[Al Bergstein]

I don’t remember, as this was months ago, when I bought the Mixpre. When I get some downtime (December???) I’ll see if I can do a thorough measurement. I certainly could have been off somewhere…But I’ll check.

Alf

[Al Bergstein]

Great post. Thanks for that feedback. But I did see a drop in noise when I simply added the Mixpre to the chain, taking the mics that I was feeding in to the mixpre first.

I forgot to mention that I also don’t use the built in mics of the Zoom H4n. It has worked well for me though, by staying with external high quality mics and feeding it from the MixPre.

Alf

[Al Bergstein]

Yes, I didn’t go with solid state because of price and size. I agree with the notion of larger hard drives, or eSata port, along with proper video card. My blu ray player will not properly play standard DVDs I have produced on my Mac. So I would be leery of buying one again.

You can always buy a stand alone blu ray player for when you show your videos to an audience. They are dirt cheap now. And most people are still asking for standard DVDs I’ve found.

Alf

[Al Bergstein]

Well, I already read the white paper, and as I said, for those of us not yet doing 3d, this seems to be a minor release as opposed to major.

I’m not slamming here, just saying that GPU acceleration should have been there a while back. All of us doing HD editing on this platform have complained for over a year about that. Sony appears to be the last major player to show up with GPU support.

Anyway, as I said, 10 seems worth the upgrade, whether it’s worth the price of the upgrade for those of us who have suffered under the limitations of playback, is debatable. I expected it to work correctly from when I bought it. I wasn’t sold a product that was advertised to work incorrectly.

Alf

[Al Bergstein]

Not sure what you have read that show that the pre-amps are good vs noisy audio circuitry. Is there something that actually tests that, that you have seen? Anyway, I also do occasionally go into a Zoom H4n off the mixpre which has been great.

Neither the Zoom nor the Olympus LS-10 are ‘motion picture’ quality sound. To get that, you need to spend a lot more money, thousands more. These are prosumer products, low end industrial quality at best. They have their own set of issues, like harshness, compared to top quality gear. But for my client needs, they are fine. There are great reviews out there that clearly demonstrate their limitations, which I read when investigating which ones to buy.

Here’s an example of some solid testing between the Zoom and the Edirol, which is considered a “professional” level field recorder.

https://www.martin-doppelbauer.de/fieldrecorder/

and especially read this…a great test..harmonic distortions in recorders…

https://www.martin-doppelbauer.de/fieldrecorder/distortions.html

Zoom, Sony and Olympus which we are discussing are good alternatives to the native sound quality of the HMC-150, which for most situations is fine, but for quiet rooms, and interviews done in quiet rooms is just not up to the task, from my experiences. But these are not ‘professional’ level tools.

Alf

[Al Bergstein]

Thanks Terry, I removed my post on that for that very reason. Easy to post without giving it enough thought. I so rarely think about changing the shutter when I shift to a faster FPS.

I didn’t catch his discussion about speeding it up a bit in FCP, I thought that was what he did to ‘fix’ the problem that already was there.

Anyway, thanks for that post, it’s a good learning point to remember for those of us that haven’t used a fully manual movie camera in decades!

Alf

[Al Bergstein]

From Wikip. This gets at what I think I’m trying to say here..am I wrong in this? Trying 30 fps might be smoother than 24?

“Judder is a real problem in this day where 46 and 52-inch (1,300 mm) television sets have become the norm. The amount an object moves between frames physically on screen is now of such a magnitude that objects and backgrounds can no longer be classed as “clear”. Letters cannot be read and looking at vertical objects like trees and lamp posts while the camera is panning sideways have even been known to cause headaches. The actual amount of motion blur needed to make 24 frames per second smooth eliminates every remnant of detail from the frames. Where adding the right amount of motion blur eliminates the uncomfortable side effects, it is more than often simply not done. It requires extra processing to turn the extra frames of a 120 frame/s source (which is the current recording “standard”[citation needed]) into adequate motion blur for a 24 frame/s target. It would also potentially remove the detail and clarity of background advertising. Today, devices are up to the task of displaying 60 frames per second, using them all on the source media is very much possible. For example, the amount of data that can be stored on blu-ray and the processing power to decode it is more than adequate. Though the extra frames when not filtered correctly, can produce a somewhat video-esque quality to the whole, the improvement to motion heavy sequences is undeniable. Televisions these days often have an option to do some kind of frame interpolation (what would be a frame between 2 real frames gets calculated to some degree), where for frames that are almost identical this can give some manner of improvement in judder, it comes nowhere close to a source having a higher number of frames, it is merely a trick to compensate for sources not having a high enough FPS rate. This interpolation creates artifacts on screen that are clearly noticeable also.”

Alf

[Al Bergstein]

message deleted…

[Al Bergstein]

I have gone to a field mixer to eliminate the audio noise. The Mixpre has helped get it to where it should be, which is almost nil.

It is sad that Panny put such crappy preamps in the 150. Does anyone know how it stacks up to higher end Panny cameras? Or even lower end ones?

Alf

[Al Bergstein]

Since I was searching around for something else, I thought I would update this post for people who find it in the future. I’ve been editing AVCHD natively now in Sony Video Vegas 10, and it appears that they have very effectively dealt with the preview stuttering issues, etc. I do a lot of fast and dirty editing there, since it saves me time (=$) in post production costs.

I agree with Noah, that for more higher quality jobs, requiring effects, and deep multiple tracks, I transcode, either via Neoscene on Windows or I use FCP to take it to ProRes on Apple.

So the choices have expanded since this original post.

Alf