Am I wrong (or crazy) for wanting to unload my Z1u?
 

Hello, i'm a noobie. Have been reading posts on this amazing site for a few months, but this is my first post :-)

I've been struggling with a few issues regarding my Z1, and HDV in general. I don;t feel good about telling people I can produce high def content. I strongly feel that 1440 x 1080i isn't real high definition. My thinking is that only 1920 x 1080P is actual high def. Am I wrong?

My big issue is the fact that the Z1 records interlace (blecchh).

I feel that standard def will be with us for the next few years, and that if i *really* want to do the best for my clients (I produce corporate videos) that something like the XL2 is by far the better cam. Am I wrong about standard def being with us for at least the next two years?

The other issue is that Sony's new V1 seems to be a dramatic leap forward. If reality matches the hype, then this is a cam that produces 1920 x 1080 P: true high def. Progressive no less.

Alas, like most of Sony's cams, the V1 looks like a toy. Can ypu imagine showing up for a professional shoot with what looks like a handy cam?

So my urge is to sell my Z1 and purchase an XL2, and see what the state of HDV is in a couple of years. Everybody I've talked to thinks I;m crazy.

Am I?

Believe it or not I;ve been losing sleep over this the last two weeks :-)

Welcome to DVinfo James! Personally I think Z1 can produce terrific standard definition footage if you downconvert from HDV. I can't tell you what camera is right though, you have to decide that for yourself. However, realize that 1440x1080 is the HDV standard and not 1920x1080. If you bought a V1 you would still be getting 1440x1080. Same for Canon's HDV cameras.

I'm very happy with my Z1 and don't plan to trade it anytime soon. However I don't need to impress anyone with the size of my camera; if that's a big concern, get a mattebox, shoulder rest and some other goodies and put them on your Z1 :-)

Yup, your Crazy! Enough said!

Well, not really. The Z1 is an excellant camera with all the potential you need to do whatever you want. I have an XL2, and I love it, but will sell it to go HD. I will be getting an XLH1, not a Z1, but not because I think that the Canon is "SOOO" much better, it is that I have all kinds of accessories for the XL series. I want to be able to changes lenses etc..

I have friends who have the Sony High Def cameras and they make beautiful footage. If you do really have one, keep it, and learn to use it! High Def is a format and the camera is truely High Def. Don't like 1080i, get used to it, deinterlace. Few cameras do 1080p, and most will not catch up for a long time. Wait for a while, make money with your Z1 and buy when the market has settled somewhat. If you can't shoot good video with the Z1, you can't do it period.

This is from a XL2 and XL1s owner, so please take my word that the Z1 is great!

Mike

Anything over 576 lines of vertical resolution is considered HD, James. The Z1 is one of the best, TRUE HDV and low-cost HD cameras out there. There's nothing wrong with Interlace, but the V1 does 24p and 30p, along with 60i, and compared to the Z1, it's nearly identical in features with some better image controls and more.

Otherwise, expect to spend a lot of money to buy a 1080p camera (the F350 XDCAM HD costs around $15,000 without a lens).

heath

James,

Are you crazy? I don't think so. You raise valid points. Whether you should sell the Z1 and get an XL2, in that perspective I would agree with others that you are crazy to even consider that. You would be downgrading from HDV to SD. Somewhat similar to sell a Ferrari or Lamborghini and get a cheap Chevy/Daewoo. I mean both do the job in getting you from A to B, but the ride is quite different in terms of enjoyment and comfort.

You mention that the V1 looks like a toy and you want to look professional. In that case, have you considered the Sony 350 XDCAM HD? From a budget point of view, be prepared however to spend upwards of $ 40K for a complete setup, including lens, batteries, charger, tripod, etc.

Another point, how do you deliver HD material? Do your clients have HD-DVD or Blue-Ray, or do you still use SD-DVD? If the latter, I would just keep the Z1 and await the arrival of some HD delivery format and players with your clients.

BTW, 1440x1080 with a PAR of 1.333 gives 1920x1080.

Afraid so, James. Not only is 1440x1080 actual high definition, but so is 1280x720, which is the other flavor of HDV. In fact, the Advanced Television Systems Committee defines high definition as "any format with a higher definition than SDTV," but it's generally accepted that HDTV starts at 720.

Edit: Oops, Heath beat me to it while I was typing: "Anything over 576 lines of vertical resolution is considered HD."

Not sure that I would equate the Z1 with a Ferrari, but I'm positive that I would not equate the XL2 with a Daewoo! The XL2 is an outstanding camera, and for SD it may indeed be the Farrari.

You said he made some valid points, which ones were they?

Mike

Thanks everybody, for the rapid responses. What an amazing board this is.

The above statement I do not understand. PAR of 1.333? Forgive my ignorance.

Indeed, lack of delivery media is an issue. And thats clouded my decision, since I cannot even begin to estimate, or downright guess, when affordable bluewave burners will be available. I remember a few short years ago when Pioneer released the first sub-thousand dollar dvd burner and that changed everything for us lower end producers.

So for the foreseeable future DVD's are with us, and hence standard def, and by extension the XL2 would be the best bet (or so my logic has it).

Back to the V1... Sony says quite clearly that their cam does full 1920 x 1080 P.

Quote: Sensor are processed in the progressive domain as 1920 x 1080p signals, allowing high-resolution progressive footage to be captured.

Here is the link: http://bssc.sel.sony.com/Broadcastan...ogressive.html

If so that is a radical leap forward, is it not?

That, my friends, excites me. Yep, looks like I;m a geek :-)

1. SD is not dead yet. It will disappear, but that will take a couple of years, since the delivery format for HDV is still rather unclear.
2. HDV without a delivery format makes downconverting to SD almost necessary , thus you may question why not get a good/great SD camera like the XL2.

The drawback for the last action however, is that you throw away future capabilities for HDV.

James,

1440x1080 pixels, which are not square but rectangular will look like 1920x1080 pixels. This is called the Pixel Aspect Ratio, PAR. In old SD terms it is the same. Talking PAL, SD-DV is 720x576 pixels. To display 4:3 or 16:9 formats different PAR's are used to ensure that the display is correctly formatted.

My point exactly!! And if you're going to distribute high def, it makes sense to produce with the best standard def cam, and in my humble opinion, the XL2 is far superior to the Z1.

Another noob question: about interlacing. Seems to me that the procedure of interlacing simply removes on of the fields, and that would cut my resolution in half. Am I right?

Thanks for indulging my relentlessly noobish questions. I deeply apreciate everybodies contributions :-)

If I'm delivering in SD, I'll still shoot, capture and edit in HDV, then do a down-convert in my NLE to SD for delivery. It's been proven time and time again to be better than originating in SD (or down-converting from camera or VTR to NLE). Later down the road, I can deliver an HD copy to the clients and make some more money. So to me, shooting in SD doesn't make sense if I can shoot in HDV, edit in HDV, deliver now in DV/SD (with better quality because of the 4.5 times the resolution) and then make more money later with an HD delivery.

PAR is all about the Pixel Aspect Ratio. There's a lot of math involved, which is tough to understand, to be honest. Check out VASST's HDV book which explains a lot.

Also, Adam Wilt explains things nicely, too, and not just in HDV.

heath

ps-And no sweat one your newbie questions.

Ah. I see. now, any idea how i would ensure that I am outputting this? What setting would I use? I edit in Premier Pro 2 and also Final cut

That is significant, being able to bump up to 1920 x 1080.

In my opinion the XL2 may be the best of the SD cameras. But, downresed Z1 footage, (shot in HD, then downressed) ia simply beautiful.

Unless you need the other options available on the XL series, lenses, adaptors, etc., stay with the Z1.

Mike

A lot of that happens in the display, but you don't need to worry about it in the NLE. I've been cutting native HDV in Final Cut Pro for almost two years now.

heath

You are correct if you just throw away one field and duplicate the remaining one. However, in some applications there are algorithms to minimize this effect by interpolating between the two fields and depending on the quality of the algorithm used, you may lose less than 50%, but you never end up with 100%. Often deinterlacing leads to noticeably softer images.

You're right, Mike. I'm sold! Going to keep my Z1. Thanks to everybody for taking the time to set me right :-)

What a board... within ten minutes of my originating this thread I had all the answers I needed. Simply amazing.

Thanks everybody.

James,

If you weren't convinced, I was going to do a search to find an example Douglas Spotted Eagle uses of SD vs. HDV-down-converted-to-SD clips. They involve a digital push-in; the SD footage was pixelated; the HDV-to-SD footage was only very slightly pixelated. This is because there are over 300,000 pixels in SD-originated footage and around 1.5 million pixels in 1080i HDV-originated footage.

Glad you're here!

heath

See my illustrations on this page:

http://www.dvinfo.net/canonxlh1/articles/article06.php

They pretty much explain PAR at a glance.

Thanks, Chris. I'll link to that from now on.

hwm

Spot's book is so much better because it goes into wonderful detail, but my illustrations are more... immediate.

Ha ha, of course. Hey Chris, maybe we should move this to General HDV discussion or the Z1 discussion threads?

heath

Heath, a slight technical correction here. The F350 is the more expensive of the two and the body only price is just under $25K, the F330 is the $15K body.

Also, the sensors on the Z1 are only 960 horizontal and get pixel shifted to 1440 which would then be elongated with PAR to form a 1920X1080 image.

The sensors on the F330/F350 are native 1440 horizontal and no pixel shifting is involved, only the standard PAR correction to form 1920X1080.

When you get up in the really big dollar cameras such as the HDC-1500, you get native 1920 horizontal sensors and true 60P capability. But then you're looking at $90K for just the body.

Nonetheless, the Z1 does produce beautiful video and I'm glad James has decided to keep his camera.

-gb-

So where does that leave the 720p cams? A friend of mine has a JVC that records 720p. How do they go from 720 lines to 1920 x 1080?

They don't! But, it is progressive at 720p. That is one of the two main current platforms. You have 720 which is always progressive, as far as I know, and you have 1080 which can be progressive or interlaced.


Mike

Oh really? So then *cough cough* his cam is lower resolution than mine? The 720p cams have *cough cough* lower resolutoin than the Z1's?

720p is very popular, as it is able to shot motion better. It does not suffer from interlacing artifacts, like 1080i would. 1080p would not suffer from them either, but is newer and not in as many cameras. When it is, 720p will probably fade into the sunset, at least for TV I think. It will still be fine for movies and transfer to film.

As far as higher resolution formats, RED etc. they are mostly for film replacement, as 1080i or 1080p will be all that be be displayed on TV. And, that will remain the new standard for many many years to come. It is just much too expensive for goverments to change it again soon. Thank goodness for that too!


Mike

Yes, but don't cough to loudly, as his is progressive and yours is interlaced! One frame of yours contains only half of the info, and it would take two of yours for a complete frame, thus interlacing, and its artifacts. His captures a full frame each time, and that has advantages. When you get 1080p then you can cough, loudly!

Mike

Should you not have said: One FIELD of yours contains only half of the info, and it would take TWO FIELDS of yours for a complete frame.....

They don't, James. When recording in the 720P format, the horizontal resolution is 1280 as opposed to 1920. That's the 16:9 ratio.

1280x720P vs. 1920X1080I. As you can tell, it's all about compromise. You can have a progressive image at a lower resolution or an interlaced image at higher resolution.

Of course you can turn a 1280X720 image into 1920X1080 but it's going to be an uprezzed image and will theoretically look inferior to a native 1920X1080 image. I say theoretically because as we've seen around here numerous (get it - numerous) times, numbers don't tell the whole story.

All in all, I'd say we have some darn nice tools for image creation available these days.

-gb-

I stand corrected!

Mike

I believe what they are saying is that the image is internally processed by the camera at 1920x1080. But when you record to tape, it will be squeezed to 1440x1080. The playback device then understands to stretch the image back to 1920x1080.

Something similar is done on the XL2 in widescreen mode. The CCD's use a 960x480 array, but 720x480 is written to tape, which is anamorphic 16:9 standard definition.

Look at the page about the CMOS sensor on that same site: http://bssc.sel.sony.com/Broadcastan...U/devices.html Here you will see that the sensors have 960x1080 effective pixels. The EIP chip interpolates the data from the chips to create a 1920x1080 progressive image. Then it's scaled down to a 1440x1080 4:2:2 interlaced image which is available through the analog component video jacks. Finally it undergoes the HDV compression process before being written to tape.

Never mind--this I don't get.

Mike

See the following: http://dvinfo.net/canonxl2/articles/article06.php

Don't confuse the resolution of the image sensors with the format of the data written to tape, they are frequently different! All standard definition DV is recorded as 720x480, regardless of the number of pixels used to capture it. Likewise, 1080i HDV is always 1440x1080 to tape.

exactly, which makes the fact that a 1920x1080 signal exist somewhere before it's recorded pretty much irrelevant. more or less a marketing 'lie' rather than anything else.

It isn't a lie. Pixel shift with non-square pixels makes it go to 1920x1080. Does the HVX200 with its 960x540 sensor make it a 'marketing lie,' as well, since it goes to 960x720 and 1280x1080?

heath