Gord Stephen
Forum Replies Created
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Jose,
Yeah, you would need need to capture direct to the card as you were shooting footage. Not that much of a pain for a studio setup, but it definitely becomes a hindrance if you want to take the camera anywhere else. If you’re happy with the results that you’re getting with your ZR40, the HDMI out would probably be overkill. Of course, you could always start with recording HDV and then move up if you ever decide that you want or need to. (As an aside, and I’m sure that someone will correct me if I’m wrong on this, it’s my understanding that the XH-A1 doesn’t output uncompressed, be it through HDMI or SDI – interesting, eh?)
As far as alternative cameras that would work better: as long as you’re recording in DV or HDV, you’re recording with 4:2:0 or 4:1:1 chroma subsampling, which is what makes keying more of an issue. No matter what camera you shoot with (again, assuming you’re not moving up to a less compressed format), you’ll have that to deal with. So then the issue becomes finding the camera that works the best within those limitations… and well, I’m an HV30 fanboy, you can guess my recommendation. 😉
Hope that helps!
Gord
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Hi Jose,
If you’re going to be shooting in front of a green screen and compositing, you might want to consider the HV30. The DV and HDV formats are less-than-ideal for compositing given how much they compress the footage – but with HDV, at least you have some more pixels to play with…
The HV30 will also output uncompressed video (hasn’t been encoded to HDV yet) from the HDMI port (4:2:2 colour space and 1920×1080 square pixels, as opposed to HDV’s 4:2:0 and 1440×1080 ‘rectangular’ pixels), which is a lot more appealing for greenscreen use. That being said, to go that route you would need an HDMI capture card on your computer (they’re affordable, but more money nonetheless), and you would need to make sure that it was compatible with Vegas, in your case.
Personally I’m a fan of the HV30 because it’s cheap but has potential for expansion. Of course, at the end of the day, it’s your money – if you plan on eventually moving up to an XH-A1, perhaps you can afford to wait. Maybe shoot and composite some test footage with the ZR40 and see if you can live with the results?
Gord
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I work with an HV30 and CS3, no issues. You should be good 🙂
Gord
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That setup’s more than sufficient for rescaling HDV, you won’t have any issues there. I’m not a Mac guy but I’d imagine that you would just need to capture the footage from your camera in iMovie or equivalent, and then export it out as SD (iMovie can probably even handle the DVD burn process).
And just keep in mind that Spiderman 3 wasn’t shot on an HV30. 😉
Gord
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A computer could probably do a better quality downscale then the camera. Maybe try capturing the video to your computer, using software to do the conversion, and then burning the output to DVD?
It would take longer… but it might be worth a try.
Gord
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I know that the Canon HV30 will record JPEGs to an SD card during tape playback – it’s a great camera for the price, too.
Gord
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Hi Dan,
It would seem to me that you’re out of luck… a DVD video disk can only contain SD content.
That being said, your HD video can still be viewed and shared in its full resolution on your computer, or your camera can be plugged directly in to an HDTV and your footage viewed that way. Another compromise might be to put your footage onto a DVD and play it back through an upconverting DVD player… your source would still be SD, but it might look a little nicer.
If you’re dead-set on getting your HD footage onto a video disk then Blu-Ray would seem to be your only option…
That probably wasn’t the answer that you were looking for, but do any of those alternatives help?
Gord