Two more HV20 clips + more frame grabs
 

Nothing fantastic or limit pushing. Preview images of the clips are here, the stove and cat clips are new.

http://www.filefactory.com/file/357866/

http://www.filefactory.com/file/3d100b/

Some new frame grabs and digital stills here...
Flickr gallery

Alright, finally got the clip after jumping thru several hoops at filefactory (guess that's the price we pay for free hosting)...

The HV20 sure produces a nice clean crisp image. Nice stuff.

&

The photos (especially the Cat) are simpy amazing!

Hey Daymon,

Lot of Aussies over here. Know any who could send you one? The box really isn't all the big.

OTOH, it might be worth the wait since you'll be getting the PAL version -- lucky you!

I remember when folks were complaining in the U.S. that Panasonic was holding back all the good stuff. Some "interesting" theories started floating around.

Anyway, I don't think you'll have too long to wait and I believe you will be very happy with this camera.

Oh, and you have Rode just next door. I'm going to have to jump through some hoops to get my Video Mic.

Happy shooting :)

Thanks Wes. Keep up the great work!!!

HV20: Ducks and flowers
 

Here's a short clip of a couple of ducks and some flowers.

Miserable day though...

http://www.morecowbellpictures.com/downloads/duck.avi

100MB file.

Mike

The subject matter is really good in those shots! The "hawker stalls" in Japan are very colorful and allow for a wide range of colors when shooting. (The food also looked really good!;)) What settings did you use btw?

Yes, the video was somewhat "squished" but that is very easily fixed when playing back with VLC player.

I think the unfortunate thing is that since the weather has been so cloudy, you couldn't capture the cherry blossoms in full daylight. Perhaps some HV20 owners in Washington D.C. could get some video??? :)

What codec was used for this? It's an AVI file but it doesn't appear to be DV. AVIcodec doesn't know what codec was used. It reports 4CC as "CFHD" but says "Unknown" for the codec name.

Good luck.

Dennis

Glen,

Thanks for your comments. My town has quite a few cherry trees and there are still a lot of blossoms although I think they're a little past their prime and a lot have blown to the ground. Still, if it's decent tomorrow, I may try to get some footage of the what's left. If not, we may indeed have to rely on an HV20 owner in Washington, DC :)

The Shinjuku footage came out squished but the food stall footage was okay. I think I put the original footage into Vegas incorrectly. Not to toot my own horn, but I thought those colors were great. Actually, it was all the camera's doing since I just had it set on Night mode.

Tomorrow I'd like to really get into the manual settings and even try out the 24p. I think I need to up the shutter speed because I am getting too much blur.

It does seem to me that these high def, 16:9 cameras need a tripod or at least a monopod. A little moving around doesn't seem too bad in standard def 4:3 but these cams show everything. I wonder if Average Joe Shooter is going to be happy about this?

Pretty sure it's cineform.

Besides footage of Laguna Beach shot with HV20 that I've seen, I like yours the best. My HV20 arrives today and I can't wait to put it through the motions.....

It was an "export movie" from Premiere Pro 1.5.
Cineform HDV

Some sample HV20 Frame Grabs
 

I'm still working on familiarizing myself with the new HV20, but saw some other folks putting up some frame grabs and figured I'd join in the fun.

There is one for a soccer ball on there which I liked. No, not going to win any awards for it, but I think it does a good job of showing off the color capabilities. That was shot in full auto, zoomed in abou 8x or so from about 10 feet. Very accurate colors for sure.

http://www.szudzik.net/caps/HV20/

The one of my dog was taken inside under very low light (60 watt bulb). The rest pretty much taken outside in "Portrait" mode under very cloudy skies.

--Steve

Thanks Steve always good to see more samples!

Haha filming paintball sucks...
 

http://www.lousyheros.com/nwps3.wmv

Was a cool angle though, this was a tie-breaker 1 on 1

Camera only got hit once, I got hit... a lot...

got 3-4 more videos to work with... lots of footage...

Relevance being that this was a Canon HV10... maybe the size of the camera helped avoid getting hit...

Good stuff! Hard to believe your camera made it through everything being as you were directly in the line of fire for a lot of that exchange. How did it handle being hit the one time?

Oh just fine, it's been hit multiple times w/o issue... paintballs leave the gun at 280-300 fps (roughly 200 mph) but slow down very fast... as you can only get 125-140 ft out of a level shot. Either way as you can see in the video, they're going pretty fast ;)

Only problem I had w/ the camera all day was my cheapo $8 ebay battery decided not to work properly, the copper connectors got pushed in somehow and so it wouldn't make a solid connection, I popped in my $40 Impact battery and it was flawless... yet my other Ebay battery was great before that...

Oh well :)

Cool footage, those incoming rounds almost look "3-D" here - made me want to jump outta da way!

DB>)

Thanks Steve - great stuff

Were these frame grabs from 60i or 24p?

These were from 60i. I have done a few small clips with 24p, but haven't gone through removing the pull down yet. Ok, honestly I haven't stopped to figure out what I need to do for that yet. I have Vegas setup to automatically remove pulldown (in the preferences checkbox list), but had not noticed any major differences.

I had done a few small 24p clips ealier and had a lot of jitter when panning. Somebody in the forum had said that the panning rate has to be significantly slower when shooting 24p. So I tried that and indeed had much better success. I was probably moving much slower during the pan than I had to but it came out very well.

--Steve

That was some cool footage! I have seen the damage that paintball can do to people -- ouch!

I liked the angle alot. It was cool being able to see the balls fly everywhere.
~Gabriel

Cheers Steve

By the way it is possible to watch 24p on the fly if you use a PC using Media Player Classic, Dscaler 5 and the IVTC mod - then you get true 1080-24p (and it looks much better if your monitor is capable of 72hz for no judder)

Thanks for the info Fergus, I'll have to give that a try.

I'm hoping that we'll get some good weather for next weekend and I'll be able to head up to Mt Vernon, WA for the tulip festival. I think that would be a great place to get some footage. Tons of colors, mountain backdrops. Should really be able to show off what the camera can do. Then I can post some actual footage, not just a few frame grabs.

Here are a few shots I took with my Canon 20D last year from the festival. You can see why it would be great with a HD cam!

http://www.szudzik.net/Gallery/Galle...ery=2006/April

Steve

HV20 and some T-Ball
 

Here's a short clip (about 10 seconds) of my youngest getting his first "professional" hit during tonights T-Ball game. Was shot using regular HDV (no 24p yet) "sports" mode, exposure set at zero. Haven't done any color correction yet. Looks ok, maybe a bit dark on the computer. Reds need to be toned down for the TV though, very bright.

Rendered as WMV with standard 10% compression, interpolated fields..

http://rapidshare.com/files/25886948/Thomas.wmv

Still learning a ton about all of this stuff and appreciate all the great information found on this forum.

--Steve

Hey, that was very cute, and the picture looked great! Cute kid gets first hit, you'll be really happy to have that footage; him, too!

It sounded good, too. What was your audio setup?

best,
elmer

Looked good and the colors were very contrasty

Thanks Elmer and Joey. I'm still getting used to shooting video, been doing stills for so long, I'm used to setting up for one shot, not re-adjusting on the fly as the lighting is changing. Still a lot to get used to. My old cam I would just set on auto, but this one offers so many options, I just can't help myself and keep fiddling with them.

Elmer, for the audio, I have the Canon DM-50 mounted and was shooting in shotgun mode. So far that has done a really good job with this camera. I haven't tried shooting with the 2 stereo modes yet.

We had another game today, so I shot about an hour and 10 minutes with the BPL14 battery and did about ~35 minutes of capture. That left the battery with about 10% charge left. Not too bad I suppose.

Steve

Thanks for the info, Steve.

I take it those modes, shotgun and stereo, are modes on the DM-50. I didn't know it had that flexibility. I also really like that it's not so big.

best,
elmer

Yes, the DM-50 has three audio modes. Per the manual:

1- Shotgun: Clearly picks up sound arriving from the front of the microphone (monaural).
2- Stereo 1: Picks up sound arriving from the front of, as well as sound surrounding the microphone.
3- Stereo 2: Picks up sound surrounding the microphone in a wider range than Stereo 1.

I've been using shotgun at the games to try to reduce the "crowd noise" and pickup more from each of the kids, or the ball being hit. We're all packed pretty closely together there, so it still picks up a fair amount of the folks around me though. For a reasonably inexpensive mic, it does a good job.

Steve

HV20 footage depository
 

Due to a slow certification process for this forum, my buddy Keegan asked that I direct your eyeballs to his growing collection of HV20 material at:

http://zaps21.com/HV20/video_clips/

Of particular note is his recent Redsox footage and pigeon01.

All clips are encoded as H.264, using a Mac, and are fully compatible with both Windows and Mac versions of Apple's QuickTime Player.

Most awesome! Buzz is getting his game on. :)


Very nice footage... very nice. Thanks for sharing and thanks to Keegan for posting the footage.

Cool footage. I like the scene mode comparisons. It custom color settings look so much better than the cine mode on my display. Did you notice the clips getting washed out in color when you compressed to quicktime?

Jay

Awesome footage. Now I'm going to finish watching all of it.

The washed out look you speak of is actually a bug in the way QuickTime player uses Core Video to display the H.264. I hoping this will be fixed in Leopard as it's VERY annoying.

One solution I've found, and it's what I'm using for my HV20 footage (coming soon!) is to use Visual Hub (http://www.techspansion.com/visualhub/) for the compression. This uses ffmpeg to encode the H.264, and it does not suffer from the washed out look.

25p Cine Mode Sharpening test + comparison with auto for sharpness and exposure
 

Hi All

thought I would share some recent tests results with you regarding sharpening cine mode in post.

I took some 25p cine mode footage and brought it into Vegas. Then using sharpen I applied both medium and strong amounts and rendered seperately. This I then compared with the same scene in fully auto (still 25p).

My conclusion is that cine footage looks better with a medium amount of sharpening but with the strong preset its too much. Medium looks as sharp as the normal 25p footage without the cine mode on.

Also its amazing how much more is lost in auto mode. The branches of the trees in the top middle of the picture cannot be seen properly in auto and the tv aerial on the top left is completely gone!!

Here is the original cine scene:
http://img45.imageshack.us/img45/118...nalcinekl6.jpg

With medium sharpen:
http://img338.imageshack.us/img338/5...sharpenvp5.jpg

With strong sharpen:
http://img338.imageshack.us/img338/2...sharpenfy8.jpg

Auto for comparison:
http://img45.imageshack.us/img45/648...arrisonzp1.jpg

I own an HV20 and have yet to play with the manual sharpen feature - I can capture uncompressed via component, so when I *do* try this, I'll keep a close eye on the results (and post? ;) )

Auto looks horrible! It makes me think: was the focus on manual or auto? Did the focus change at any time? Auto looks nothing like Cine with the sharpen on normal.

The question is: should we HV20 owners be shooting with Cine all the time?

Very Interesting! Going to do some of my own testing.

In fairness I might not have chosen the best frame grabs - especially the auto shot (in terms of sharpness) but the blown highlights are an issue full stop. I think cine just provides more latitude and is a good starting point.

Yet more HV20 NYC footage
 

http://www.savefile.com/files/678224

720p, 58mb, 2:49. A little more compressed than is the norm around here, but it looks pretty good once you get past the complicated, choppy waters of Central Park.

I'm really impressed with this camera. I've been shooting entirely on Auto in 24p, and everything comes out fantastic (aside from a few shades of red I have mentioned). Also impressive to me is the image stabilization; I'm a very shaky shooter (can't take a 1/2 second still photo to save my life), but I'm able to get some very steady handheld shots, even at max zoom (see the boaters in the video).

Anyway, enjoy!

More HV20 Footage...
 

I did not shoot this. Link was posted on the IMUG list.

http://web.mac.com/chupap/iWeb/Films/Boom.html

Besides being shot on the HV20, it's pretty cool.

... Just... why?