HD For Indies

A FEW MORE THOUGHTS THE NEXT MORNING, and again, this is ALL PRELIMINARY, disclaimer disclaimer, without true side by side tests, etc.

The lesser compression artifacts (it is still noisy, however) on the HVX200 puts the COMPRESSION in a different class than the HDV based cameras, not the overall quality.

Thinking about the three mid-price cameras - the HVX200, the GY-HD100U, the XL H1 - they are roughly the same price in actual, usable configuration - the JVC lists for $6K, the Panasonic is $8-$10K or more depending on how many P2 cards you want and can live with (or without), the Canon lists for $10K. (Once the FireWire or P2 recording devices comes out for HVX, the price config will change for those willing to put up with big rotating disks).

If you gave all three manufacturers the same pile of parts to choose from with a variety of different encoders, recording media, imaging chips, lenses, body styles, etc....you'd get about what we have here - three cameras where the emphasis was put in different places. My PRELIMINARY gut read at this point -

Panasonic put their money into the P2 part of it and the color reproduction. In order to do this, they added to those piles and took away from the imaging chip pile to meet their price point. (More on that - they went with lower res on chips to get better low light and less noisy than higher res chip would have yielded, all things being equal). Not to say AT ALL that the imaging chips are bad, just that in the overall balance of things, as compared to the others, that's my gut read - the P2 tech and nice compression technology was where they put their effort.

JVC put their money into interchangeable lenses, true 24p, and a nice looking image. The color reproduction could be a LITTLE nicer, the imaging resoution could be 1080i or 1080p instead of 720p, the frame rate could have been higher with some different technology (720p24 or 720p30, 720p60 comes out the analog component only). The standard lens is nice but could be nicer, but obviously that would push up the price point. It's a nicely balanced solution - a good bit of each.

Canon seems to have put their money/effort/time into 1080i instead of 720p imaging chips, a good codec, 24F technology (note NOT 24p), HD-SDI output, nice pro controls (full color matrix) and interchangeable lenses. The color reproduction is highly tweakable, and we didn't mess with it as much as it could have been. What we saw was good but not phenomenal - the way we had it set up, it was a like Kodachrome colorimetry. To fully explore the matrix options for best results would be a whooooole other test series to run, and we didn't have time - like a week in and of itself.

I don't know which color reproduction I like best yet, I think probably the Panasonic but that's a VERY PRELIMINARY gut read, NOT based on side by side comparisons enough. But the Panasonic "just feels good," and as a post guy, I like the idea that I wouldn't have to muck around much with the colors in post, because well, the colors are already looking pretty real, as in realistic, as in what you saw with your eyeballs.

As far as codecs go, based on Adam Wilt pointing out a lot of things, I think Canon has the nicest of the HDV codecs, while DVCPRO HD is preferable in terms of fewer compression artifacts, although it suffers in terms of resolution - 1920x1080 formats are recorded as 1280x1080 (50i at 1440x1080), and 720p formats are recorded as 960x720 instead of 1280x720.

As for glass, "they fail in different ways" says Adam - Canon has good detail but lots of chromatic aberration. HVX lens - goes nice and wide, fairly clean, and it clearly passes a lot more detail than the chips are capable of recording. "We've got nice vigorous aliasing as far as the eye can see - it's a demo case for what aliasing looks like." says Adam. JVC glass - for the price it's an alright lens. Around F4, middle of zoom range, it is nice and clean, but at the end of the range, it portholes and vignettes a bit at telephoto extremes, and has chromatic aberration. "It was the only real lens" of the range as camera folks call it - it has mechanical zoom and mechanical focus. (glass comments are from Adam mostly, he knows'em better).

As for the Z1U, we are just now capturing footage from tape, and during the shoot, it was the furtherst machine from my capture station, so I don't have an opinion on it beyond my previous doodlings and testing with it from over the last year.

And as for the Varicam, we were using Omega Broadcast Group's Varicam, rev or model H (I'm not sure of the correct designation). But the latest one. I watched during live capture as I was operating that capture station, and it looked gooooooood. More review and analysis to follow.

-mike