Well, that is one of the reasons why I hate providing what I don't usually do. Filmmaking approach. I should never do that in the future.

I did mention before that rock musicain can't play classic music in its tradditional way.

I'm into capturing the real performance rather than making up stories and situations, so yes, I'm not the right person to put my hands on this camera.

XL H1 is too heavy for my purpose, and don't even balance on my shoulder like HD100 would, and not light enough to take it around in the extreme situation.

Kaku, I'm very sorry if I offended you. I don't mean to say you are unprofessional in any way shape or form. You did as well if not better than any of us here could considering your time constraints, conditions and so on.
My intention is to say that the footage I saw was with a film crew with tons of production equipment, they even showed footage of the crew along with the footage shot.
Don't quote me on this, but I believe what I saw was Canon's "official" footage that we've all been waiting for.
No one can match that by going out on the town with a camcorder alone and no one is ever expected to.
I completely appreciate what you've done because it demonstrates to a degree what the camera is capable of.
Truly, truly sorry if I offended in anyway.
It wasn't my intention.

What you saw Eric was the "Watchmaker's Shop" vignette that Canon USA put together (and still has not yet put online, go figure). We are very fortunate to have Kaku Ito provide us with these XL H1 clips... just like last year with the Sony FX1, these are among the first of their kind available anywhere; definitely the first 24F clips in the world that have been made publicly available. We all owe Kaku a debt of gratitude for thinking about sharing his limited time on the XL H1 with DV Info Net community here.

Canon USA pulled out all the stops on their sample video; they had a full crew, a crane, a dolly, a DVCPRO HD deck, video village, craft services and the works... and for some reason have chosen to show it only at ResFest so far; it is a complete mystery to me why this video did not get put on the web at the Canon site right after the Expo announcement of the H1. If you want to see "filmmaking" with the H1 then you'll have to hold out for the Canon USA promo.

Thanks again to Kaku; someone in Japan put the H1 in his hands and he thought of DV Info Net right away. The amount of sample material he has submitted so far is just wonderful. The man is catering to our requests. We owe him a big thank you.

No Eric, it's true and you said what you felt, so that is real.

I don't have any filmmaking background, so I'm not entitled to provide the clues for what this cam can do for filmmaking.

But one thing is though, I had PDX10s before, and PDX10 was great in shooting Live band performances at massively lighted situation, but it was terrible in natural low lighted situation. So, yes, naturally, heavily production equipped environment makes any camara perform better.

I should put a title as "naturalist" next my name, so people know for the next time on, I do emphasize on natural environment for shooting. AND that does not mean that I would not stop developing knowledge and ability to shoot better in that situation.

I agree, Chris, completely. I'm sorry that it came off as more of a bite on Kaku's footage because I was so far away from that notion it wasn't even on the horizon of my thought process.
Kaku, don't ever stop giving us footage, man. I'd hate for Chris to hunt me down like a dog and kill me.


And shooting under regular circumstances is great, we do need to see this camera operate under all kinds of conditions, run and gun included.

Jeez, now I feel like a jerk. (Insert sad face icon here...)

Naw Eric, the Kennelmaster doesn't engage in that anymore now that he has us wranglers to do it for him.

All kidding aside, this is why written communication has to be thought out and words chosen carefully. I kind of came away with how your earlier post could be misconstrued as a slight against Kaku's camera skills.

What he has posted is very useful to me, because that's typically what I shoot and the more 'realistic' it looks, the more I like it. That's why I'm such a fan of the promise of affordable HD.

-gb-

Ah, the joys of being the Kennelmaster! Thanks for the advice, Greg. It will be well heeded.

It's true. I have people who do this for me these days. "I was attending the baptism of my godson at the time, your honor."

Chris, good solid alibi, I like it.

Kaku, if you're ever in LA, the beers are on me, sincerely.

Personally I would prefer to see footage shot along Katu's style as it is very easy with a full crew and plenty of time, lights and money to make any video look good.

If the camera is going to get the independant small shops to buy it we must see footage shot by one man bands.

Thanks for all the hard work and time Katu

You see, even when you try so hard, even taking time to shoot, things don't get perfect so I call my effort as "study" rather than professional work.

I'm inclined with understanding of music, sound, sports (at least BMX and mountainbiking) and with more than average (as normal person) understanding of video, nonlinear editing environment and web technologies. I'm not pro of any of them (I run companies distributing MOTU software/hardware and system integrating NLE and music production system), but at least always try to stand users' side and sympathize to research the useability and quality, and at the end, develop the culture of production and the real performance of music and sports, capturing the precious moments, performance that may happen only once or twice.

Thank you Eric for sticking around and I'm not taking it personally with you, but filmmaking style is not my bag at all, so we should do cooperative testing for the next time, to make senario to do perfect testing here, that will make me understand filmmaking aspect and I'm sure others that want to getting into would appreciate it, too.

Thank you for all of you for the encouragement.

Another hard thing for me is to express professionally in English as a second language. My writing might not sound professional, but I tell you, even at my current level of writing English, I improved a lot from posting and getting commnents here. So, I thank you all.

Thank you Kaku,
making tests is heavy that I know for sure...
Atleast I got a lot of information and I am very happy that you shared your weekend with us .

Well, that's true with any camera.

But I don't think controlled conditions will take away the video look. Nate's L.A. footage was also in uncontrolled conditions and looks like film. 24f doesn’t look the same as 24p.
It's what I said before. Resolution doesn't make a camera.
I know it's quite early to fully judge. But my first impressions are that the HD100 is an overall better camera.

Hey Kaku, you are doing a great favor for this whole community. You shouldn’t feel bad at all. I'm sure we all are very grateful to you. If it wasn't for you, we would most likely have to wait a long time till footage hit the "airwaves." So, don't be so hard on yourself. Specially that your footage looks great. It's not your fault it doesn't look like film. You shot it properly. I think it wouldn't look much more filmic even if you had done the test with filmmaking in mind, using a full crew with all the equipment. If you had shot those clips with an Arriflex or any other 35mm camera, no matter what, it would have looked like film. So, it's not your fault at all.

Michael,

Don't worry Michael, I know I tend to take things too seriously.

By the way, my source, Mr. Sekiguchi at Apex (Canon's broadcast lense dealer) told me that Canon changed the distribution channel on this XL H1, from the consumer channel to broadcast channel. He is going to talk to the broadcast product manger next week to report all of our cooporative effort here. If we raise enough recognition here, so we might be able to do another test in the near future. I personally requested that I want smaller HDV with 720p or 720 interlaced in a casio G-shock sytle chassis. No other brand had done it before, so it might be a kick.

Mr. Sekiguchi was able to get the sample unit last week, to start taking it around to his broadcast related customers beginning this week, and he thought of me and got okay from Mr. Yamaguchi of Canon Sales to let me use it for the last weekend. They are the same people that helped someone from france who wanted to shoot independent movie with XL2.
They're intention and actual efforts to help the people in the field is very generous and in the contrary, I never had received any kind of recognition from Panasonic nor Sony (I got help on GS400, DVC30, FX1 and HC1 from Pro Video Station Shinjuku and Mr. Nakamura from VideoAlpha magazine). So, I must mention that I really appreciate their help.

For the tourist coming to Japan, Pro Video Station always have the cheapest price tag for these popular cams. They are right in Shinjuku around all of the other huge camera stores are. So check it out and if you mention my name they will be extra nice to you.

If you really can put in a word to the product manager just tell them to make a gl2 with hdv and 1080i24f (or 720p24 jvc style, which I doubt they'd ever do) and 2 xlr inputs, that's all I and probably a lot of people need!

We can try this anyway. I've been writing a column in a professional video magazine for close to ten years now. The topic is all up to me, so for the last several months, I've been writing about affordable HD production environment and the column is called "Affordable HD Study" on VideoAlpha magazine published by ShashinKogyo Shuppan. Since Canon could be different from Sony or Panasonic, I can keep putting requests that we can gather here on my column and hope they would listen. But my main goal is to suggest them the hardcore HDV camera with the chassis of G-shock style, so we can take it to extreme conditions without so much weight.

My requests are G-shock style chassis, DVC30 style manual zoom ring, 2 XLRs like Evan says (or maybe even detachable unit) and special vistasize mode (less active pixels to avoid compression breakups for fast camera action) and so on. I will probably make a special blog section to keep sending the message. If you want to join me, feel free.

What codec is this! It won't play... I took it to my XPpro box and it wouldn't play on that either. So not on my macs or PC. What do I need?

I managed to play it with Media Player Classic - wmv9 codecs installed.

Michael - this might work:

http://www.videohelp.com/tools?tool=HDTV_Pump

primarily for playing back HD transport streams, handy to have anyway.

Otherwise Chris did mention the free VLC player at the top of this thread

http://www.videolan.org/