Panasonic HMC 150 and Vegas Pro 9 (AVHCD)

[Jim Greene]

I had the HMC150 for 1 year and just sold it. I didn’t like the imagery at all, but that’s not your question. I never used VP9, I went from VP8 directly to VP10. However, I think as far as AVCHD footage, VP8 & VP9 are the same. You will want VP10 for that. The footage is tough to edit with, when using VP8. I always converted the files to MXF files which is much easier to edit, especially whith multi-camera timelines.

Actually, a major problem I had was importing the footage from multiple 4GB files from the HMC150. That is, even though the camera will record continuously until the card is full (hours and hours), it breaks the files into multiple 4GB files. If you simply place these files on the timeline, there is a gap in video & audio. The only way I could get them to bind together properly was to go to a command prompt in Windows and do a binary copy of all the files, like this:

copy /b 00001.MTS + 00002.MTS + 00003.MTS onebigfile.mts

which gives you “onebigfile.mts” from the original three binary concatenations. I’m happy I sold it.

-Jim.

[Gilles Gagnon]

Hmmmm Thanks for the info Jim. Great tip on the concatenation of the files. I didn’t know about the 4GB “limit”.

I’m curious,

What did you replace the 150 with? or… asked differently, what would you consider purchasing in the same league if I were to choose a diff camera?

Gilles

[Gilles Gagnon]

one more thing Jim, I forgot to ask,

what did you not like about the imagery?

Gilles

[Jim Greene]

We produce wedding films and now exclusively use the Canon DSLR cameras. We had only used the HMC as the backup cam, mostly in the rear of the ceremony, for continuity — because it runs continuously, unlike the DSLR. However the image does not match well at all with the Canon. In fact it only looks good with good light. In low light, like a church or reception hall, it looks really grainy & muddy. We used to use the Sony Z1 (tape-based) and think it actually might look better in low light even with more grain. The LCD is substandard, hard to focus with and has a poor viewing angle. The manual shutter speed button seems to change at unpredictable values for me, which is unacceptable. Most people seem to love this camera, so I guess it may be a preference issue. The DSLR certainly isn’t for everyone, it’s not ergonomic. Some of the newer cams look promising, like the Sony HXR-NX5U or the Canon XF100, or the Canon XA10, or maybe the Panasonic AG-AF100.

-Jim.

[Gilles Gagnon]

Thanks again Jim.

Indeed I’d love a camcorder with changeable lens, as in DSLRs, like the Panasonic model you mentioned. Price ia prohibitive at this time.

Thansk again for taking the time to reply. It’s great food for thought.

Gilles

[Tom Pauncz]

Jim,
A quick question – did you ever try the Vegas pro ‘Device Explorer’ way of importing the clips off the memory card from the HMC-150?

I regularly shoot on 32GB cards and create >4GB clips. The ‘Device Explorer’ can see a card reader and will stitch the clips automatically when importing.

Gilles and I had a very long discussion about this and tested a ‘stitched’ clip ~12GB vs clips just butted up against each other in Vegas and there was a major audio dropout using the second method. None in the stitched, large file.

Cheers for now,
Tom Pauncz
(30WEST MEDiA GROUP)

[Al Bergstein]

I owned an hmc150 for a year and a half and loved it. I recently sold it and upgraded to acanon xf305. It all depends on your shooting. What are you going to use it for? It’s not great for low light but to be sure it seems like a lot of wedding photogs do use it, given the boards i’ve been on.

As to vegas, i had 9 but upgraded to 10 & it works much better for avchd. It imports natively and with device explorer it imported them fine. No drop outs. If you can’t wait a few months for the hmc250 then you likely will like the 150, as long as you don’t shoot in really low light alot. I switch over to my 7d for that.

Another option to think about is the Canon xf100. Much better low light camcorder.also works well with vegas, in 4:2:2 at 50 mb. Superb picture imho.

But the bottom line is that you need to be clear about your requirements. For me the 150 was a superb camera for the price and i highly recommend it. Vegas 10d will handle the footage fine.

This is a low light shoot done with the 150, and boosted a bit in post. I think it turned out well.
https://m.youtube.com/index?desktop_uri=%2F&gl=US#/watch?v=9P6i9P9gk4M

Alf

[Jim Greene]

@Tom: No, I never tried device explorer, but my workflow was to copy all video files from all cards and then just drop them onto the timeline. I had thought device import went away once cards were used, guess not for Panasonic. My method works great for Canon DSLR files. I know that FCP also needs to import from the cards and you can’t simply copy to a directory and then drop it into FCP like Vegas can (for DSLR files). Anyway, the binary copy worked fine and I no longer have that cam, so no problem.

-Jim.

[Gilles Gagnon]

Hi everyone,

So I purchased the HMC-150.

Q. which workflow do you recommend,
A.importting the .mts files natively and work from these OR
B. converting them using the utility provided by Panasonic?

CHeers,

Gilles

[Stephen Crye]

Hi Al;

I have a new Sony HXR-NX70U that is giving me BIG problems (see my recent posts to the Sony NXCAM forums). 99% that I will send it back. I’ve been eying the XF100, but Slashcam says it has poor low-light compared to the NX70.

Also, I just got off the phone with Canon pro support and they flatly stated that Vegas can NOT edit the .xf wrappered Canon files!

So, now I am confused. I’m very nervous about jumping ship from Sony to Canon – for the last 20 years I’ve owned nothing but Sony.

Can you please confirm that you can easily edit and import XF100 files into Vegas 9/10/11 (I have all three)? I’m hoping to be able to drag and drop, they way I do with the AVCHD files from my various Sony cams.

Thanks!

Steve

Win7 Pro X64 on Dell T3400 MultiTB SATA 8 GB RAM Vegas 10e x64 DVDA 5.2 Sony HDR-CX550V