Bj Ahlen
Forum Replies Created
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As HD cameras become more and more advanced, I am finding more and more value in my film shooting experience.
Back in the ye olde days nobody expected (or even desired) to have the uncorrected film dailies look like the intended end result.
When shooting film, it is often possible to get more out of each frame by shooting in ways that result in really ugly dailies.
I have found the same to apply when shooting 2/3″ broadcast video also. It takes a bit of work to figure out what to do, but once you have developed your work flow and “look” it sure is a joy…
Even the $6500 XDCAM EX can be “painted” (image adjustments in menus) to look like a Varicam (or an HVX200).
The HVX200 gives very nice-looking images right out of the box, while the Sony needs tweaking.
Is that bad? I don’t care, because I put a fair amount of work into developing my looks, so the “Auto” setting is of only academic interest for me.
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Panasonic is far better (100 Mb/s) [than XDCAM 35 Mb/s]
Ummm, depends on what you mean by “better”. DVCPRO-HD at 100Mbps compresses more heavily than XDCAM at 35Mbps.
How? Because the long GOP is far more space efficient.
I’m too tired to do the math right now, but from memory I think the DVCPRO-HD is about 3 times as heavily compressed.
DVCPRO-HD is easy on the CPU, so you can composite more tracks on a given machine. But then I really don’t think either of these codecs are that great for post work. They are really best for acquisition work.
Long GOP is a pain to edit natively in many cases, and I simply think it shouldn’t be done. Unless you’re doing just a few simple cuts, get the video over to ProRes asap, and do all your work in that before your final render to MPEG-2 or H.264 or whatever.
DVCPRO-HD is also limited in resolution. It maxes out at 1280×1080, while XDCAM EX as noted is a full raster codec at 1920×1080.
The HVX200 creates beautiful footage and is great to work with. It does however have 960×540 CCDs which means that its “4:2:2” color sampling actually has lower chroma resolution than the 4:2:0 of XDCAM EX (which has been widely found to work great for chromakey), and the HVX is far behind in the sharpness department, even with its built-in uprezzing circuitry (low res can certainly be OK as part of a pleasant film look, film wasn’t that sharp either in many cases).
My suggestion: rent a Sony and the corresponding spec Panny for a weekend, shoot a variety of scenes, and do your own evaluation of what is important to you. Nothing beats that!
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The HDX900 is a 2/3″ camera which can be a great help or a great hindrance, depanding on if you want a narrow or a wide DOF. It has 1280×720 CCDs, so if your deliverable isn’t 720p, you’ll be working with uprezzed footage.
The XDCAM-HD you’re referring to is probably a CineAlta F-350, and some people have even suggested it keys better than a VariCam. I’ll stay out of that debate, because I haven’t tested them side-by-side.
What is clear is that you cannot compare the efficiency of an intraframe codec such as DVCPROHD with a GOP codec as used in XDCAM-HD.
In a lot of situations, footage shot with the XDCAM-HD 35 Mbps HQ codec can be considered to be less compressed than the same footage shot with 100 Mbps DVCPROHD.
There are exceptions to this, but the math is very simple and our eyes can confirm it.
My recommendation: rent both for a day, or worst case do a simple test at the rental company and bring some footage back to look at in your own NLE/compositor.
Personally, I hate working with cameras I don’t know inside out. Better to use a camera you really know than some other new camera that is “10% better” but with many unknowns.
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In the comparison between the HVX200 and the EX1, you can’t say that the “4:2:2” of the HVX200 is better than the “4:2:0” of the EX1.
You were concerned about chromakey, so let’s look at the absolute chroma resolution of the two cameras.
The HVX200 has a luma resolution of 960×540. 4:2:2 color sampling gives it a chroma resolution of 480×540.
The EX1 has a luma resolution of 1920×1080 (full raster sensor). 4:2:0 color sampling gives it a chroma resolution of 960×540, i.e. twice the chroma resolution of the HVX200.
In practice, both cameras do chroma interpolation (and the HVX200 does a pretty amazing job of quadrupling its recorded CCD resolution to get to 1920×1080 also).
For chromakey work, you can also use the HD-SDI spigot on the back of the EX1. This has full SMPTE 10-bit 4:2:2 1920×1080 with no padded bits, interpolation or anything else.
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What do you see in InDesign? Nothing or nonsense?
InDesign CS2 has some limitations in its Unicode support, and you won’t see fully working Devanagari until CS3, which should hopefully be here very soon (April).
In the meantime, you may have to switch to non-Unicode fonts, or be adventurous enough to try Quark 7 (if your machine is fast enough or your patience is great enough).
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The scariest part is where AT&T is putting millions of dollars in our politicians pockets to try to get the right to act as tollgatekeepers for content.
Creative Cow’s server internet access? “We noticed you accept advertising on your site, so from next January you will pay 4 times the basic rate. Just charge it to your advertisers, or start charging your forum users.”
“And, Mr. Forum User, we noticed that you access video tutorials. From next January, there will be a $1.50 access charge for each of those (subject to future increase). VOIP calls will be subject to a 12 cents per minute surcharge.”
“And if you don’t like our prices you can go somewhere else. Bwah-hah-hah!!!”
“In other news from Washington in January 2007, it was reported that the Congress critters and Senators who had voted to eliminate Net Neutrality (in order to allow tollgatekeepers), were found floating in the Potomac with their intestines pulled out by the largest angry mob in the history of the United States. The 10 million strong mob marched on the White House and delivered a 12-foot diameter “rubberband ball” to the President, but made of intestines.
The President got the message, immediately restored Net Neutrality by Executive Decree, and to be on the safe side also ordered AT&T once again dissolved into small regional Bell companies.”
“BREAKING NEWS: The President of the New AT&T has escaped to Russia, where he has been offered a position reporting directly to Putin with responsibility for extortion of all datacommunications users in the Greater Former Soviet Union.”
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What’s scary here right now is that AT&T is using its vast political muscle to buy up all landlines they can get their hands on in the U.S.
If, as expected, they get approval to acquire SW Bell, there ain’t much left for them to do other than to buy Verizon also and they’ll control nearly 100% of all U.S. business and consumer DSL access as well as all lines going to cell towers. They have been paying enormous amounts of money to senators and congress critters to make their ride as unimpeded as possible as they try to reinstitute the old Ma Bell monopoly, but for all wired and wireless internet access this time.
And if they get their way, they will also shortly be able to charge both consumers and providers of video materials extra access fees on a per kilobyte basis on top of the large amounts of money they are already receiving for bandwidth subscriptions, plus the billions of dollars they received from the Federal Government (i.e. U.S. taxpayers) over the last 10 years to build up networks with universal access for all, even in the boonies (which of course never happened, the money was just pocketed).
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As has been said many times before, “The difference between theory and practice is that in theory there is no difference, but in practice there is.”
It’s as always a good reminder to test all workflows on a small scale first…
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The next question is if some enthusiast has hooked up such a 5-drive RAID to the eSATA connector on the MacBook Pro?
In theory at least that interface should suffice, at 3 Gbps it at least exceeds what the camera is feeding.
I agree it is getting to the point of silliness, but it could be a bit more portable than a Mac Pro setup.
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You are quite brave to be thinking to install Vista “early in the new year.”
Windows XP has had 5 years of continuous bug fixes, and is just beginning to get to the point where it’s quite stable and only the very frequent security patches irritate.
Vista will be brand new when it comes out, the development has been restarted from scratch once because it was such a disaster, and the advanced features that made it worthwhile to upgrade have had to be removed in order to get a somewhat working product out before the programmers’ retirement.
So what remains for you? Eye candy reminiscent of another long released desktop OS.
Vista side effects include millions of yet to be discovered security holes, instabilities, and incompatibilities with popular applications.
I expect InDesign CS3 will be approved for use with Vista, it is scheduled to be tested by naive end users as early as April 2007, i.e. six months away.
If you’re not doing layout for a living, it is of course OK to play around with the latest and “greatest,” but history tells us that all new software releases have unexpected problems that can hold up client checks for long periods.
I recently got burned by a project that can not be typeset on an Intel Mac, not on InDesign CS2, not on Quark 7, not on Windows; only Quark 6 on a PowerMac works in this certainly slightly unusual case, although I have been told that InDesign CS3 will be able to handle it when it is released.
That project cost me several months of frustration…and now I have to suffer with the ugly @##@$%&* that is Quark.