Evan Donn |
May 24th, 2006 11:08 AM |
I'm currently trying to decide between the HVX and H1 for shooting motorcycle races. The HVX at 720p60 seems the logical choice but I think the P2 workflow is going to be more of a hassle than it's worth at this point, at least until large capacity cards become available. The H1 looks like an excellent option as well but I'm concerned about HDV's ability to handle panning with brightly colored bikes moving at ~200mph. I've got an HC1 which I'm just shooting casually with but I've noticed a lot of compression artifacts when creating slow motion footage from it.
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Originally Posted by Kaku Ito
Also, I noticed in HDV in general, some red object moving even moderate speed in front or on green surface like grass would introduce blocky artifacts on the edge of red object. My friend is a Specialized rider and he wears the red Specialized jersey, and him moving around on grass area always introduced blocky compression.
You might be able to locate that problem in this H.264 clip shot with FX1 and HC1 here.
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I can see the blocky-ness along the edges of his jersey, but is that present in the original footage? I've noticed that seems to be present in any h.264 footage with strong primary colors and I'm assuming it's due to the color sub-sampling of h.264 itself. Take a look at HD the miami vice trailers on quicktime.com and you can see the exact same thing in the solid red/blue titles, which I assume came from an uncompressed source.
Quote:
Originally Posted by Kaku Ito
FYI, HVR-A1 is an interesting camera for x-treme sports shooting especially with some camera motion that goes from dark to bright since it does not associate with ND filters. CMOS provides some terrific dynamic range that can handle from dark to bright without switching the ND filters (probably Barry dan explain this professionally).
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I really like the HC1 but as I mentioned it exhibits noticeable mpeg artifacts when panning quickly - I don't know if this is simply a limitation of HDV or if a better encoder could do a better job, such as the one in the H1. While the CMOS does handle high dynamic range nicely, it actually does incorporate 2 automatic internal ND's which hit 3 positions each to provide 8 levels of exposure at f.4, which I assume is the sweet spot of the lens. Also, the 'rolling shutter' effect of the CMOS can be an issue with fast motion if you are slowing it down in post. Still, for the size it's an amazing camera - I just think I'll need something larger with 'real' controls for shooting the motorcycle stuff.
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