Cross-cutting Canon H1 HDV footage with Sony Z1 HDV footage
 

We are going to shoot a wildlife series. Anybody have an opinion on our ability to effectively cross-cut HDV footage from these two cameras? We are not going for film look, we'll be shooting 1080i).

Does 50i or 60i impact your opinion?

(Looking at the Canon for its long lens potential. The Sony for its ease of focusing quickly. )

Thanks,

Wayne

They should look pretty good together, although you may want to tweak both cameras looks to match eachother as closely as possible.

As far as 50i or 60i...not sure. 60i looks even more "hyper-real" in a temporal sense, but you might get the slightest of improvements in compression quality going 50i, simply because it has a lower frame rate, so in theory you should have more bits allocated per frame. If it were me and I were shooting in an NTSC country, I'd stick with 60i just to make life a little easier.

If you stay in 60I or 50I the HDV signal is compatible. Last Sunday the people taping the concert I was working at were mixing and matching Sony and Canon cameras live. Not perfect matching but not bad. As for color the Canon has a lot of flexibility which might let you find a setting where the cameras look very similar. Resolution the Canon should have more of it. Of course matching is a difficult thing since exposure and sensitivity can come into play and with the different gain structures of the cameras you might get into situations where one camera makes a picture that the other one can't match.