Why are all camcorders useless??

[Mark Suszko]

AFAIK, all pans are horizontal.
Tilts are vertical.
Dolly moves in and out
and trucks go right and left.

Sorry to be such a stickler about it but there’s a bad habit growing of people casually using “pan” when they mean a tilt or even a zoom or dolly. If we don’t keep up a standard vocabulary for these moves, pretty soon nobody will be sure what actual move anybody is talking about. Back to answering your comment:

You can love or hate this codec, but the issue was here long before the codec. Film camera operators have long known this issue and they developed a set of “speeds” for making their moves that minimizes the effect. It takes real discipline to consistently make the panning move at the “right” speed.

You may also want to look into some of the plug-ins that claim to repair this “jello effect” in post.

[Rick Wise]

Mark, the judder effect is I believe quite different from the jello or rolling shutter effect. The jello comes from the scanning of a CMOS chip during a pan. The judder comes from moving the camera horizontally faster than one should for the subject. Subjects such as vertical picket fences are the devil to shoot, while a large flat wall poses no problems.

There is a tutorial on how to remove the Jello effect here: https://lesterbanks.com/2010/03/rolling-shutter-fix-in-after-effects-with-no-plugins/. The “free” method for After Effects is long and when working with a lot of footage shot with this problem it would be more effective to buy one of the plug-ins.

The only cure for judder is practice panning slowly enough to prevent it. 24p is worse than 30p, which is worse than 60i. When shooting product shots in 35mm one trick we latched onto was to shoot at 60 frames/second. Then transfer to video at 60 fps. Since we were transferring to interlaced video, the result was that each film frame was one field of video, providing twice as much visual information as we would have had shooting 30 fps. We never shot 24fps for these table-top shoots because the 3-2 pulldown at the transfer (to 29.97 frames/second, which is what video runs at,) added artifacts.

Rick Wise
director of photography
San Francisco Bay Area
part-time instructor lighting/camera
Academy of Art University/Film and Video (grad school)
https://www.RickWiseDP.com

[Sean Herbert]

Thanks for the replies, guys.

I looked at that video – I don’t have that “jello” issue at all. It’s definitely judder.

I tried panning slower and sure, it’s not as bad, but it’s still there – it’s horrible!

I guess what baffles me is why the hell AVCHD is such a standard format, when it has this glaring issue?

My 7D shoots h.264 .mov files, and doesn’t have this judder during panning at equal speed – so it’s not as if smooth panning is impossible to achieve with highly compressed full HD files!

Unreal… I never had this issue with MiniDV.

[Jan Crittenden livingston]

Hi Sean,

Your 7D is also recording in AVCHD, just another version. The issue is your shutter speed if you have slowed down your pan and it is still too juddery. The smaller cameras may not allow for control ouver shutter speed.

Take a look at the collection of footage here:https://vimeo.com/groups/72874/videos/sort:alphabetic

They were all taken with the AF100 camera, all recorded to AVCHD, and there is not an issue with motion. So it comes back to the movement of the camera by you, i.e., you are moving it too fast, or your shutter speed needs to be slower to allow for more motion blur.

Your reference to the poster that complained about the codec is not a scientific post, thus it is not well documented as a problem. What is documented in that post is that a person is having a learning curve issue on how to shoot with a camera and is not reflection on the codec at all, but more on his inabilities.

Best,

Jan

Jan Crittenden Livingston
Product Manager, AVCCAM, AG-3DA1, AG-AF100
Panasonic Broadcast & TV Systems

[Dave Cochrane]

Woah! Way to go there with a diplomatic post about someone potentially using your company’s products there, Jan.

For brand representation it might have been better to point the individual toward the knowledge he might lack, or some form of training that would address the issue. Pointing out the shortcomings of your customers is never, ever a smart move.

[Shannon Baker]

How did Jan not address the issue? She said it was shutter speed. She said that you could fix the problem by changing the speed. Of course she’s going to reference her product as she probably knew the website by heart. She didn’t say he couldn’t make the 7D work and the Panny was better, just saying they use the same codec but yet she had proof the Panny could do it, so the 7D could too.

As for the subject at hand, I personally don’t like AVCHD either. I’m a DVCPro HD fan myself…but use both. Why hasn’t everyone moved to P2? Ask yourself, will you pay that much for the cards? I did…and love them, but a lot of people won’t. It doesn’t end there either…as you need more storage space too. Try transferring data to a client. It takes a hard drive! Point I’m trying to make is that I believe cost in general is one of the reasons we have the HDV’s and AVCHD’s of the world. But that’s just my opinion. 😉

[Ralph Savage]

Rick,

I just read this post about camcorders using the AVCHD format.

About 14 months ago I purchased a Canon XA10 camcorder which records in AVCHD.

I had to shoot a room for a realtor and mounted the camcorder on a tripod with the image stabilization OFF.

I then began panning from right to left and then back from left to right. When I played the clip back on my computer, I noticed that on a fairly regular interval, the panning would STUTTER or SKIP for a brief moment.

I don’t know if this is a problem with the camera or if it is just a quirk associated with AVCHD.

My camera was set to MXP (High quality 24mbps), PF30 frames per second, at a shutter speed of 1/60 second.

I thought this would be fine, but are these settings the cause of the problem?

My camcorder can shoot at 60i, PF30, PF24 and 24P. I am shooting for the web and thought I was doing everything right.

I appreciate your feedback/advice.

Is there a format that wouldn’t do this? There are so many PRO cameras shooting AVCHD.

Thanks.

Ralph

[John Sharaf]

Pan slower and/or use a wider lens. Settings sound correct.

JS

[Rick Wise]

I agree with John. On some cameras it is possible to set a wider shutter angle, which will help to add a more normal blur as you move. One other possibility is to shoot at 60i — the stutter problem is then less acute. Since you are panning empty rooms for web display of real estate, there probably is not a whole lot to gain by trying to shoot 30p so the 60i should work. Indeed for that very reason when I shot just such a project for a client, I did shoot in 60i and it worked just fine. (The worst setting for web use would be 24p. More stutter, and more artifacts from the 3/2 pull-down conversion to 30 fps.)

Rick Wise
Cinematographer
San Francisco Bay Area
https://www.RickWiseDP.com

[Ralph Savage]

I’ll have to try the 60i setting. Still, the realtor is going to post the video on the web– will 60i work on YouTube or a website?

Also, I don’t understand what SHUTTER ANGLE is. I understand shutter speed and frames per second. I don’t know if my camcorder can adjust the angle of the shutter.