XL-H1 Overcrank clip!
 

Ok folks,

I've been trying an experimental procedure to get the equivalent of 60p overcrank slow motion from the XL-H1.

Before I go into the details, please let me apologize for the underexposed clip. It was almost sundown and I just rolled off some footage in the backyard of my sister's house with the kid's jumping around on a trampoline, and I forgot to adjust the brightness of the EVF, so it's a little wonky...color settings were a little off too...but oh well.

Workflow:

--Shot SDI straight to DVCPRO HD 1080i into the Kona card
--brought clip into Compressor and converted to DVCPRO HD 720/60p
--Brought 60p clip into Cinema Tools and conformed to 720/24p
--converted clip in Compressor to 720/24p h.264 @10 mbs

That's it.

Please tell me what you think of the motion rendition

www.homepage.mac.com/mrbarlowelton

that looks great on my powerbook. i'll load it on my workstation and look at it on a bigger monitor tomorrow.

but i have to tell you, it looks really smooth and clean. i'll be starting a Barlow Book with all the cool stuff you're discovering and sharing.

vince

Thanks, Vince.

I'll post a few more from better material in the future. Just thought it had some geek value.

Edit: forgot to say, there's a 1080i of the original FCP clip. It's DVCPRO HD so sorry to anyone who can't open it.

Sincerely? If it's possible this overcrank from 60i, I don't know why so talk about HVX200 or Varicam...

Frankly to me, the quality image, noiseless, etc or the resolution is quite more important than any toy, specially if it's possible to get it at post.

On the other hand, with this effect all the footage will go similar. So popular at the Hollywood stuff! Formulas used by one industry not art! Blackmail to the spectator...any good film critic knows it!... And if the creative filmmakers are thinking that the art is a trick that it's possible to copy ad nauseam, they are completely wrong.

IMHO this is just marketing and brands like Panasonic know how to sell their products.

And you, with this sample, you put the HVX200 point down. Comparatively with Canon's XL-H1, where are the differences? And you have been to prove it.

BTW, how is it possible to open the backyard file? I'm at PC side. Thank you.

EDIT: I already saw your warning. Thank you for the care. Again for the tests and posts.

I'll post the 60p of it in h.264 later on

Thanks for posting this! Looks great. I'd been wanting to see exactly this scenario. Well, not the kids or trampoline part, but the simulated overcranking from 60i for sure.

Did you happen to try the same thing using the HDV 1080i footage to compare how much better the SDI capture straight to DVCPRO HD is?

As a matter of fact...yes. The HDV is not much different...perhaps sharper.
I even converted the HDV to DV100, and did all this stuff, and the result was almost identical.

There's a 60p DV100 of the same clip, and a h.264 60p also, for comparison.

www.homepage.mac.com/mrbarlowelton

Well, I think the advantage of the HVX and Varicam is you don't have to put up with render times in Compressor to get to these results. It just goes to show there's A LOT of temporal resolution available from 1080i. Lots of flexibility to downconvert to 720p format with good results.

I would agree. All that matters is the output.

I've often thought the slow motion features of the HVX might create a bit of a cliche' look. But who doesn't want options?


They sure do...but they have some great products. My point was to show there's always more than one way to skin a cat.

Lots of differences, but we've all been through this before. I only wanted to show that the H1 downsamples to 720p quite nicely, with temporal flexibility to boot!

Lookin good! And not even using Twixtor or Shake. Very impressive. Nice crisp image too.

As I said: where are the differences? Of course, there are lots of...exactly but not as some are saying.

You did it!

Wow that looked really smooth and clear! I guess the only advantage of an hvx is render time then.

I am not surprised by the results of this method. I have actually done this with SD footage in the past. What I am surprised about however is the amount of detail that is still in the image after pulling the fields into their own frames. In theory a 1080i field should only have about 405 lines of detail after filtering but this looks much higher.

Were the missing lines duplicated or interpolated?

Interpolated, I think. Basically, under frame controls in the inspector, I checked on every temporal filtering quality option to "best". Compressor does some pretty slick math...a poster on another forum said he thought the program borrowed some stuff from Shake because Ben Waggoner (compression guru) said Compressor did a nearly flawless conversion of 1080i to 720 60p. So far, that would seem to be a fair claim.

Major Differences:

HVX

--HVX does the math for you. You can simulate over and undercrank with various post methods, but the HVX will give you instant gratification.
--Wider lens
--form factor
--P2

H1

--Higher resolution. The H1 delivers a very sharp image in 720p. Possibly sharper than the Panny.
--interchangeable lens
--SDI!!
--cheap tape and good hd
--great telephoto and OIS
--form factor (shoulder stabilized)
--less noise (IMHO, of course, but there are noise reduction options w/H1 too...although I've found them to be mostly unnecessary.

Does that help? I'm not bashing the HVX at all. I think it's an incredible camera and would love to own one too.

I think it all comes down to what your priorities are in image quality, and how much time and effort you're willing to put in to get good results from either product.

Major differences at my point of view, codecs away:

HVX200

color + filmic dynamic range + wide latitude + native progressive scan = better film-like look

XL-H1

native higher resolution + superior lowlight & noise handling = better run and gun

Here are the specifics from Compressor:

Name: 1080ito60p conversion
Description: DVCPRO HD 720p60 with audio pass-through
File Extension: mov
Audio: multi-track passthrough
Video Encoder
Format: QT
Width: 1280
Height: 720
Pixel aspect ratio: DVCPRO HD 720p (16:9)
Crop: None
Frame rate: 59.94
Frame Controls:
Retiming: High quality Motion Compensated
Resize Filter: Statistical Prediction
Deinterlace Filter: Motion Compensated
Adaptive Details: On
Antialias: 0
Detail Level: 0
Field Output: Progressive
Codec Type: DVCPRO HD 720p60
Multi-pass: Off, frame reorder: Off
Pixel depth: 24
Spatial quality: 99
Min. Spatial quality: 50
Temporal quality: 0
Min. temporal quality: 50

Good job Barlow.

Now if you could find a way to make the colors to pop a little more in the shadows like the HVX...That would be great really. The Canon is very clean. ...but it still look a little too edgy for my taste, so maybe dial down the detail a little would look smoother ?

1-Could you try some different gamma/colors settings in high contrast environment ? I'm curious...

2-What is your workflow ? is it time consuming ? What is the cost of the card ?

thanks

Thanks Antoine.

In time I'll be testing all kinds of looks in camera. That said, I think color correction has a lot of latitude from even the HDV, so it's always possible to get what you want in post--or at least damn close. Try Magic Bullet or lots of other ways to massage the image.

Workflow:

--I capture and edit in DVCPRO HD from SDI output (whether HDV playback or live signal) with the Kona LH card

--Output 1080i clips for slow motion processing in Compressor

--I convert to 720 60p and then conform to 24fps playback in Cinema Tools

That's about all.

I put up a slow motion HDV clip. It's a guy whooshing down a snow tubing hill. There's a 60p converted h.264 and the 24p conversion in h.264. It was processed with said workflow. The clips are titled:

H1HDVto60ph264.mov
H1HDVto720pOcrankh264.mov

www.homepage.mac.com/mrbarlowelton

thanks Barlow,

I can't wait for your tests.

I think that both the HVX and the XLH1 can produce beautifull images, no doubt. They look very different, but good.

I just noticed that you used DVCpro HD to edit and convert this with. This clip had amazing detail but it could have been even better yet. DVCproHD only records 960x720 pixels compared to the full 1280x720 that you could get in this conversion. It would be interesting to see the results if you converted to a 720p uncompressed codec instead. You should be able to pull even more horizontal detail if you did it that way.

I actually forced it to render 1280x720, instead of 920x720 because for some reason I ended up with a squarish frame...which I could correct in QT, but it bothered me.

Uncompressed would look slightly better, for sure.

I didn't think you could force the DVCpro HD to encode 1280x720. It may just be setting the aspect ratio flag in different ways but still only giving 960x720 pixels of data.

Well "force" may be the wrong word. I changed it to custom frame size of 1280x720 because I was getting the square picture by the default.

I rendered the clip into 720p60 uncompressed. It ended up being 1.18 GB for 8 seconds!!

Here are a few tiffs from it.

www.homepage.mac.com/mrbarlowelton

Barlow Elton, I was away from my broadband connection and it wasn't possible to download the last files that you posted and linked in your download account.

Is it possible to link them again? It would be so much appreciated because the subject is very useful to me and to my future investment.

Thank you very much.

You could also export to photojpeg at 75% or 100%. 100% is 4:4:4 while 75% is 4:2:2

Some clips are back up Leuname.

Thomas, there's a h.264 from the 60p uncompressed render. It's the original 1280x720, and it's better than the photojpeg at the same bit rate.

It's hard to see the extra horizontal detail over the DVCPRO HD for some reason.

Though away from my office I already began to download them.

Because its size I will download it at last during the next 24 hours. I'm very interested to see the results. Thanks again.

OK, great result, very smooth. Now I thought I would apply that procedure in my production and got stuck, on the fact that my camera is european version, thus I only have 50i, not 60i. So, there is no DVCPRO HD 50p. and if I go from 50i to 60p, I don't think will get the same result. Will I?

Can't hurt to try. I was actually really surprised to not see a 50p "Easy Setup" in FCP.

I think what you should try is capture your footage in DVCPROHD 1080 50i, render into another codec (uncompressed or photojpeg) at 50fps, and then you (in theory) could get a 2x slowdown after conforming to 25p in Cinema Tools, or you could try the Nattress plug-in using "map frames".

Barlow, ready when you are.

Hey Darrel,

I shot you an email. Call if there are problems.

Barlow, do i just drag and drop onto your webpage?
Darrell
FIRST CINEMA PICTURES

Email me or call

Barlow,

what version of compressor do you have? i'm not getting the exact same settings and it won't allow me to change a few - min spatial quality and min. temporal quality.

vince

Compressor 2.0.1

Vince: If you're bringing in a 1080i clip, try this in the Inspector under frame controls:

Frame Controls: Custom
Resizing Control: Best
Output Fields: Progressive
Deinterlace: Best (make sure Adaptive Details is checked)
Anti-alias:0
Detail level: 0
Rate Conversion: Best (High quality motion compensated

barlow,
it worked fine without those settings. it did, however, create a quicktime with a frame size of 960x720. even though it was set for 1280 x 720.

either way, looks pretty nice. i will continue to experiment.

thanks,

vince

yeah, I had that result initially. Compressor can get confusing with DVCPRO HD because you might see a general description where it says it\'s rendering out a 1280x720 standard HD image, but because it\'s rendering into the actual sub-sampled 960x720 spec of 720p DVCPRO HD, it offers up a squished, squareish image. I went to the frame custom controls and told it to be 1280x720 there, and then it rendered correctly.

The download is done and thank you for the email that I received. Your files were and they are useful. And you prove that it\'s possible to get the same slowmotion as HVX200 does. Besides from 1080i, so better resolution or from 60i to 24p is there losses?