Ron Shook
Forum Replies Created
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Kathlyn,
[Kathlyn Lindeboom] “Steve Rhoden, who joins us from Kingston, Jamaica”
Super Duper! Steve couldn’t be more welcome considering his patience and help. The only thing better would be for him to set up a tent and field kitchen for a flood of visitors in 5 months. (g)
Ron Shook
Shoulder-High Eye Productions
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Trey,
[Trey Isbell] “I am going to look into the panasonic cameras. What kind of burner do you use if you have a high definition camera”
The Panasonic camcorders I was refering to are SD only. If you want HD for under $1k, you’ll almost certainly have to get a single chipper if you’re purchasing new. I’m sure someone will correct me if I’m wrong. I don’t think that there is a 3 chip camcorder out there that does HD for under $1k.
Most folks who shoot some form of HD now, still deliver on SD DVD, so to answer your question, you still probably use a regular SD DVD burner.
Ron Shook
Shoulder-High Eye Productions
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Trey,
[Trey Isbell] “I have seen a few panasonic videocams on ebay that are 3ccd for about 500 dollars but I dont know how good they are.”
Panasonic is/was the only major manufacturer to make really low cost ($600-1200) 3 chip DV camcorders. They are based on 1/6 and 1/4″ CCD chips and for what they are they are pretty good. Not so good for low available light situations but quite OK when the light is high as in most of the outdoor situations that you anticipate using the camcorder. They aren’t going to perform up to the degree of $2.5-5k 3 chip units, but in the outdoor situations you want to capture, not too far off the mark.
Be certain to budget for a good polarizing filter for whatever camcorder you get. It’s essential anytime your background is the sky. Perhaps another $100 for a good one. And make sure whatever camcorder you get allows you to control the exposture manually.
Ron Shook
Shoulder-High Eye Productions
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Alister,
[Alister Chapman] “That’s not at all correct.”
I stand corrected. In Theory. (g) What users are experiencing in practical usage is largely a difference in offload speed attributable to the different sizes of the files. It may not be the same tomorrow, but it is today. The speed of the cards themselves is also a levening factor. P2 being raided allows it to get the most out of the PCMCIA slot.
Ron Shook
Shoulder-High Eye Productions
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Alister,
[Alister Chapman] “Additionally the Express card PCI bus permit speeds around 800mb/s or 100MB/sec so transfers are 3 to 4 times faster than P2 will ever be.”
Just a technical point as I don’t want to get in the middle of defending one or the other. The Express card slot isn’t that tremendously faster than a PCMCIA slot. The biggest determinant of speed of offload is the fact that XDCAM HD is a 35mbps codec whereas DVCPro HD is a 100mbps codec, ergo, the XDCAM codec, all other things being equal will offload almost 3 times as fast. It’s more like 4 times as fast because of the somewhat increased speed of the Express card slot.
Ron Shook
Shoulder-High Eye Productions
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Trey,
[Trey Isbell] “Where can you get a decent 3ccd video camera for under 1000 dollars.”
I’d say that you can’t, but then I’ve never attempted to do so, or even looked in that direction, so I’m not the one to answer that question definitively. I’d quess that if you doubled that amount you might have some success.
Ron Shook
Shoulder-High Eye Productions
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Don,
Your advice is excellent, except this last part is misleading.
[Don Hutcheson] “And if you buy a Sony DVCAM format camera, shoot in DVCAM all the time. DVCAM is superior to MiniDV (except in HD) because it lays down a wider video and audio track. A larger original file won’t suffer as much degradation as it is manipulated and compressed in post (editing).”
The video layed down to DVCAM tape and to miniDV tape is identical and once it is ingested into the NLE, performs in post identically. DVCAM tape is manufactured to more rigid standards and moves through the tape mechanism more rapidly, thus separating the elements of the DV signal more, so that they are less prone to drop out and other problems should the tape path be slightly out of whack or dirty. The same size DVCAM tape as MiniDV will have less running time because it goes through the tape mechanism faster. DVCPRO25 tape goes even further along the robustness continuum by running even faster with a better tape forumlation than DVCAM with a cooresponding decrease in running time but only for camcorders capable of shooting this tape.
Practical considerations inform your decision about which tape forulation and format to use. It’s very hard to justify using DVCAM tape, which is 3 times the cost of miniDV for 2/3rds the running time, for a hobbiest project that isn’t going to significantly suffer if there’s the possibility of a little gitch here and there. It’s just as hard to justify using miniDV tape to save a few bucks for a commercial spot where you look like a fool if the good take has a glitch in it. Match the tape cost and quality to the job, but you aren’t giving up any imaging quality by using miniDV and not DVCAM, just increasing the slight chance of a problem. DVCAM tape should hold up better over time than MiniDV for archival purposes, and if you decide that you don’t need to keep what’s on it, is more reliable for reuse in non-critical applications.
Ron Shook
Shoulder-High Eye Productions
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[john sharaf] “Panasonic AVC-I is really four times as good as that on the XDCAM.”
With respect, the relative quality levels of the competing codecs are not even close to 4 times different. You have to look at these apples and oranges from several perspectives to come to any even speculative conclusions, and we’ll have to wait for the real proof of the pudding when we can compare them directly. The fact that the Panasonic is intraframe and the Sony interframe makes a huge difference. The old rule of thumb when looking at MPEG2 compression is that interframe (long GOP) compression is approximately 2.5 times more efficient than intraframe compression (I-frame), just harder for the NLE to work with.
All compression schemes are conscious compromises. Since MPEG2 compression is perhaps a little more efficient in intraframe than the intraframe DCT compression used in DVCProHD, there is very little difference in quality between the 35 mbps XDCAM HD interframe codec and the 100 mbps DVCPRO HD intraframe codec, except where the respective companies decided to compromise. Panasonic went for 4:2:2 color space for improved color resolution and vibrancy and Sony went for 4:2:0 color space to improve the spacial resolution. These choices have been born out in the practical applications of shooters, who for the most part agree that XDCAM HD is sharper than DVCPRO HD but that DVCPRO HD images have a color vibrancy superior to XDCAM HD. This assumes that camera heads are equal which of course they never are, which is another reason that we have to look at things in the real world.
Now both Sony and Panasonic have new codecs, a 50 mbps, 4:2:2, interframe MPEG2 XDCAM HD codec for Sony and a variant of MPEG4, 50 and 100 mbps, AVC intraframe codec for Panasonic. The old rules of thumb don’t directly apply anymore because the AVC codec, if we are to believe Panasonic (and let us do so for simplicity), is twice as efficient as DVCPRO HD. If the old competing codecs were roughtly equivalent in quality, then the new competing codecs will give the edge to Panasonic, because it is twice as efficient as the old, while the new Sony is approximately a 1.5 times improvement. But that means that the Panasonic codec is perhaps 30-50% better than the Sony, not 4 times better.
We will have to wait and see how this works out in the field, but my suspicion is that there will be little real difference in the quality, such that other things like work flow and the subjective response to the camcorders’ imagery will be of greater importance than any mostly non visible differences in codec quality. Another thing to watch out for is the relative ease or difficulty of dealing with the respective codecs in the nle. We already know that long GOP XDCAM HD is harder to deal with, and we know that AVC-I takes more CPU horsepower to decode than MPEG2, but I at least haven’t heard how much. It may be a wash or it may not?
Ron Shook
Shoulder-High Eye Productions
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Rick,
[rick kadri] “thanks ron for your help, i actually found a production house who would run the file from the p2 straight out to component beta PAL.”
Excellent! It helps, knowing exactly what you need and want, when making the calls.
Ron Shook
Shoulder-High Eye Productions
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Rick,
[rick kadri] “i’ll call tomorrow and see if they can work from an HD file dumped back to my HVX through P2.”
If they can actually work from a file rather than tape, just dump it to a FAT32 formatted external hard drive. You shouldn’t have to put it on a card, but I could be wrong. Ask ’em.
Ron Shook
Ron Shook
Shoulder-High Eye Productions
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