ok - someone posted a link to stevesdigicams but not the exact link for a 720p clip . Here it is

http://www.steves-digicams.com/2006_...1_samples.html

It's a handheld shot with a fair amount of action. I think it looks great. What's he doing that the others aren't ? Kurth

I have been busy with work and have not be able to do any more tests. Now that the HD1s are out I'm sure there will be a bunch of testers soon. I have Vegas 6, but have not done any editing with it yet. In fact I am trying to figure out how do the basics today. It seems a bit tricky...

About the bug with the MP4 program, report it to the sourceforge site, I'm sure they will love to upgrade it to HD.

About the bug with the HD1 footage, if everybody with a HD1 reported it to Sanyo then they might do something about it (there are a few more bugs to, but starting your letter with this one would help). Organisations have a habit of ignoring something until the same thing is reported by X amount of people.

Marc, about your system crashing, sounds strange, you might try reinstalling mainboard software and Graphics.DSP drivers with the latest (could even be the XP installation).

i don't think it has to do with XP as those crashes only happens with .avi files converted through HD1 MP4 files...for me the problem comes from MP4CAM2AVI with HD files...

but it's a good idea to leave a post on the sourceforge site, i tried to find a forum there yesterday but couldn't find anything which seems updated regularly...

will try again later

Emmanuel,
I was refering to this hint (User Guide P 77)
"When using a tripod, the docking station or other means to stabilize the camera, please turn the motion compensation function off . If the
motion compensation function is enabled when it is not actually needed, it
may result in an image that appears unnatural."
When you look at the image captures of the clips, with a huge zoom in we can see also steps on the "/" direction, but they are twice smaller than these of the "\". Could be a kind of compromise to reduce data size ?, as you said before.

Luc-Henri

But it is worth looking at, it might be some part of Windows, or the drivers, that has only has been used for the task, that would be why it doesn't turn up anywhere else. As I understand there is problems with the Ulead product to, which seems strange. So reinstalling things one at a time might help )through honestly XP is the last thing to try).

I have been using MP4CAM2AVI with mp4 files from my Sanyo C1 a lot. It´s a great app becouse only recodes the audio stream to pcm and video stays untouched. I use Vegas (now version 6) to edit and export to mpg2 DVD compilant.
Now with my HD1 the edit process it´s a bit tricky, becouse if you put the mp4 files of the HD1 directly on the editor, it eats ram like crazy (1 GB ram or more with only 3 or 4 clips....). Don´t tried in other video editors...

The solution is to convert the mp4 files to hd avi files. I use Matrox HD codec (one friend of mine give´s it to me) and eo video for bach-encode of all files, but this metod is time consuming, and space wasting becouse the bitrate goes up to 100mbit/sec!.

Pd: Marc. You must to have Quicktime 7 to manage mp4 files from HD1 properly. For me the bug with MP4CAM2AVI is that it sees the files of HD1 like 640 x 480 standard files, and the resulting video is of that resolution, showing only a portion of the full original screen. (only boy and icecream witout sorrounding for example).

Regards!.

HD1 jaggies
 

Ah OK good point. Do you know if any of the clips posted so far has been taken without motion compensation?

Almost all the clips i took with with motion compensation off. I'm not sure about the very first set, but I think it was off. One later set of clips I made a point that it was on and hand held.

HD1 directional jaggies
 

Thank you Joseph. So apparently there is currently no way to get rid of these artifacts... Too bad. May be as reviews start to pop out on the web we will learn more about this "feature", and get some answers from Sanyo.

HD1 directional "jaggies"
 

Looking in details at zoomed screenshots of the OCx.MP4 samples it seems pretty clear that something is wrong within the macroblocks for patterns oriented along the "\" direction. For instance, instead of having
\
_\
__\
___\
You get something like
/
_/
__/
___/
where "/" is 4 pixels high. So I guess it is definitely a bug with some DCT components/coefficients...

Thanks Rafael for your feedback. I do have Quicktime 7 installed. Don't you regret the purchase of the HD1 in regard to the difficulty to manage and edit those mp4 files ?

especially if you compare with the easyness of MP4CAM2AVI...

i mean, if editing video clips , which is one of the more basic stuff to do when you own a digital camera, is a nightmare then what is the use of having a High Definition camcorder in the first place ???

really i wonder...

Turnaround : Dutch angle
 

Emmanuel, we only have to turn our future HD1 around it's anteroposterior axis to definitively avoid or minimize the "\" ;-)
Seriously, I am afraid you could be right for the bug, Sanyo must know it, so I don't realy understand (Is this cam officialy distributed somewhere ?)

Luc-Henri

@Marc : I looked at the MP4Cam2AVI and it looks like that the code for mp4 parsing do not depend on a specific library, and for some reason it doesn't work with the files we have here (HD has nothing to do with this, the code is just assuming too much things). So i suggest you to use a tool like MP4Box (it works perfectly, i just tested) to demux the mp4 track to AVI. Unfortunatly (or fortunatly :D), it's a command-line tool...

Use :
MP4Box.exe -avi 1 MT9.MP4 to demux the video track (1) to avi
MP4Box.exe -raw 2 MT9.MP4 to demux the audio track (2) to raw aac

you can find this tool here or here

For those interested by the profile used by the encoder, the mp4 clips are encoded in Simple profile@L3, which means pretty much no options that helps quality (like bframe, qpel or GMC). I encoded some raw 720p samples @ 9Mbits and unfortunatly, Mpeg4 SP is not efficient enough at this level. You need at least b-frames to have something correct at this bitrate... It would be cool if we could hack the max bitrate somewhere in this firmware :D

Steven, great to hear there's another option to convert MP4 to AVI - though it's slightly over my non-technical head.

Could you just clarify that MP4Box doesn't re-encode, i.e. that there is no loss?

Thanks.

Graham