HD For Indies

UPDATED AGAIN THURSDAY - David Newman of Cineform emailed to tell me they've been playing with the cameras for a while, that 24F works as expected (1/48th shutter and 1/24th sec time base), and that the Canon demo footage is KNOWN to have been posted poorly, and is not indicative of what the 24F stuff should look like. So FULLY disregard my comments about bad cadence issues with the 24F footage.

UPDATED THURSDAY: I've been informed that the Canon demo footage is known to be messed up, so my 24F comments below are not a fair assessment of the 24F mode. More as I know more.


Saw a Canon XL H1 in the flesh the other day, as well as the little remote LANC based controller and the remote viewfinder that snaps onto it.

Some thoughts, in random bloggy order (no time to organize, sorry):

The camera itself:

-very very much like the XL1/2 series, just more buttons and ports
-blacked out body looks kewl
-HD-SDI port and reference signal ports and timecode ports make me happy
-weighs about a pound more than the XL2
-putting it on my right shoulder, the thing BADLY wanted to tip inwards - very annoying, had to use waaaay to much hand strength to hold it upright/level. Am I doing something wrong here? Didn't seem correct at all for that to be the case. Keep in mind, I am soooooo not a shooter whatsoever.

Remote viewfinder/controller:
-remote controller (tethered via LANC) is very very cool
-remote viewfinder is very cool, a tiny flat thing that could clip onto the remote controller, and I loved the concept. Too tiny to show full HD by a longshot, but a great idea.
-I think about a $500 option. Worth it for those circumstances

Some thoughts on the camera - it is pretty much EXACTLY like an XL2 at first glance, but black, about a pound heavier, and has more ports, buttons, and whatnot on it.

The Footage:

-a little context - we were watching the footage about 6 or 8 feet wide coming off of an $5000 LCOS 3 chip projector, and I heard the tech guy say 1440x1080 resolution. Was that in reference to the projector or camera? 80% sure that was in reference to the projector. It was definitely an HD projector, and for $5K I was very impressed with it.

-a guy I was sitting next to was not impressed, and kept wincing at all the whites blowing out and saying "dammit" - clearly he was hoping for more from the camera. My guess is he's a shooter.

24F "Frame" Mode.
-my own impression - the 24F mode is not the sh*t, it is sh*t. "The F in 24F stands for FAKE" was spoken in my presence by another attendee. As far as I can tell from watching it in 60i mode, this on footage Canon produced, I didn't like it. I heard somebody in the room say that they shot on 24F mode and recorded to DVCPRO HD in order to edit the footage we were watching together, since FCP doesn't support it, so perhaps doubly compressed. If edited DVCPRO HD and then recompressed to HDV, a LOT of compression cycles. Not how I'd do it at all if that were the case. I have no factual data on that.

It seems, based on the footage I saw, that 24F is very very much akin to the motion characteristics of the CineFrame mode on the Sony. It might be sharper, using some better field blending characteristics, it might be doing some different exposure timing, but watching the 24p footage at 60i (as it is recorded) was not Not NOT a cool thing. The motion was inconsistent in a painfully obvious way to my eye. Steady pans had a gallopy nature to them. Now, if I tried to do reverse telecine, would it look better? That is a question to be answered, and I could not obtain a copy of the footage that I saw in order to analyze it. There is some wiggle room here, though, that maybe it isn't as bad as it seems (because the motion cadence temporal artifacting was baaaaaaaad), maybe it was shot with Advanced Pulldown mode and needs to be played back with regular 3:2 pulldown. But I'd just be AMAZED if the post house that did Canon's work for them blew it and didn't process it right - I can't see a company that large letting something this bad out the doors as representative of their $10K product.

So this isn't an end-all, be all opinion on the camera, but I'm just not impressed with the footage I saw.

There is also a PC based application that lets you remote control everything - VERY cool! Not the greatest UI, HUGE time latency issue (HDV compression/decompression cycle), but the abilty to put it on a boom or jib or crane or whatever and remote control it is VERY NICE!

For NOW, based on my LIMITED experience and exposure seeing footage somebody ELSE shot (and it was Canon's own hired crew!), I'm utterly underwhelmed with the 24F mode as shown on the Canon demo footage - gallopy stuttery motion. Yuck. Now, perhaps removing Advanced Pulldown and playing at 24p would fix that issue, or maybe not. I don't know until I play with it more. So disclaimer disclaimer, not the end-all commentary, but so far:

- I am NOT impressed with 24F as I've seen it used on Canon's own demo footage
- exposure lattitude is dissapointing -especially highlight blowout
- the detail is VERY impressive, however that this captures.
- HDV, especially if this is second or third recompression, was alarming - skies had a dance to them, a compression flicker, ALWAYS.

I'll need to have a DP shoot some stuff and let me play with it in FCP and FTHD to really tell, but the Sony is holding it's own surprisingly well in the light of the JVC and Canon competitors. We'll have to see HVX200 footage to see how it fares.

I later spoke with Toronto based DoP Kevin C.W. Wong, here are some notes I jotted down whilst talking to him about the Canon XL H1. He apparently saw the same exact official Canon demo footage that I did. These aren't quite quotes, but definitely capture 80+% of what he was saying:

A DP's opinion:

XL H1 -

from what he saw, there was a lot of extreme wide shots to show detail - showing off the ability to show detail
-nothing to do for extreme wide shots to manipulate/control the light
-you depend on the camera to get the range
-"I find that the footage there was just unnatural in a way - the highlights were blown out when they shouldn't be"
-"Compariing this to shooting with Z1 or something, which has great lattitude, certainly more than the H1. The latttitude on the Z1 looks more natural, more like what the eye sees. "
-"would like to play with it and mess with the shoulder and knee to see if that was the optimum stuff" (and this was Canon demo footage)
-right off the bat - "this is HDV" - there's no moment of "ooh, what was that shot on?" - it shows itself as video based HDV immediately, no moment of "could that have been shot on film?"
-"the highlights were just popping out"
-"the shot of the bike riding past the bridge - because the highlights were so unnaturally blown out it made the perspective look odd -- because the blown highlights it altered the pereption of depth"

-WHAT DID YOU THINK OF THE 24F - thought it was very noisy,

-watching it on an HDV tape, we wondered if all of it of it had been recompressed too much - there was a logo embossed. Poor processing and re-encoding back to HDV?

-skies were consistently dancing due to compression blocks

-late afternoon heading towards magic hour, it should look great - it didn't

-"the idea of the improvements they have, such as operating the camera - the remote focus/zoom module with LCD attachment is clever"

-"I always run into that problem when shooting on a jib - even Glidecam or Steadicam - have to shoot wide with a set focus because you can't control it readily enough." The remote control and viewfinder will open up new shooting options there.

One of the most common limitations on shooting digital video - it's not always just a budget thing, if you can only get your hands on that digital lens, there's hardly anything you can do, such as put a follow focus on it, etc.

Thanks Kevin! I appreciate you writing in.

Stay tuned as I find out more. So far, not thrilled, but open to improved opinions IF AND ONLY IF:

- the test footage was shot non-optimally, or lighting/camera setting choices were made to let highlights blow out
- the 24F mode stuff I saw requires further processing to look smooth, and at 24p playback would be groovy. But the temporal anomalies were "Woah! What is THAT!?" distracting on the footage I saw being projected 60i on an HD projector.

-mike