Topic: HDV Camcorders?

[buddyboy101]

Any High Def. tapers here?  Is it worth the investment? 

Also, how's editing?  Any harder/easier than SD?

[cleantone]

The image is awesome but I haven't gotten into post yet cause I need to upgrade my mac. I still haven't figured out the proper workflow for downconversion and such. All I know is that what I have shot, played on a 1080 HDTV blows me away with the image quality.

[willndmb]

i have not done any hd work on my mac, but i have gone thru some video clips on how to do it
apple.com has a few as a matter of fact http://www.apple.com/finalcutstudio/quicktours/?quicktours/delivery/qt_dvsp_1_convert_sd_to_hd
it seems really easy, basically just like doing a conversion with sd video

[taper420]

I was right where you are about a month ago and now I'm up to my ears in it. Last thursday I was at work from 8am-1:45am finishing a project that had to be at the dupe house by 9 the next day. So first off.... a HUGE difference in terms of video quality. We do allot of green screen work and it has made the compositing so much quicker and cleaner. Whereas some footage might not even be usable with SD, with HD it just means you need to adjust a little. The SD footage in general looks very blurry and straight lines tend to get a staircase effect when they aren't on a perfect horizontal axis. There's none of that with the HD. I don't think I'll ever go back. We use 1080i cameras (SONY FX-1) which can be deinterlaced from within final cut if you so choose. Still if I had my choice I would have opted for a camera with 720p capabilities too. As for editing, I didn't notice any extra effort on the part of the CPU. The fx-1 uses mini-DV, so it's compressed HDV. This came out with a bitrate of 3.2MB/sec, whereas standard DV is slighter higher than that. Any professional camera using uncompressed HDV will of course be higher. As a sidenote, becareful because allot of the consumer and prosumer "HD" camera don't shoot true HD. Allot of the 720p cameras only shoot 30fps wheres as the 720p specification states it should be 60fps. But either way, it should be editable in most of your higher-end editors like FCP.

The final step is rendering the HD sequence down to SD if you need to. Simply create a new sequence with standard definition settings and drag the HD sequence into it. As an alternative you could export the sequence in HD as a quicktime movie, then drag that whole movie into the new sequence. Both methods will need to render but it's not too long. Then export that sequence to whatever format you choose.

My opinion is it is well worth the investment, but you have to do your research and know what you need it for and then select your best options for what's available in your budget. Or if you don't have a budget you could get something that won't become obsolete (http://red.com/). With congress now pushing for the NTSC to ATSC switch in the next few years, any SD camera you buy surely will be under par in the coming media landscape. Unless of course your doing allot of work for the web.

[cleantone]

I only have an 800mhz G4 so I cannot do any of the above. I have the Z1U and have toyed with the HDV>DV downconversion on the fly off of the camera. I am not happy with the results and again need a new Mac (which is not feasable right now) before I can do anything else. I will be waiting until HD DVDR is reasonabley priced. Until then I will just shoot for fun and build a catalog to work on when I am able. Or I will have other people do the post for anything that is serious and not practice as I have been doing thus far.

[wilsonedits]

unless you have 5,000 plus I would stay with SD..... 

HD cams that record to tape are not really recording HD anyway.... plus most of those uder 5,000 sony HD cams only shoot 60i .... which is more suitable for porn than concerts recording....  under 5,000 pani dvx 24p is where its at

[taper420]

unless you have 5,000 plus I would stay with SD..... 

HD cams that record to tape are not really recording HD anyway.... plus most of those uder 5,000 sony HD cams only shoot 60i .... which is more suitable for porn than concerts recording....  under 5,000 pani dvx 24p is where its at

The HD cams that record to minidv ARE real HD.... but it's compressed. That's like saying Bluray isn't really HD. For a 'real' uncompressed HD cam your looking at $10k+. You can't get a prosumer or consumer model that records uncompressed HD. As far as 60i goes, that easily translates to 30p in an editing program... like I said in my previous post, this is not quite up to the 60p standard that 720p or 1080p uses, yet the difference is negligible. An analogy can be seen comparing video to audio. In audio you have bit-size which is like pixels, and you have sample rate, which is like frame rate. If you ask most of the people around here they'll say the greatest difference comes from increasing your bitsize.... the benifits from increasing sample rate are negligable at best (if they're truly is an increase and not decrease in fidelity, due to timing issues). So I believe the greatest benefit for video is seen when increasing spatial resolution, not temporal resolution. The other thing is, 24p is the biggest piece of crap gimick to hit the prosumer market. How many prosumer's do you know have the money or plans to eventually print their final product to film? If they have the funds to do that, they also have the funds to get a pro camera. All standard NTSC DVD's display content in 30p (or 60i), so it will have to be converted for that eventually. The 24p, which is suppose to look more like film, is actually very flickery, and will make your footage look like it's under a strobe light. It's a step backward in temporal resolution as far as HD shooting is concerned. Even if you were going to shoot video intended to be printed to film, the major houses that do this suggest either using a PAL camera (which shoots 50i/25p), or to just shoot 60i and have it converted. Never shoot 30p when intending for film as the conversion is near to impossible with any quality.

In light of my opinions on HD image quality (even in the lesser consumer models), and what I know is coming in the media landscape, if you plan to spend more than $800, I would highly recommend an HD cam. Even if it's a one chip consumer model, you WILL see a difference, and your purchase won't be completely obsolete in a couple years.

[BayTaynt3d]

For the most part I'm with you on everything, but...

Just for the record, 720p can run at a variety of different framerates and still be "true" HD whatever that means. So 60 fps is not actually a requirement of 720p cause 720p can run at 24p, 30p, and 60p (maybe more) as far as I understand it.

Also for the record, there are PLENTY of (in fact I might argue the majority of) DVDs that are 24p, or are 24p stuffed into a 60i wrapper. So, FWIW, when I watch a movie like that on my 720p native HD display, I am literally watching the movie in PERFECT 24p -- it plays at 24 fps with no pulldown artifacts whatsoever. So, I can easily point to two good reasons (besides filmouts) where someone might want to shoot 24 fps. One is if your distribution is targeted to DVD b/c given the right player and display it can literally and actually be watched in 24 fps. Two is if your distribution is to the Net or Web, in which case you can also easily watch the video in true 24 fps. And, of course, yes you get less temporal resolution, but just as some photographers still use film for the "look" rather than digital, some folks may want the look of motion film, which is 24 fps and everyone is used to it cause that's how film works 'til this day. I so don't buy the "stobing" argument b/c if it was that bad, they wouldn't keep spending billions of dollars per year making 24 fps motion pictures. The real issue with strobing is that you can't shoot 24 fps like you would shoot 30 fps, the DP has to actualy shoot differently, especially slower pans. Also, it is worth mention that there are many, many shows on TV these days that are showing you 24p material wrapped into a 60i signal. Now yes, the tuned eye can see the funky cadence, but the fact remains that there are tons of examples on MTV and eslewhere where they are shooting 24p on DVXs and pumping that out the NTSC pipes, and they do it cause they like the feel of it. Not everyone does, and myself, I only like 24p when it can actually be watched that way, as opposed to watching it with 3:2 pulldown inserted at 60i.

Lastly, I totally agree that HDV is HD, so no arguments there, but I do get a kick out of your analogy that uses audio to make your point. The reason I find that amusing? Is because the HDV codec records audio in a LOSSY format -- yuk! That little fact often gets overlooked, but the reality is shooting standard DV gives you 16/48 lossless audio and HDV gives you lossy.

[nickgregory]

In light of my opinions on HD image quality (even in the lesser consumer models), and what I know is coming in the media landscape, if you plan to spend more than $800, I would highly recommend an HD cam. Even if it's a one chip consumer model, you WILL see a difference, and your purchase won't be completely obsolete in a couple years.

I agree.  I recently bought the HC7 HD Mini DV cam from Sony and the picture is fantastic...much better than what I had seen from SD cameras...and the fact that it records natively in 16:9 format is a huge benefit to me considering my TVs in the house are all widescreen....

[taper420]

For the most part I'm with you on everything, but...

Also for the record, there are PLENTY of (in fact I might argue the majority of) DVDs that are 24p, or are 24p stuffed into a 60i wrapper. So, FWIW, when I watch a movie like that on my 720p native HD display, I am literally watching the movie in PERFECT 24p -- it plays at 24 fps with no pulldown artifacts whatsoever.

It was my understanding that most DVD's were 24p packed into a 60i wrapper with the pulldown. A quick look a wiki shows you're correct... it can be 24 or 30, interlaced or not .... it was mpeg 1 that only allowed 30.

I so don't buy the "stobing" argument b/c if it was that bad, they wouldn't keep spending billions of dollars per year making 24 fps motion pictures. The real issue with strobing is that you can't shoot 24 fps like you would shoot 30 fps, the DP has to actualy shoot differently, especially slower pans.

My argument is this.... the consumer models that record 24p produce the strobing effect.... real film camera's don't and probably high-end video doesn't. So with most consumers lacking the knowledge of an experienced DP, working with consumer 24p cameras can produce lousy results. The people spending billions don't have to worry about using crappy equipment, and they'll have an experienced DP to know how to use that frame-rate for the best footage. They're also using a hidef video to film standard called 2k or 4k and this allows frame-rate adjustment on a continuum like film cameras. Alls I'm saying is, stay away from consumer or prosumer 24p, because in my opinion it looks crappy.

Lastly, I totally agree that HDV is HD, so no arguments there, but I do get a kick out of your analogy that uses audio to make your point. The reason I find that amusing? Is because the HDV codec records audio in a LOSSY format -- yuk! That little fact often gets overlooked, but the reality is shooting standard DV gives you 16/48 lossless audio and HDV gives you lossy.

This was news to me.... I haven't noticed a difference in sound quality, and once imported into FCP it states 48kHz/16bit (which might still be compressed)..... what compression scheme is it using?

[BayTaynt3d]

"HDV audio uses lossy compression (MPEG-1 Layer 2) to reduce the audio bitrate to 384Kbps. DV audio uses uncompressed 16-bit PCM at 1536Kbps."

From here:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HDV

My guess in FCP is that the project audio is set at 16/48 or something, but I don't use FCP. Also, don't get me wrong, at 384K it's probably hard to tell, but the minute you start editing and then recompressing on render I'm not so sure, but I'm betting it's standard to use double sound anyway, so the feed to the camera may be backup for most projects. Lastly, this fact is often obscurded by manufacturers by listing in their tech specs something like this:

Audio: 16/48 and 384 Kbps

What they really should say is that when shooting in HDV mode, it's 384, and when shooting in DV mode (which many HD cams can also do), then it uses 16/48.

[wilsonedits]

unless you have 5,000 plus I would stay with SD..... 

. The 24p, which is suppose to look more like film, is actually very flickery, and will make your footage look like it's under a strobe light. It's a step backward in temporal resolution as far as HD shooting is concerned. Even if you were going to shoot video intended to be printed to film, the major houses that do this suggest either using a PAL camera (which shoots 50i/25p), or to just shoot 60i and have it converted. Never shoot 30p when intending for film as the conversion is near to impossible with any quality.

In light of my opinions on HD image quality (even in the lesser consumer models), and what I know is coming in the media landscape, if you plan to spend more than $800, I would highly recommend an HD cam. Even if it's a one chip consumer model, you WILL see a difference, and your purchase won't be completely obsolete in a couple years.

it is flickery and jutter¥ if your using a cam that doesn't do true 24p like the dvx....  I have used several cameras sony fx1 / sonya1u and i really just don't like the look of anything thats not 24p.... I  like the look of SD 24p verse HD 60i....

here is a clip that is a good example of 24p v 60i... two dvx's in 24p and then the camera on the right that I barely use (just a couple of times at the end is a sony in regular 60i... just looks out of place... the colors and movement you get with the 24p don't even compare to the cheap look you get with 60i ... thats just my opnion but then again look at most concert dvds out... most of the low budget are all shot with the dvx in 24p

http://web.mac.com/wilsondef/iWeb/Site/+++++.html

[kuuan]

SD good to edit,

HD requires much better PC, HD TV asf:
HDV difficult to edit, need good PC
AVDHC no software to edit yet