Hi Kaku...

I gather from this that the HDV format had difficulty recording fast action with a lot of detail? Was the picture falling apart, or perhaps did it suffer some other form of compression artifacts?

By the way, was wondering if you might have been the guy I met through Audy in Hawaii back in the 1980's. Your name sounds familiar.

Dean, howzit.

I once found your email from an article and sent an email to you but I guess it was old or something and came back failed. Yeah, back in 80's, long time ago.

Probalby HDV would be more useful when each companies give us more format choices to shoot (which means smaller format like JVC GY-HD100). By shooting at 1080/60i, it's beautiful when you are shooting scenaries, close up of the casts, however, trying to shoot like fast or not even that fast mountainbiker passing by and either holding the camera still or following the biker with steadiest panning would introduce mpeg artifacts (like half diameter of the wheels would look like they have really big blocks around them) and lower resolution (I guess by the result of blocky compression). I have many many clips that I experienced this and I did everything I could to avoid this issue including shooting with Glidecam V8, using tripod and so on, but I can't adjust myself and change the shooting style FOR WHAT SONY WANTS TO SELL or HOW THEY WANT TO MANIPULATE THE ENTERTAINMENT CLUTURE (I personally think Sony really abuses the quality of entertainment media like video and music for the products they want to sell, I have many evidences) when honest company like JVC made desicion to go with lower resolution format in HDV to avoid the terrible looking portion of footage (usually only less than a second, but you can see as you get used to it, just like stereophile people can hear the slightest distortion in the recording) and like Panasonic decided to go with P2 that able to shoot higher resolution and frames but currently suffers with price/capacity issues. Sony Japan even advertises HC1 saying it is HD quality, but it is most of the time and it is not fully, that is an exaggerate advertisement. They advertised before that CD sounds better than analog records. Some ways they are, but not every way. They later said that was mistake (after over 20 years) and came back and said we are trying to get the audio fidelity of vinyl records on SACD to satisfy the real audio mania.... and so on.

Talking about HDV format issue, In case of Ken's problem, it is the characteristic of HDV format that it is not suitable for what he wanted to do, but DV format performed better for his needs (that simply HDV is not a better format than DV under that situation nor other situation like mine). I have done many onboard shooting with my mountain bike now and came to the conclusion for HDV that this format is not suitable for sever situations like onboard with small vibration and low frequency vibration (to back this up, I think I should shoot both DV and HDV with the same cam, say HVR-A1 because it is the latest...unless the problem is originated from the optical section, not HDV format). I haven't tried JVC GY-HD100, so please disregard it from this conclusion.

Mr. Kurama/Panasonic was a videographer before he was hired by Panasonic and he said he shot with HVX200 under sever vibrated condition and he reported that DVCPRO HD format does not suffer the same problem.

I guess Canon must have had studied the panning compression issue and vibration issue, but they probably came to the conclusion that XLH1 is going to be used more like film camera instead of video camera, so people wouldn't swing around or mount it on mountainbikes and ATB. XLH1 can capture scenaries beautifully, taking advantage on the 1080i format the best they can.

Please don't forget that my application is very niche, probably does not apply to many situation, but even in regular situation, you might run into the similar problem because it does in its extreme situations like mine and Ken's. Also, Sony did make many good products, but they are too confident about what they do and in the respect of media culture, their advertisement and sales copies are oftenly way too much wrapped around to make it sound good. I'm not enermy of Sony, I would give my points to them if they come to talk to me. I even talk about these kind of things on my column in VideoAlfa magazine which I really respect because editors let me express my points as long as I have evidences.

Kaku,

Now that you've seen the HVX200 up close, were you able to actually play back the P2 files? It appears from your video that you were only monitoring.

If you were able to see footage played from the camera, how did it look?

Thank you,
Steve

Steven,

On the P2 integration video, the girl was shot by Mr. Nakagaki at the spot (her little stage was located right next to the P2/Power Book stand), took the P2 card out, inserted it to Power Book's PCMCIA, imported to FCP. Maybe I can look for portion of my video (probably in Japanese tho) that shows what he did. There was no trick. Only thing is that Panasonic haven't finalize fine tunning the characteristics on color and picture, so they did not want to give me the files. At 720/60p, it looked lower resolution than 1080i (ofcourse) but when you freeze it, it was taking advantage of progressive format, there was no interlace artifacts (now we can say truely interlace artifacts is bad in this situation because this camera can shoot in 60p :) ). For 1080i, my impression was not that excellent, but I'm used to monitoring 1080i in the true 1080i resolution with my digitally connected AJA HDP/Eizo S2410W combination, and what they had at the P2 integration stand was probalby lower resolution Plazma connected with component, so my normal monitoring enviroment for regular footage like girl's talking would be a lot higher resolution than that. I really have to have the cam in my hand, shoot my regular footage and bring it in to my editing environment.

By the way, Panasonic's new full resolition 65inch plasma display looked awesome.

deleted because I double clicked the post button.

Kaku...

Great to hear from you again.

Thanks for all the detailed practical info on the HVX-200 and the video format it's using.

It's as I suspected when I first heard about HDV. I didn't think the GOP concept would hold up with rapid changes in scenery. It might work well with multi-pass variable rate encoding but with live material and the impossible task of predicting changes in every frame, it's highly likely there would be artifacts.

And sure enough, there is.

For our own work, the Panasonic system would probably be a better choice. I left the newspaper business at the beginning of the year to do video production full time. The fishing show I'm working on often has thrashing fish at the back of some large fishing boat. With the rapidly changing pattern in the wake at the boat's stern, the splashing, and changing colors it's a sure bet HDV would fall apart at the worst possible moment.

We're not going to jump into HD just yet as we're still watching the technology. Also, our cablecast host, Time/Warner, isn't requiring HD programming yet. But we'd like to be ready when it does require the jump.

One of the things I like about Panasonic's camera is the ability to create a record-ahead buffer. We've burned hours of tape on a lot of trips just waiting for that moment. And I've missed a lot of candid comments as well. A lot of our time is spent waiting for a hook-up or other real-life action. Now we can have the camera ready and waiting with a 10-second buffer and just hit "record" when a reel starts to scream or when someone says something meaningful. Just gotta make sure someone's awake to grab the camera when it does!

Aloha,

Hi Dean,

I think I did find your name under the fishing thing.
Fishing in Hawaii must be spectacular that can be appreciated all over the world. If I get asked about any fishing deal by my clients (boradcasters and productions) and I will recommend you to them.

Just imagine what HVX200 can do for the slow motion footage on fishing! Shooting in 720/60P, you can benefit right away even for your SD projects.

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were you able to eject the tape when you were holding hvx200.
if so you could brought spare dv tape and record it. i know it's not HD footage but we can basically see what it's like. such as color tone and others.

Jung,

I was told that the unit was not the finalized version, so I wouldn't have done that. I asked Panasonic if we could copy the files shot at the show but they did not want to provide them, so they don't want to have the files go out. I won't take chances to shoot something wihtout asking even if I were appearing here with psudoname. My name is know enough around the industry in Japan because I've been writing articles for a decade on Video Alfa magazine.

Kaku...

Thanks for the offer of recommendations! We're looking right now at having the show marketed outside of Hawaii. One third of our website's visitors come from California and another third comes from everywhere else.

I thought about the slow-mo feature. True half-speed video. Certain FCP plug-ins should provide even better options, too. And what's also nice about the HVX200 is that it'll shoot DVCPro50 as its SD format, tho not to tape. And that has 4:2:2 color space, which is really helpful in post.

So I'm keeping a close eye on what develops with that camera.

And here's a bit of fishing trivia: The Pacific Blue marlins caught and tagged in Kona, Hawaii often travel as far as the South China Sea and other parts of the Pacific. This was discovered with the aid of electronic "pop up" tags. These large pelagic fish cruise entire oceans!

Dean,

Yes, the "Moments" we can capture, "like a feather in the wing" haha, with 60p in slow motion and not need to deinterlace in freeze and all the goodies. And less compression DVCPRO50, yeah, I want to see how different resolution video holds for HD environment, so my first project would be challenge to mix the different formats that HVX200 can shoot with.

Man, those big fish can travel!! Pixar should make somehting according to that.

Ha ha! I was just listening to that album the other day while doing a bunch of color grading on an upcoming show.

Keep us posted on what you discover along the way. And drop me an email sometime when you get a chance.

Aloha!
Dean Sensui
dean@HawaiiGoesFishing.com