capable of playing back 1080 60p files.

With a good GPU (I have a nVidia 8800GT) and Windows 7, you can get very good playback even in Windows Media Player. The win here in the new Microsoft AVC CODEC... it uses DXVA 2.0 for video acceleration. My Q9550 system barely manages a jittery playback in VLC at 60-80% CPU (all four), but in WMP, 12% for full, smooth, 1080/60p playback on a 1200p monitor.

I haven't got the PS3 to play it back yet... only tried once. It seemed confused, not sure why. The PS3 obviously outputs 1080/60p, and given that Sony is moving to support 3D output from the PS3 this summer, it sounds perfectly reasonable. Any idea what version of the PS3 firmware you used... that could be the problem. Did you play from SDHC card directly, or something else?

[Paulo Teixeira]

If you can tell me the simple steps to getting 24p within 60i from my GH1 into Premiere CS4 and easily remove pull-down without any extra software, I'll be very happy.

When I have Premiere view a 60p clip as 24p for slow motion I get very good results. Now when it comes to editing 60p at normal speed, it's real time only for the first few seconds. My laptop's processor is a 2.4 Core2Duo. I hear people have been editing 1080 60p without any issues at all in a quad core processor using Edius Neo 2 Booster and Edius 5.5. I'm assuming Premiere CS5 is good as well although I haven't heard people's experiences yet.

As for the PS3, theirs been issues for a few users one in particular in the AVS forum has claimed that disabling the picture enhancements made the playback much better. I reversed the process and my audio got bad so that may solve the issue but then again, it may also be version specific since theirs been a few revisions of the PS3.

[Dave Haynie]

Originally Posted by Paulo Teixeira

If you can tell me the simple steps to getting 24p within 60i from my GH1 into Premiere CS4 and easily remove pull-down without any extra software, I'll be very happy.

Assuming the GH1 tags the video properly as 24p telecined to 60i, I would expect your NLE to just do the adjustment automatically when you add the clip to your project. That's how Vegas does it. I don't use Premiere (well, not since the early 90s).

So, I did a quick Google search, and there's some claims that CS4 "should do this, but doesn't", leading to this forum thread: "Transcodeless" 3:2 pulldown removal workflow for Premiere by LordTangent - Canon HV20, HV30 & HV40 User Forum

There are others that suggest using the "Interpret Footage" function, and selecting "Guess 3/2 pulldown" on your clips, and see if Premiere can figure them out. Again, I don't use the program.. that's what I found with a 30 second search.

Finally, you can run the video through Cineform Neo, to generate a Cineform version of your HD video and also do the pulldown for you automatically. I use Cineform anyway for heavy edits from AVC (now a total of three AVC cameras), so this speeds things up. I mean, it's $100, and by all rights your NLE ought to just recognized the telecined video and adjust, but if it doesn't, you have to find some solution.

Originally Posted by Paulo Teixeira

When I have Premiere view a 60p clip as 24p for slow motion I get very good results. Now when it comes to editing 60p at normal speed, it's real time only for the first few seconds. My laptop's processor is a 2.4 Core2Duo. I hear people have been editing 1080 60p without any issues at all in a quad core processor using Edius Neo 2 Booster and Edius 5.5. I'm assuming Premiere CS5 is good as well although I haven't heard people's experiences yet.

Video playback of AVC is very dependent on how you're playing it back. I have a Quad Core 2.84GHz desktop and a Dual Core 2.4GHz notebook. Nothing that doesn't use GPU acceleration will play back 1080/60p smoothly on the notebook. And it's barely possible on the desktop. I can edit it, but it's much slower than 1080/60i or 720/60p, as you'd expect -- twice the complexity for that poor CPU to deal with.

Edius Neo 2 is supposedly the best thing out for realtime editing of AVCHD. It's also probably the newest release of a well known video editor... we'll see if Adobe, Sony, or any of the others get better AVCHD handling this year.

The Grass Valley people claim to support three streams in realtime in Neo 2, which ought to imply one-and-a-half 1080/60p streams. I have one free version of this that came with my HMC40. Tried it once, but it seems kind of clumsy, or maybe I just didn't get it. Anyway, for 1080/60p, you're probably going to want an intermediate CODEC like Cineform anyway, particularly if you're editing multicam.

[Paulo Teixeira]

I've used CineForm and it works very good but the real point I'm trying to make is that with native 24p you can easily put it in a timeline of random NLEs and edit it right away. It's even worse if after you shoot something, you have to give the footage to someone right away and you'd have to explain how to work with the footage.

[Dave Haynie]

It's easy to argue that 24p over 60i is a well understood format that should be automatically supported by NLEs... it's been available on video cameras for longer than native 24p has.

On the other hand, no one's going to argue for 24p over 60i being anything other than a compromise compared to native 24p. Native doesn't screw with color, and yeah, it just plain works in any NLE that can support 24p.

It's annoying that, since these are really just "a simple matter of software", there's no reason Panasonic's now including 24p over 60i in consumer cameras, other than to cripple them relative to pro models. My daughter's SD9 supposedly does native 24p (haven't checked it myself, but that's the claim)... we couldn't have had this on the TM300 or TM700?

And what's with 30p... my HMC40 does native 24p, but it does 30p over 60i, at least for 1080/30p. That seems terribly dumb, particularly given the plethora of consumer cams that can do native 1080/30p.