HD For Indies

OK, this one is here and nowhere else: Dale McCready, a reader Way Down Under, sent this in, and I'm publishing it with his permission. He's a professional DoP, working in New Zealand, and he got to play with, walk around, and shoot with a Panasonic HVX200 out and about outdoors, and not in one of those staged, caged, models-in-a-bullpen tradeshow deals.

Keep in mind, this was a pre-production prototype. He talks very specifically about some things didn't work, but that is to be expected from unfinished product.

His report:

Hey Mike,

Well you already have most of the specs on the HVX, I'm really only able to chime in on my personal observations about it.
In New Zealand I was lucky enough to be shown the Varicam about 2 years ago, and noted it for use at a later date. This year I shot a series called Maddigan's Quest for the BBC and Channel 9 Australia. A fantasy, visual effectsy teen series set in a future after the great flood etc, etc. (www.maddigansquest.com).

I enjoyed the Varicam and forged a good relationship with Panasonic, and have helped them push the adoption of the Varicam here in a pretty much entrenched Sony market. Sony here, as a market leader, does nothing to approach DP's and help them embrace these new tools.

Panasonic asked me if I would be interested in checking out the HVX and last week I got to see the one model that's to be shared between Australia and New Zealand. I was very keen, as it's something that I've been keeping an eye on.

So I picked it up and went to a friendly lighting hire company and set it up on a chart, dolly, and handheld inside and outside.

Now this model was a pre-production model, so there were some things I couldn't check out. But anyway:

Quite a heavy camera body, menu buttons difficult to press down onto, but looked like something that could easily be improved upon in a release model. Good location of most of the buttons/switches. Quite user configurable also with 3 user buttons that can be assigned a number of options.

Zoom...nice and smooth, the rocker control on the side handgrip was good, but most of the weight hangs sideways off the right hand which can make it a little uncomfortable. Bigger cameras allow the hand to cup a little more to lift the weight, but the HVX doesn't allow this. The left hand then is needed to hold it up a lot then, and means the left hand is not quite as able to shift between all the buttons/focus and iris as it could be. I think there will be a big secondary market for accessories to help in this area. Personally I like a heavier camera, it has more heft and feels solid. I thought on first glance that the body looked like a Tonka version of the DVX100. I ended up bracing it against my chest most of the time when handheld.

Focus was good, although a little slow to react. I'm hoping that they will add user adjustable speed control of the AF, similar to the Sony HDV cameras, which is a useful feature. Like the DVX100 it has a readout of the focus position and this can be changed between feet, metres and an arbitrary unit measurement. There is also a zoom for the viewfinder to get a quick check of the center portion of the image.

The iris control is a good size and moves nicely. A nice extra iris function that can be enabled when in AF mode, one of the user buttons can switch the focus wheel to control the iris, giving much finer control.

One thing that is way better than the Sony HDV cameras is the zebra. It's adjustable right up and down the scale on both zebras. Often with tape I set a low mid tone zebra control, and then use the high one just for clipping. The HVX in cine gamma mode seems to like midtone right down around 50-55 IRE and it's no trouble to set it here. The camera does shoot up over 100IRE, the waveform shows the knee working (when set high) at around 106.

The monitor is great at night, but very difficult to see in bright sunlight. It is a partially squeezed anamorphic image on a 4:3 screen so you see the whole frame with a little squash. the extra space above and below the image holds useful menu info, which nicely doesn't just cover everything up. The eyepiece finder is a bit low res, but I think I would set this up purely as an exposure reference and not worry about focus through it.

Like the DVX there is a dial for user settings (6) which is great, and through the scene file menu, which has a good number of editable parameters, you can set up a few different looks. More can also be loaded through the SD card reader .(lots of I/O on this model) Next to this and under the P2 area are the pots for sound. A great place to put them, I doubt they could ever knocked there.

So.... The camera I was using didn't seem to work completely. I had no firewire, and I didn't trust that the 720 mode was working properly, but I think it was occasionally switching into 480 mode rather than 720. Just a pre-release bug, but nice reassurance that the camera is natively 1080 which worked perfectly. So I didn't test any variable frame rates, and mainly decided to concentrate on the 1080P modes.

Thanks for your explanation of the native mode where the flagged frames only are put to the card, I could not make sense of that from the manual at all.

In 1080 mode the camera looked amazing! shot a Macbeth chart which looked excellent. A little fringing from the lens, but to be expected really considering the cost of the camera and it's size. But honestly the 1080 pictures are stunning. Focus becomes quite critical with 1080 I found, so it's worth being very deliberate with setting it, because it can look kinda-sorta sharp in the finder but be well soft when you look at it full frame.

I shot some motion tests, and was impressed. Nothing unexpected really. 24P is exactly that. Simple. There is an shutter with incrementally adjustable angles, and this can be switched between degrees or percentages depending upon whether you set the camera menus to film or video modes. Unlike the Varicam the slowest setting is 180 or a 48th so you can't get any extra light or motion effects like on the Varicam with the shutter switched off. One thing that I think the 60Hz version of this camera should fix is an allowance for 172.8 degrees in the shutter. When shooting 24P in 50Hz countries it's the ideal setting to reduce lighting flicker, but the camera only goes to 173 or 172.5 degrees. Just a way to make more customers happy.

There is word that the 50Hz version of the camera may not be able to do 24P because of issues related to sound. But Panasonic are apparently considering the option of including 24P as well as 25P but with no sound on 24 and I think they should. In territories that are 50Hz and shooting 24P, mostly the end product would be ending up on film, so generally a sound recordist would be used. A compromise, but I really hope that Panasonic do this, it will make a lot of people happy that they tried to give as many options to customers as they can.

In the evening I decided to go for a walk. I have to say that it was a lovely day and I popped the nano in my pocket, chucked some P2 in my bag and a couple of batteries (it barely uses them!) and walked toward the city.

Sunset was amazing on this camera, and the choices of look available on the camera really came alive. The flatter cine mode was great, and would be the best for grading later, but I found the crunchier cine mode very appealing also. I really loved setting the camera slightly blue/green, crushing the blacks a little, and desturating it too. Very grungy-urban-indie-thriller-relationship-drama. I thought that a lot of people would love the amount of creativity that the can put in to their shots, pre-grading them if they wanted. The desaturated look had so little noise on 1080 but so much detail, and concrete buildings, plasterwork and graffiti looked amazing.

Colours were great on the cine settings and I tried to really blast the lens with sunlight when I could and looked a lot of out of focus shots also, pulling into macro mode to check the gradation. There is a little quantizing visible, but only on the transitions between the most saturated colourful flares of the sun against darker colours, and subtle salmon and mostly grey graduated skies were extremely smooth.

The lens tends to flare with a bit of a vertical smear, but only when the lens is pointed directly at the very brightest of sources. Most car headlights didn't do it at all.

I filled up the P2 very quickly wandering around, but because they record instantly there was no need to pre-roll. I couldn't turn the beep on this pre-release model, but it is really needed. There is just no noise from this camera at all to tell you it's recording. None.

The hot-swap P2 thing was great. I had issues getting the files out of the camera because of the pre-release thing again and mac drivers and so mostly plugged in via the include component cable to watch my shots back off the camera on a 1080 analog input dell monitor. WOW and YUM. superb results once you look back at the shots. The viewfinder unfortunately is way out-gunned by the camera, but at least you'll always be pleasantly surprised when you watch your rushes back.

My walk around the city in the evening was perhaps one of the more enjoyable shoots I've done for a while, and reminded me of wandering with a good stills camera. The HVX is flexible enough, and the shots amazing enough to feel that you can be really creative. The ethereal nature of recording straight to P2 means that you can be a little more experimental and can always delete clips if you want, so I found myself editing the shots a little as I went, only rolling when the moment was right and cutting as soon as I felt the moment was over.

I walked down some pretty dark streets and tried the gain. 3db and 6db just looked kinda grainy but not intrusive, but 12db was pretty over the top. But again when I looked at the playback of shots I was very surprised just how much detail in the shadows was there that I assumed from the viewfinder was gone so I didn't need as much gain as I thought. I measured the camera at around 500ASA if you're into that sort of thing.

So, there it is. My little walkabout. I really want to get one of these cameras, I think it's a great, and is sure to really enable people to go out and tell stories and lift them in terms of visual quality. It's great to walk around with a tiny, silent camera with shots that could be printed to 35mm easily. People on the street barely notice that you are shooting with it. I came to the conclusion very quickly that I'd be more than happy to shoot a short film or feature on the HVX, in fact I hope to soon. It's not a Varicam, and doesn't match the sharpness of the big cameras in terms of lenses, but for the cost and size, I've never seen anything like this.

Dale


Thanks Dale! Not just for the report, but also for allowing me to run it.

Anybody else got a chance to play with one? Share it! Contact me at mike at hdforindies dot com.

-mike