25P Fix....ed.
 

Hi All

Just received my V1E back from Sony....Well......

Now I can't see any difference between 25P and 50i. I think we can safely say the "oil paint" effect can now be banished to history. :)

I cannot see any signs of crawling edges or over sharpening. There is a very slight difference between 25P and 50i images, 25P being everso slightly sharper. This could simply be due to different line up of photosites or different chroma-sampling between clips. I am splitting hairs to be honest.

I'll get the camera out tomorrow and get some shots to upload. It's very dark and drizzling with rain here so no shooting outside today.

Cheers

TT

Tony, good to hear it's been fixed, and looking forward to some more comments.

My camera was collected on the 28th of December, so I don't think it'll be back before next week.

GREAT NEWS!

What Sharpness level are you using?

Could you try 5 7 9 to see if the Sharpness differentially affects I vs P?

At 5 most everyone thought my 24P was softer than 60i.

But at 7 30P was seen to be equal to 60i.

If someone will post of video grab(s) of an ISO 12233 or slant edge chart, I'll be happy to evaluate the sharpening, or the difference in sharpening between 24P,30P and 60i, or between different sharpness settings using the Imatest MTF50 spatial frequency test. At any given setting of sharpness, it will state the percent over/undersharpened relative to a standard 2 pixel radius. Another useful result would determine which in-cam sharpness setting equates to zero over/under sharpening.

Quote;
"Now I can't see any difference between 25P and 50i. I think we can safely say the "oil paint" effect can now be banished to history. :)"

With the monitors and other viewing devices, what setups or devices do we need to correctly view the difference between 25P and 50i that the V1-P produces.
Michael.

You need at least a 1920x1080 capable monitor. The very slight differences in sharpness between 25P and 50i would be lost on anything less. The difference would be impossible to see at a typical living room viewing distance even on a massive screen.

We are talking tiny differences that might not even be down to the camera but rather the NLE's handling of 25Psf.

TT

Cheers Steve.

The sharpness was set to 3 for both I and P for my quick test.

I saw the extra sharpness in your P grabs as well. It's something I am hugely worried by as it is barely visible. :) Because of the oil paint effect I've scrutinised the image far more than really necessary.

TT

Tony, I take it that (apart from 25p being "everso slightly sharper") you don't confirm the crawling ants artefacts as a side-effect of the oli-paint/softness cure. Is that right?

Glad to hear all is well now Tony!

Stairstepping!!!!.
 

Cheers Ken!

Might have spoken too soon!

For those that are interested check out the grab. Take a close look at the right hand swan and the stalks of grass in front of it. There is some stairstepping of those blades of grass.

The camera was left with the default sharpness of 7 (see the halo round the Swan this is why I prefer much lower. you really only notice the steps when close to the screen but from a viewing distance the image looks "very HD." Unbelievably sharp, almost too sharp for my eyes!

Unfortunately I don't have any more progressive footage shot with a lower sharpness setting.

I did a quick export to 1280x720P and the stair steps are no longer visible.

Question for those that know more about the HDV format than me,

Is this a limitation of the format that is showing up in this grab? perhaps the dreaded 4:2:0. But why are these jaggies not seen in 50i?

Am I worrying too much? At a normal viewing distance the jaggies are not visible and the image looks crisply sharp.

Anyone like to comment?

TT

If a TV made an utter hash of de-interlacing 25Psf (25P in 50i) then I could see these jaggies being quite visible.

Hi Tony, it is nice to see you got everything just as expected, this image does look good apart from the strange "interlacing effect" spotted by you (oh my god, you really look into so much detail), I wonder it is because the glass is too thin and waving in front of white subject, will this make too much challenge for HDV encoding ?

Or is it caused by the rolling shutter recently mentioned by other thread ? I trust you didn't go with high speed shutter.

Or perhaps the high sharpness setting has splited the thin glass into pieces (so avoid default sharpness setting).

Or the 45 degree CMOS has done anything to this ?

I am sure you can do more test in coming days. But this oil-free image does put Sony back to the track :D.

Strange, Tony. There seems to be a lack of details in the overall image, but that's probably because I just checked out some Red frames... These "steps" you're talking about look a little bit "interlaced", but that's probably me. Have you checked the way you capture ? Do US users have this problem with 24P ?

Thanks for this frame grab, looking forward to discovering 25P footage !

Kristin

Tony, how obvious is the stairstepping on moving video? I don't trust frame grabs as they tend to introduce many artifacts not visible in the moving video.

I agree with you about the default "7" sharpness. It is exceedingly sharp, but can introduce those halos around certain objects. Many times, depending upon the scene, you won't see it at all, but at other times it's there. But I have to admit I love that super-sharp look....it's kind of what HD is all about. I may try a setting of '5' and see how that looks, but I seem to recall that I could still see some halos around wires against a sky when I was experimenting with my FX7 @ a setting of 5.

Hey Tony, I could be wrong here and only one way to see for sure but
the grass that you describe could actually be the seed stalks for that
particular grass type... the blade that runs across the neck for sure looks
at first to be stair'd but again, to me it looks like a seed stalk...

You'd have to go out into the marsh and look at the grass, but it is that time
of year for grass to seed ... :-)

If indeed those are seed stalks then I'd say your cam is doing a fantastic job of detail.. :-)

The seed stalk I'm talking about is not a grass blade, but a long straw that
comes out around the grass into the air and it has the seeds on the stalk.

Unfortunately it isn't seeds. I have a close up and they are just blades of grass.

I wonder if 24P users notice any artefacts like this?

50i looks much better in my opinion. All the fine detail has lovely anti-aliased edges in 50i.

Anyone got any ideas?

Cheers

TT

Tony,

would it be a solution to shoot in 50i then deinterlace to make it progressive? How would that compare to 25p shots? Or am talking something stupid here?

Tony, it seems like when the blade of glass is not vertically straight-up got the most obvious "interlaced effect", was it very windy when you took the shoot ?

I am asking this bcs I realise that not only those few blade of glass in front of the swam got those effect, if you look closely to any area of the green, you can see those minor horizontal lines as well, not obvious bcs it is mostly green.

In this case I don't think it is the problem of the encoding.

Perhaps you can use the camcorder to take few pictures, see it gets the same issue or not.

Or perhaps your tape is not clean ? sound silly, sorry if i am stupid again.

Yes -- frame grabs add a bunch of variables. It's what folks see on a high-quality monitor that count.

An audience is going to the overall detail -- they are not looking for halos. This a nutty way to judge video. There's nothing wrong with your V1E. I wouldn't expect P to look exactly like I.

The fact is the stair-stepping is aliasing. And, yes it should be worse on diagonals. To eliminate it -- one would need to lower overall detail. Not a good choice!

Sony uses a setting of "5" for Cinema. I too want a detailed look so I wouldn't go lower than "5."

Well, it seems to me more like post-deinterlacing artefacts. I have no idea how on earth it appears in a progressively shot video, but when I feed and interlaced material to my 1920x1200 LCD through component and stop it, I'm able to spot a couple of edges with tiny spots of stairstepping like this; the same edges are stairstepped all-along in the original interlaced video, played back without any deinterlacing through DVI.

Tony, does it happen only in a recorded material, or can you spot it when the camera is connected live to a monitor as well, ie. before going to tape?

Steve, IMHO aliasing is more common with nearly horizontal, and not vertical, edges - just like the top TV set edge, heavily aliased in a picture posted in another thread on post-cure status of 25p...

I have to respectfully disagree on a couple of points.

I think the halos are a matter of personal preference, mine is to reduce them where possible. The aliased edges on fine detail is another matter. I simply don't understand why interlaced should produce a beautiful anti-aliased image and progressive produce an over sharpened image with aliased fine detail.

I personally would expect P to be near identical to I. Could you explain why you believe this not to be the case? Why does P footage have the aliasing while I footage does not?

Piotr

You have to be careful when monitoring on a 1920x1200 screen as that will induce stair steps if the screen changes the aspect ratio of the video. I don't have a way of monitoring live at native aspect ratio unfortunately so will not comment on live output.

Anyway, I'll do a bit more fiddling but am coming to the end of my time off. :(

Cheers

TT

Yes, they shouldn't be the same, but shouldn't P look better then I ? In term of clean & sharp resolution ?

Tony, my monitor has a capability to maintain the correct aspect ratio, so I'm always displaying at 1920x1080. So far, I never spotted stairstepping other than those post-deinterlace artefacts (should be called jagged edges, really).

In a word no!

Why?

Have you seen the difference between progressive and interlaced footage on a V1e?

TT

It's never made logical sense to me that a cam said to be natively progressive would use the same native progressive sensor in a model that only supported interlaced output, the FX7. I think we've reached the point through semantics where you can call something anything.

Add to it the 25p artefacts, and the original suspicion of the progressive being obtained through some internal deinterlacing returns:)

Poitr

Bad news I'm afraid. I have reshot my original test clip and the oil paint effect is still there along with over edgy lines. My original test clips didn't have enough high frequency detail to clearly show the effect hence my misplaced optimism. In a direct comparison between 25P and 50i the 25P material looks terrible. 50i never falls apart no matter what is filmed.

I am sorry for posting duff information before I had chance to fully test out the camera. I am hoping Sony just forgot to upgrade my camera by mistake.

Anyway my dealer is on the case....again. I am really impressed with their attitude now they are about to kick some a$$.

When you get your camera back could you do some tests please?

Sorry for posting duff info at the start of this thread...

TT

Tony,

I'm so sorry to hear this. Of course I'll do my tests as soon as I get the camera back, but I must admit I dislike all this more and more. Could you please drop me an e-mail with the information who your dealer is in the UK?

Thanks

Piotr

This was my original concern as well, why output as I if P is the native capture design.. but there are threads saying it is because HDV doesn't support P and Sony doesn't want to make incompatible format just like Canon did it 25f in XH-A1. I don't know this is the truth or not but any claim can have it's own very valid reason...

Yes, such "internal deinterlacing" does look obvious in Tony's screengrab, almost everywhere if you look carefully to the green field in the picture.

Tony, perhaps my initial suspicion is right, V1 is an overpriced FX7 with few more menu option plus a 90% good Progressive output (at least for PAL we live with). But it's 50i is really superb. I don't do progressive output so I won't have so much concern about it but if I haven't bought A1, I will stick to FX7 bcs no worth to pay couple hundreds pounds just for few more menu option.

Just my silly stupid opinion.

Hi friend, you have nothing to sorry for, I think Sony has to start listen to it's loyal customers like you and many of us.

And what you said might be correct too that they forgot to fix your camcorder before returning to you. I have similar experience dealing with Sony service center in Malaysia, my camcorder was like a ball being kick around few times before they really fixed the problem which is a month after few iterations.

Tony, now I'm not saying you should do this, but can you simple return the camcorder for a refund? Perhaps it might be worth waiting a few weeks waiting for cameras to come off the production line that have all the kinks worked out. Just a thought. I know I don't like the idea of sending and re-sending a product to the manufacturer to get a problem fixed if the return option is on the table.

Regardless, hope you get everything squared away. The V1 looks like a really cool cam, its a shame that PAL users are having problems :(

Let us know how it goes Tony and Piotr.

I hope this gets sorted for us PAL users. I really was hoping to add a V1E to my arsenal.

I just have sent my cam back by the courier two days ago. This thread kinda scares me again after some relief...

Could we just demand to receive a normal working V1U replace instead of this haunted V1E?
I for one don't give a fig whether its E or U. 24p instead of 25p, so what? No eye can see the difference (unless branded with oil paint). And there is an additional 30p as well...

Any thoughts?

The situation is not good at all.

As far as a refund, yes my dealer promised me that if the firmware fix was no good then I could have a full refund. But then what would I purchase? I chose the V1 over the A1 because for me it is the better camera so if I get a refund I will end up with a second choice camera. All I want is for Sony to pull their finder out and provide the camera that their marketing suggested we were getting. In fact what my dealer thought he was selling as well. They are not pleased by all accounts either.

I would still like to hear an answer as to why progressive footage should be different to interlace footage given the camera is actually a progressive camera?

Sorry for not checking the camera out before jumping in to print. It won't happen again.

Let's hope some technician with a new year's day hangover failed to upgrade my unit before sending it back.

One can only hope...

Have a good weekend.

TT

The only benefit to the refund is that it absolutely ensures that you don't get stuck with a lemon of a camera. I was just thinking it might be advantageous to hold on to the money and wait a bit for properly fixed cameras to get to the dealers. It would just suck to have to keep resending the camera, especially if the techs don't see any problems and keep marking it "repaired". Might be less frustrating to earn some interest on that money for a month and then repurchase a properly functioning camera?

Again, regardless of the route you take, hopefully it'll work out for you. If you like your V1 as much as I like my XH A1, I can only imagine how frustrating it must be to have the cam sitting there in ill health :(

My camera was supposed to have the fix but still exhibited the problems you have. When the footage was put through Vegas it did improve versus the output direct through HDMI. I was told it was my TV that was the problem which may have contributed but the clips were not as clear as the 50i, you could even see this in the LCD, not that it is a great evaluation tool but it did emphasise that there was a problem. The clips when viewed on my computer monitor showed the same issues after capture.

Why don\'t ALL of us unfortunate to live in "PAL Land" just cancel our orders, or simply ask for a refund. That would make Sony sit up and pay attention, and hopefully start to take the situation seriously. I personally have cancelled my order and am now looking at an A1.

I think that is a good idea. I am running out of patience with Sony and I don\'t know whether I can ar to wait for Sony to fix it. My other real concern is that there no fix at all and don\'t want to be left with a lemon.

Part of me wishes I chose the XH-A1.

TT

My dealer had nothing good to say about the way Sony had dealt with the issue. I won\'t say any more because it wouldn\'t be fair on the dealer who was having a private conversation with me.

Sony, just give us the same quality in 25P as 50i and we\'ll shut up and be happy.

TT

What is important is whether or not our cameras will show the same flaws as described by Tony and others. I certainly hope they will not, but am already prepared to ask my dealer here for a refund. I\'ll probably wait untill the matter is absolutely cleared and buy another one. Still sticking with Sony, I\'ve been their happy customers for some 30 years now...

Tony, could you please email me who your UK dealer is - I\'d like to buy my next cam in the UK, as the local dealer here said they\'re not going to have a new batch before March, due to many units in stock. Thanks!