Need expert advice on new camera purchase

[Rmherd]

This month’s American Cinematographer magazine reviewed the Red. The price point seems to be competitive.

RH

[Tim Kolb]

[rmherd] “I looked up the Sony XDcam info, and it has Y: 13.5 MHz; R-Y/B-Y: 6.75 MHz 10 bit (I couldn’t find, but I assume it’s also linear DCT). Red is the ONLY wavelet camera. Sony appears to be using DVCAM, so I guess/hypothesize it’s laying all fields to “tape.””

Red isn’t the only wavelet camera…of course there is only wavelet compression, cameras are strictly visual capture devices…not to pick a nit, but the RED has several downstream recording options, including uncompressed if you can find a bit bucket fast and large enough.

The Silicon Imaging camera (of which there was a working prototype at NAB last year and it made it to the CML camera lineup for the second year this year…still no RED at the event) uses CineForm compression on RAW files, which is wavelet, and the RED compression is based on JPEG 2000 wavelet compression, the same as another wavelet based recording format, Grass Valley Infinity.

And of course, anything attached to a Wafian disk recorder running CineForm compression is a wavelet recording system…another method that has been in use for more than a year.

XDcam IS DVcam…XDcam HD is VBR at 35 and 18 Mbps settings, which offers an advantage over CBR of tape based formats. If you account for the fact that DVC Pro HD dumps 25% (1280 down to 960) at 720p and 33% (1920 down to 1280)at 1080, of it’s image resolution upon recording, the spatial information lost vs. temporal losses in HDV or XDcam HD make any margins a bit harder to quantify in either direction.

The Varicam only does 720p and it looks the way it does much more due to the camera head than the compression system. I use one from time to time and really like the pictures it makes. Conversely, I haven’t been impressed with the aesthetic of the XDcamHD stuff I’ve seen, but until I shoot with one, I have to reserve judgement.

What isn’t useful in my opinion is comparing cameras based on image compression systems. We have an HVX200, and frankly I’d prefer to try to composite an HDV 1440×1080 image off an XL-H1’s 1440×1080 CCD any day over the HVX 200’s “higher quality” 960×720 image, subsampled from a 1280×720 image, formed from interpolating an image off a 960×540 sensor.

(And I have to say that I really LIKE the image aesthetic from the HVX200 camera…again, I just don’t think you can use the recording format compression as the quality measurement for any particular camera any more…there are simply too many other variables.)

TimK,
Director,
Kolb Productions,

Creative Cow Host,
Author/Trainer
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