HD For Indies

Today was more low key than yesterday, thank goodness. Haven't sorted pictures yet, but will when can.

We continued our camera tests:

Panasonic HVX200
Sony HVR-Z1U
JVC GY-HD100U
Sony F350 (newer, nicer XDCAM HD)
Canon XL H1
Panasonic Varicam/H

We met down at Auditorium Shores at 10am, and talent (same two, Stacy and Carol Lee) showed up about an hour later. Stuart English stopped by with his two little girls, we an impromptu kid shot was set up. I popped in and out between talent wrangling and fetching some supplies for the shoot, and had to leave to meet Allan Barnwell up at Omega so he could let me in (on a Sunday) to go capture footage from the F350, which had to leave that afternoon.

Later I saw more footage, which consisted of some across the water shots, some zooms of downtown, the classic Austin shot - Stevie Ray Vaughn statue, Town Lake, the downtown skyline. Shots of the models in broad daylight in close up, medium, and wide. Shots of a long canoe with 10 or more rowers cranking away.

Civilians kept wandering up to figure what was going on. Li finally said "the body has floated away, there's nothing to see!" and Nate Weaver suggested this brilliant response for the overly inquisitive:

"We're filming a mayonaise commercial."

...which should instantly disperse any curious crowd. What's less exciting than mayonaise....

While most were still down by Auditorium Shores, I drove back to start capturing from F350 and HD100U.

CAPTURING

Sony F350 XDCAM HD (tapeless optical disc in a shell)

Capturing form F350 was interesting - gives a lovely thumbnail screen out the HD-SDI (there is NO component HD analog output on this camera!) in HD, makes it a snap to see what's going on - a NICE touch! I kept trying to click on the thumbnails with my mouse in the capture preview window just by instinct. Since is on a nonlinear cartridge and not tape, you get thumbnails of your video clips - very much like the thumbnail viewing mode on digital still cameras. Just press the "thumbnail" button and you get the list, press Play to play the clip. Since there is no 9 pin cable outlet on the camera, we had to capture wild. FCP 5.0.4 (and 5.1 as well) do not support the XDCAM HD format yet. 24p mode unfortunately comes out as 24p on 30i with 3:2 pulldown. Since we have no deck, and it doesn't come out as 24pSF (progressive segmented frames), we had to capture as 1080i60 (1080p24on60i is what I call it, since 24p with 3:2 pulldown means 1080i60). PFHAT files, since no native codec support, just saved as 8 bit uncompressed - biiiiiiiiiig files considering how small it could be. Again, a "GIF saved as a TIF" solution - saving the files in the massive uncompressed format, even though there are files on a disk inches away I can't read. Grrr. Soon I hope, but I fear FCP 6 won't be until July-October timeframe.

Panasonic HVX200: P2 solid state memory cards

capture was a snap - hook up FireWire to the camera from Mac, and select File==>Import and there's a P2 option. Adam did it for me was we were pressed for time via FireWire from the camera. First batch came in all random file names, he said he'd goofed somehow and he redid it. Not sure if that was just puting Card 1 clips i Card 1 bin or what, I'll need to look at results tomorrow - hope everything's slated. Similar to the F350, you get thumbnails, but unfortunately no view of thumbnails out the FireWire or component output. All files were imported no problem. So all frame rates and recording options (at least teh ones we used) appear to be no biggie to get into FCP.

JVC GY-HD100U: HDV with a 720p30 and a proprietary 24fps on 60 fps timebase mode

The JVC was the first one I finally used the checkbox in Clip Settings for "Make New Clip on Start/Stop" when capturing native HDV over FireWire, which allows you to COMPLETELY automate and walk away capturing a series of clips. Truly a "Sliced Bread 2.0" award winner in terms of time savings. I know, I know, DV folks have been doing this forever, but the HD-SDI type of capturing I've been focusing on for last year didn't have that ability. The camera send 720p59.94 out the component analog outputs when shooting live (that we ran ito an AJA HD10A converter and then recorded the converter's HD-SDI output into an HD-SDI card, either BMD or AJA, interchangably). HOWEVER, when recording to HDV tape, it skips every other frame and you get 720p29.97 - half as many frames. Harrumph. But it captured just fine over FireWire, I just need to go back and add metadata to those clips now. 720p24, however, is a COMPLETELY different animal. It puts 24 fps on a 60 fps timebase. There is no 720p60 HDV, so Final Cut Pro gets completely confused and doesn't work - AT ALL. I'd expected to be able to capture 720p59.94 and process out the extra frames, but that isn't an option over FireWire - it flat out doesn't work. Solution? LumiereHD will capture and go back to tape with 720p24 footage from the JVC. I ran out of time to set it up since the camera had to go back, so I just punted and captured the footage uncompressed over the HD-SDI. Lots of data, not so much information. Grr.

One of the useful things about doing this blog is the near realtime feedback - a reader from Germany wrote in to say that in their tests, the Multibridge Extreme recorded less and less useful info as the brightness got higher. The Cobalt converter they used didn't. I'm not swearing this is true, but based on charts he sent me it is believable. I need to study and read up on this, but basically be aware that not all HD Analog to HD-SDI converters are the same. I'd be inclined to believe that if there were a problem of this nature, AJA seems to have an edge on these kinds of issues (totally unscientific gut reaction), and perhaps this justifies their higher price. In any case, I take that to mean our tests are non-definitive on this issue to some part UNTIL I can look into this converter issue.If I get less via analog than I do from FireWire, why am I doing it again? UPDATE OK, I had that a bit wrong - high FREQUENCY detail is recorded a bit soft, not bright information. It had been suggested by the writer that perhaps a lesser, consumer grade A/D chipset was being used. Grant Petty of BlackMagic personally wrote me back and said this is not the case, they are using a professional chipset as is used by other pro gear, and his engineers are looking into this possible discrepancy. I'll keep you posted. After receiving that info, I went back and recaptured 720p24on60 footage from the JVC through BOTH an AJA HD10A as well as the BlackMagic Multibridge Extreme, it'll be interesting to see how they compare on that footage (all of which came from tape).


Canon XL H1

- captured 1080i60 fine over FireWire with automatic scene detection ON, same no problem deal for 1080i50 from the camera. But 24F? A complete stumper, as it is supposedly a proprietary format with padding for the zero frames. NO Lumiere will help at this party, you're on your own. And no analog output that I saw immediately obvious. Will have to use Cinema Tools, guessing A frames, to figure this one out.

Varicam - haven't started capturing yet, Omega owns a 1200A deck I'll use. HD-SDI or FireWire, not anticipating any problems.

Z1U - haven't started capturing yet since Omega owns one of those as well. Didn't shoot any Cineframe 24F mode, since it is known to blow. But since we shot a lot of 24F with XL H1, maybe we should have. I'd rather shoot 50i and deinterlace and retime. But both 1080i50 and 1080i60 SHOULD capture no problem. (we had FireWire bus problems later)

SOME OBSERVATIONS, OFF THE CUFF AND PRELIMIANY:

As we reviewed the footage later, by this time we were getting a pretty good idea of what to expect. Most of this is stuff Adam Wilt pointed out:

-JVC GY-HD100U - I was wrong in my assessment of the color rendition earlier - it actually looks quite nice seeing it on the Canon 1440xsomething res projector against a screen. Detail was good but not the best, but with a square pixel sensor, and 1280x720 recording format, it held nice detail. The 13x lens, which has actually dropped in price to about $8K street, while costing more than the camera WITH standard lens, makes a BIG difference - buy you way into a sharper image with that lens. BUT....the codec is the weak point of the camera - there is some temporal sticking (in waving trees or other slow, fine motion, blocks of pixels won't update for 6 frames). If JVC were to update/replace the codec, we speculate by changing the firmware at best case but more likely by developing new silicon with new codec we guess, it would make this camera a much more solid contender.

-HVX200 - great color rendition, but relatively low resolution in this crowd. You can see aliasing in this one you don't see in the others. Probably OK for present generation of home theater HDTVs, but not so good for theatrical or higher resolution home theater systems I speculated. GREAT codec performance, since there is no compression frame to frame, all frames are compressed freestanding, which means no frame to frame compression artifacts. This camera is also pretty noisy. Operators complained of how heavy it was to hold as a handheld rather than shoulder mount camera. But I love the way the color looks. You see color and contrast first, later possibly notice a lack of resolution.

Canon XL H1 - the best HDV codec of the bunch. GREAT detail, decent but slightly funky color rendition. I'll need to check my notes, but even carefully setting up shots, skin tones a little pinky/orangey maybe? And did highlights clip in a very video way?

Z1U - footage not reviewed, Adam was well familiar. He said Sony tends to have a very video-y look to it, highlights blow out quickly.

Sony F350 - 35mbit looked better, but not hugely/amazingly better. I could very quickly tell the difference just looking between 18 and 35 mbit. 18 looks OK, but you see 35 and realize how much better it is (we didn't bother with 25 mbit - you either want quality or space, and probably won't split the difference that often, unless trying to maintain timeline compatibility). NICE SHARP DETAIL, decent but not outstanding color rendition. At this price, however, it should thoroughly rock. It does do quite well. But Adam noted it was closer in behavior (think he was talking about focusing) to 1/3" chips than 2/3" chips. This camera was also the one with most options, and they weren't sufficently explored. There is probably more performance to be gained from this camera, we didn't have time to learn how to do so. We discussed that someone was told Sony rep confirmed that while the SIGNAL if FORMATTED as 4:2:2 out of the HD-SDI, it only contains 4:2:0 worth of data. While some called this bit withholding or lame, I called it market segmentation. And Adam pointed out it might be something technical, like they are relying on a chip that converts RGB to 4:2:0 that's already built and working and just dropped in, and to do otherwise would be a ton of work. Oh, and highlights blew out dissapointingly quickly for a camera of this price. But image did look GOOD and SHARP. Definitely shoot 35mbit. Canon's 25 mbit CBR HDV looks, from a code perspective, to be darned close in quality to Sony's 35mbit VBR XDCAM HD recording. Canon's codec is better from what I've seen and has been pointed out. I'd expect the codec performance (blocking, quantization errors, temporal sticking issues) to be better on Canon than F350. But F350 has bigger chip, nicer lens, etc.

Varicam - didn't review it, and didn't take it out in the field - we deemed that we'd seen enough footage from it, and it's expensive in case we dropped it (no production insurance that I'm aware of in place on this gig).

Some non-definitive brainstorming:

If I were doing something strictly for HDTV with a lot of fast motion and didn't have deep post budget for post and color correction, and had around $10K camera budget (assuming purchase or metric equivalent rental) I'd think about shooting HVX200 and editing natively. The good color reproduction requires less tweakage in post, the post workflow is simple and works on inexpensive equipment without requiring HD-SDI, and has low drive space and drive throughput requirements but is still a nice codec.

If, on the other hand, I was shooting something I was confident would be seen on a larger screen, and it included a lot of indoor shots or minimal fast pans or fast motion, and had an NLE that could handle 24F mode (or 1080i50 in a pinch for later conform to 24p), I'd consider the XL H1.

those are just two examples, don't rush off and make your project based on those. They ALL have various pros and cons to them that doesn't make one outstandingly better than the other at a given/similar price point.


CLOSING SUMMARY FOR THE DAY:

OK, I can't keep my eyes open any longer, I think I just dozed for 5 minutes. So I'll punt until later, hope I don't have any typos -

-mmike

more notes:

-for home theater destined stuff, HVX200 looks awfully good "right off the truck" as they say-meaning if well shot, uncorrected, it looks awesome. MOST home theater systems would have a hard time showing the shortcomings except for some detail aliasing I THINK (need to verify more later)

-BUT for theatrical, the artifacts would DEFINITELY show if filmed out or done on proper high res truly 1080 res or 2K projector.

-XL H1 was nicely sharp, for instance, and would show better detail.

(see Adam's point about XL H1 like the Z1U but with 50% better detail)

Adam mentioned at one point that beyond about F5.6 you start getting less resolution out of these cameras - something about limits of diffraction something or other I'm too tired to remember all the details of.

-mike