I saw at JVC's HD10 camera is slated for "next month." June now? I heard Steve M. mention July...

For my 2004 or 2005 film shoot (depending on how much money we get...), we may go with the latest mini-HD camera with a 35 mm lens adaptor and lens vs. a CineAlta. Depends on our budget and the final quality. But I keep hearing the Varicam is no better than higher-end DV cameras, like the new Panasonic 24 P DV camera and the Ikegami pal...CineAlta is TOO EXPENSIVE!

It's just a matter of how this camera looks and what the other companies offer.

heath
www.mpsdigital.com

Re: HD1 Footage
 

<<<-- Originally posted by Paul Mogg : I'm not seeing any noise in the picture, quite grainless in fact, which is the most suprising thing about it, with DV I would definately be able to see SOME pixel noise, even in a fairly high end camera. It's not the best example though as the fact that it's filmed through glass and water makes it look washed out -->>>

A local Thai resturant has a huge fish tank. The fish colors are VERY bright. And the picture is very clear.

The first thing my wife said was, "why are the colors so pale?"

Which matches my finding that adding +15 saturation. When I do that with a still of the fish -- it looks much better.

Having seen footage shot on the HD1 at PMA I'm looking -- maybe too hard -- for any pattern that doesn't seem to belong. Look in the red grass -- do you see some moving chroma patterns?

The HD1 has/had losts of noise artifacts. However, these problems seem not to be from the chip. It is, it is claimed, from the MPEG2 encoding. Bright colors have the most noise artifacts. Broad areas of with no detal also have a noise artifacts. Don't look for blocking or mosquitos. Look for grunge.

Download VLC media play. It plays the TS file perfectly.

HD10 is now July.

Whoever says Varicam is no better -- I'd suggest you stop listening to this person.

Re: Re: HD1 Footage
 

<<<-- Originally posted by Steve Mullen :

Whoever says Varicam is no better -- I'd suggest you stop listening to this person. -->>>

This was said, and I admit I shouldn't rely on hearsay, by a working pro using CineAltas, Varicams, Ikegamis, the mini-dv 24P and both XL-1's and GL-2's. He said a Varicam blown up to 1080i HD and an Ikegami blown up to 1080i HD look similar. Of course, I'm going on hearsay, but I trust this person. He wants me to save money on my film budget by renting Ikegami or the 24P Panasonic DV. He has no money or anything involved, nor does he own either the Ike or the soon-to-be released Panasonic. (He owns the mini dv 24p and a Sony 500 (?) Pal and his partner in his New York City company owns a CineAlta). I will admit that the Ikegami Beta is pretty good, as a Palm Beach County-based company I sometimes work for use them.

Of course, I won't make any final decisions until I test them myself. I'm awaiting a test on the Varicam and now a July test with the JVC, HD monitor and the D-VHS. Then I'll know for myself.

heath
www.mpsdigital.com

Question for Steve Mullen:

Does it appear hat the picture noise is related to insufficient lighting level?

I decompressed this HD footage today and messed with it in FCP (see thread above). Looking at it in the waveform monitor It looks like the Pedestal is set much too high. With some fairly quick adjustments in FCP's 3-way color corrector I was able to get quite stunning improvements in both the depth and color of the picture. It looks to me that this camera just needs some gamma adjustments to make it very very usable. I can't really comment on the chroma noise as I'm not able to view it through an HD monitor or television to make a good judgement.

My 2 cents.

Paul

<<<-- Originally posted by Paul Mogg : I decompressed this HD footage today and messed with it in FCP (see thread above). -->>>

How did you get it into FCP?

The pedestal should be zero.

Wish we knew the details of the segment!

I used the mpgtx and mpeg2decx shareware utilities to demux and convert it to Quicktime uncompressed, then made a DV clone of the footage, did a DV offline edit and conform back to the uncompressed material. It seemed to work fine, please see my other thread for the details. but again I have to say it seems too simple to be without fault.

Paul

<<<-- Originally posted by Paul Mogg : I used the mpgtx and mpeg2decx shareware utilities to demux and convert it to Quicktime uncompressed, then made a DV clone of the footage, did a DV offline edit and conform back to the uncompressed material. It seemed to work fine, please see my other thread for the details. but again I have to say it seems too simple to be without fault.

Paul -->>>

So, if I'm following you correctly, this was off the internet, but can you do the same thing with the shareware programs and FCP to edit the actual footage in Final Cut directly from the camera?

heath

ps-July can't come fast enough!!!! :-)

I can't get that footage to play on any of my players. Is it regular MPEG2? Do I need something special to play it?

My understanding is that you cannot and will not be able to edit the native MPEG2_TS file that this camera natively puts out, in FCP, until Apple or someone else comes up with a Quicktime codec for for MPEG2 Transport Stream, which I believe they are working on right now. But what I am talking about, if it works on larger files (and I see no reason why not), is in fact better (quality wise) than editing in that TS compressed format, because the compressed TS file only gets de-compressed the once. You then make a DV format copy of that same footage and edit that as you would any other DV footage. Then, once your editing in DV format is done, you just switch the source footage that your edits were referring to in the FCP sequence, back to the HD footage that is sitting on your hard drive, and render. That's it, and the quality of the source material should not be degraded as is might well be if editing natively in the TS format, which is what a lot have people have been complaining about in the choice of this format for this camera.
It would probably be even easier and take up less space if you used the OfflineRT format in FCP, but I've not tried that yet. The big problem here is of course that you need massive amounts of hard drive space to hold all of that uncompressed HD material, but only when you do your conform back to HD. But hard drives are pretty cheap, and you don't need an expensive SCSI array, or an HD deck, or a $10,000 HD PCI card for this.
Once again, I stress I've only tried this on the 4 second piece of footage from the HD1 that was posted on the internet. and it appeared to work fine at first attempt, I even color corrected the footage in FCP. I'm sure there may be may be major problems I'm not yet aware of, and hopefully others will try it and point those out if they exist.
If anyone knows of a shareware HD Mpeg2 encoder, I'd be very interested, as that seems to be the missing link in doing this affordably.

All the best

Paul

JVC DV5000 vs. HD1 stills:

http://www.etaiwannews.com/Business/...1051664220.htm

Are these stills or frame grabs?

Please recheck your link Joseph, it didn't seem to point to what you were referencing.

Thanks

http://ongen.econ-net.or.jp/hihyou/v...gashitsu-l.jpg

Sorry, these are grabs; above is the correct link

That's very interesting, the 45 degree roof line of the building says a lot, how the DV stair-stepping dissapears at higher pixel resolutions, and the smoothness of the curves on the half circle of the upper light colored brickwork.

Thanks