[Gord Stephen]

Well, HDV is a loooong way from lossless… It’s in fact very agressively compressed (that’s why HDV can be recorded to the same miniDV tapes that DV could). And whether or not it’s broadcast quality depends on who you talk to. It’s certainly no golden standard…

I wouldn’t call it old fashioned, though… Just less shiny then the latest and greatest offerings. There was a time when consumer tapeless meant super-compressed, ugly video, but now the higher bitrate flavours of AVCHD (the format used in card and HDD-based cameras) use more advanced, efficient compression than HDV, to deliver higher quality images with less artifacts, and at a lower bitrate. The tradeoff is that you need more processing power to work with the footage.

Codec aside, going tapeless has its own merits (well… card-based tapeless. Exclusively HDD cameras are… not so ideal, for a variety of reasons). Tapeless means no tape dropouts, cards take up less space, faster than realtime capturing, etc…

To get back to your original question… the only really major upgrade the HV40 is offering is native 24P recording capability (as opposed 24P in a 60i wrapper). If you’re planning on using both cameras interchangeably or for multicam work, you’ll probably want to stick to a common framerate/pulldown scheme (ie not native 24P). And if you’re always shooting in some other mode (24PF, 30P, 60i), there won’t be any difference between the HV30 and the HV40 anyways. You could even wait until the HV40 launches and then get an HV30 on clearance.

Hope that helps,

Gord

[Gord Stephen]

Hi Joe,

I’ve done a bit of hiking/canoeing with a video camera, most recently with the Canon HV30. I think it’s a great camera for that application – small and cheap, with respectable video quality. Given that it’s really a consumer camera, you don’t get manual controls to the full extent that you would on a prosumer or professional model – but that’s more of an issue in a controlled shoot setting, and is probably forgivable when you’re standing on top of a mountain.

Tapes make a nice storage medium for that kind of work too, although depending on how much footage your student is looking to capture, they could get bulky… last summer I was out on a hiking trip with a friend who brought 20 miniDV tapes with him… I had to make it pretty clear before we left that he’d be the one carrying them the whole time! 😉 A nice compact, light, and more rugged alternative to tapes is solid state media – especially SD cards (because she won’t be able to dump the footage off cards, she’ll need a bunch of them… and sinking thousands of dollars into P2 or SxS cards probably isn’t that appealing). The Canon HF10 is pretty similar to the HV30, but it shoots to SD cards.

Those are lower-end, consumer-y cameras – if she’s looking for something higher end, the Panasonic HMC-150 is a prosumer camera that also shoots to SD cards. It’s almost 4 times as heavy, though, (and pretty much any prosumer camera will be), and it sounds like that may be a consideration.

Hope that helps.

Gord

[Gord Stephen]

Hmm. I don’t have any experience with that software / that issue… so anything I could tell you would just be the result of google-ing. If you’re stuck, you could try using CapDVHS – looks like you can get it at https://www.videohelp.com/tools/CapDVHS – it’s free software that apparently can be used to capture HDV to disk. Then you could import it into your editing program. I’ve never used it and don’t know anything about it… but I suppose it’s an option.

By the way, what versions/skews of those programs are you using? It looks like the Standard version of Studio 12 doesn’t do HDV (but the Plus and Ultimate skews, Movie Maker HD, and Creator should…). I tried capturing from my HV30 to Movie Maker on my laptop, but apparently the version of Movie Maker that ships with Vista Business isn’t worthy of HDV capture support. You’re supposedly alright with Vista Ultimate though…

Hope that helps… a little? Sorry I couldn’t be of more use.

Gord

[Gord Stephen]

Hey James – What exactly is the issue you’re having? Are you just wanting to capture footage from tape? What software are you working with?

Gord

[Gord Stephen]

Hi again Antonio,

Saw this and thought that it might interest you. It was shot on an HV20.

White Red Panic (HD) from Ayz Waraich on Vimeo.

Gord

[Gord Stephen]

Really? I didn’t know about that, cool. Saves buying a Blu-Ray burner…

Gord

[Gord Stephen]

[Antonio de la cruz] “So you think a feature can’t be done with this camera?”

I would think that what Ted means is that you can’t shoot a ‘film’ (which would have to be shot on, well, actual film) with that camera. You’re in fact making a ‘feature length video’?

This is the Barry Green article that you’re talking about, right? I hadn’t seen that before, very interesting. You’re sure that you don’t want to try that technique? With a mini-SD card is seems simple enough.

If you want have a film look, you really need to shoot in 24P. If you don’t want to try that Barry Green method for controlling exposure, then switch out of CINE Mode to Tv and lock the shutter speed at 1/48 (which should be what you’re aiming for, it equates a standard 180 degree shutter angle on a film camera), and you won’t have to worry about it dropping to 1/24. Then go to manual exposure and use lights to get the lighting that you want, tweaking both the exposure and lighting until you get a nice, (hopefully) grain-less picture. Switch to manual focus and use the Focus Assist button to get a closer look for grain.

Does that help?

Gord

[Gord Stephen]

Hi Antonio,

As far as work done with the HV20/30, there’s a lot out there – https://vimeo.com/HV20 is always a good place to look. There’s also a lot of stuff on the hv20.com forums – check out the ‘HD Shorts’ and ‘Footage’ boards in particular.

You’re absolutely right with regards to sound quality. I think that it’s pretty safe to assume that any ‘good’ short or feature would not have used the HV30’s onboard mic. I’m by no means an audio expert, but I would say that *anything* (properly used) would probably give better audio results than using the onboard camera mic.

Hope that helps… a little at least.

Gord

[Gord Stephen]

No problem. 🙂 It’s not exactly the most intuitive thing in the world…

Gord

[Gord Stephen]

Hi Shyam,

Once you’ve navigated down to the microphone level control, click the joystick back up once to activate manual audio level control (then the little M in a circle shows up and you see a green bar under the audio level indicator). Then you can click and hold to the left to turn the audio level down.

The same applies for exposure. Hope that helps!

Gord