[Uli Plank]

Nice

[Uli Plank]

The imager in the Canon H1 (and it’s newer siblings) is the best in it’s class.
During a huge HD event last summer we tested it with a P&S adapter, cine prime lenses and a Megacine harddisk recorder. Even experienced DOPs used to high-end HD cameras (which were around at the same time, from 950s to Arri D20 and Thompson Viper) were impressed with the quality. The original lens, OTOH, is pretty much unacceptable for a professional shooter.

Regards,

Uli

[Uli Plank]

As I explained already, 50p (with open shutter on the HVX200) will give you very much the same amount of motion blur a traditional film camera has. It will never expose the full time, since film has to be moved mechanically and can’t be exposed during that time. A typical camera has a shutter opening of 180 degrees fo it’s rotational shutter, and that will give you 1/48th of a second at 24 fps.

An electronical camera can give you nearly full time of exposure. If you use 25p and leave the shutter open, you’ll get exaggerated motion blur as compared to traditional film with 1/25th of a second.

The secrets to avoid stuttering are the so-called “panning rules”, which every film DOP knows, but video folks never cared about plus controlled depth of field, which is difficult to achieve with small chips.

How will your film be screened in the theater?

Regards,

Uli

[Uli Plank]

And for choma-keying only I can recommend DV Matte Blast as well. It’s realtime in Motion and very easy to use.

Regards,

Uli

Author of “DVDs gestalten und produzieren”, a book on professional DVD-authoring in German.

[Uli Plank]

It depends how much of a “pro” level you need. You could attach a Dell 24″ to it via DVI and happily edit away while seeing every single pixel of your footage.
But if you need more serious monitoring of color, interlace issues or SD quality, get yourself the Matrox MXO and a professional monitor. The professional Panasonic LCD 17″ is in wide use, but I prefer my good old tube in the JVC 1710.

Regards,

Uli

Author of “DVDs gestalten und produzieren”, a book on professional DVD-authoring in German.

[Uli Plank]

I’d second this. Since updating to version 5.1.2 I didn’t have any problems with files spanning cards. They only need to be online at the same time: either mounted as cards or directories on a harddisk all pointed to under “path”. The MXF-importer will do the rest and string them together.

Regards,

Uli

Author of “DVDs gestalten und produzieren”, a book on professional DVD-authoring in German.

[Uli Plank]

True, but you can only get any advantage from it when capturing live to a strong RAID. You don’t gain anything when capturing from tape.
Nevertheless, it can make sense to ingest HDV via SDI to DVCProHD with AJA or BlackMagic cards. This codec puts less stress on the CPU and makes your workflow more comfortable.

Regards,

Uli

Author of “DVDs gestalten und produzieren”, a book on professional DVD-authoring in German.

[Uli Plank]

You’ll use native HDV with FCP, not the Apple codec. Just the same settings that work with a Sony camcorder are fine with the HVR-M25.

Regards,

Uli

Author of “DVDs gestalten und produzieren”, a book on professional DVD-authoring in German.

[Uli Plank]

Yes, that’s correct, YUV (which is used for all video) is weighted. The numbers are:

Y (or Luma)= 30% Red + 59% Green + 11% Blue Analog Luminance
U (or Cb)=R-Y the red signal component minus the luminance
V (or Cr)=B-Y the blue signal component minus the luminance

BTW, this is the reason why green works a bit better than blue for chroma-keying with video.

Only very high-end systems for film production can record RGB (just like scanners), where you don’t have this limitation. Can you spell $$$,$$$ ?

That said, from my own experience the HVX200 doesn’t have any bigger problems with red (or blue) than other camcorders in it’s class. Highly saturated red or blue is always a problem with video. DVCProHD, while highly compressed too, is even a bit better than HDV.

Regards,

Uli

Author of “DVDs gestalten und produzieren”, a book on professional DVD-authoring in German.

[Uli Plank]

Well, in the end it depends on the ‘look’ you want. 720p25 will look on TV like film transferred to video (telecined).
But there’s nothing wrong with shooting 720p50 and throwing every other frame away for the cinema, since traditional film cameras have 1/48th of a second exposure time and you’ll get 1/50th