Eating Crow (a little, anyway)

Spot|DSE wrote on 9/1/2004, 6:54 PM
Admittedly...I've said several times that:
A: The JVC HD10 is not a sweet camera.
B: HDV will be a bitch to composite because of the content of color, or rather lack of it. (4:2:0)

Early tests of demo footage plus footage I shot of some Moab rocks from the HD10 weren't impressive in terms of pulling keys or layering.
Just got some footage from the JVC that while it's not quite as good as it would be as DV in the same conditions, this was lit very appropriately, managed by a VERY good DP guy that does a lot of production work for Cheyenne Pictures (Bruce Willis/Demi Moore company)
He was playing with this cam at a live event in Las Vegas, and wanted to have me do some compositing with the picture.
I gotta say that having a true pro that new the cam, and understood the lighting makes a much bigger difference than I would have thought it would have. He used Cokin glass on the front to balance out hotspots, he slightly under exposed anyway, and we were able to get a very nice image.
Vegas composited the M2T files with no problem at all, and by adding just a taste of unsharp mask, we got very clean and tight edges on the high contrast areas.
So...even though I'm still not totally overwhelmed with this camera, I find myself looking forward to Sony's HDV release in the next coupla months.
HDV still ain't HD Cam, but it's quite affordable...and 1080i looks awesome as an MPEG2 stream on DVD, and as a rendered 4:1:1 avi to DV. Even from a weak cam in the right hands.
The 3 chip cams will likely be very sweet indeed.

Comments

PeterWright wrote on 9/1/2004, 7:19 PM
Yes, my 8 year old EZ1 DV camera needed repair recently, and I was maybe going to have to replace it with a PD170, but I wanted to hang on till Sony's HDV camera arrived.

Fortunately the repair was successful, so I'm waiting ...... one big question - as it will record HDV as MPEG2, will a new version of Vegas with/without hardware be necessary for fluent editing?
Spot|DSE wrote on 9/1/2004, 7:29 PM
You can fluently edit now. You can also use the Cineform tools if you'd like to use their AVI format as an intermediary.
Just drop the M2t files on the Vegas timeline and start editing. Of course, you don't get external monitor unless you've got a high-def monitor, but they are getting cheaper by the day..
farss wrote on 9/1/2004, 7:47 PM
This is what confuses me about this and a few other bits of kit and I'm not just limiting myself to video. The stuff is priced to attract the average consummer yet you need to be a pro to get the best out of it.
Yet the pros will not touch it, they can afford the real thing usually so the product ends up falling in a black hole. Hopefully Sony will get their act together on their offering but I'm hoping but not yet convinced that HDV be the next big thing. Given Moore's law I can't see why they're still stuck in mpeg-2 land, surely the silicon is / will soon be available to use mpeg-4 compression.
Either way I guess the good news might be that DV kit is going to get a fair bit cheaper and there's sure nothing wrong with well shot DV, even upscaled to HiDef. The only thing that's a BIG issue down here is a decent 16:9 DV camera. We're looking very seriously at the Sony HDV camera not so much for the HD capability as for shooting SD 16:9.


Bob.

apit34356 wrote on 9/1/2004, 7:54 PM
Glad to see you have taken a bite out of the HD apple, cancel the apple, subst with watermelon! The Bella keyboard that I won from the VASST tour is very nice! Spot, from doing the tour with the Bella keyboard, do you have any special configurations that you would recommend? Thanks in advance.

AJP
Spot|DSE wrote on 9/1/2004, 7:58 PM
Only thing I can tell you about the Bella is that I've assigned my fave scripts to the various buttons at the top of the keyboard..And modified a couple keystrokes for things I do a lot. Like Shift+Z is my audio dim...

I've done a fair amount of HD, you saw some on the VASST tour. But HDV, I've messed with, and been really unimpressed. Until today.
Stonefield wrote on 9/1/2004, 9:11 PM
What kind of system would you recommend for pushing HDV files around ? I'm moving up to a P4 3.2, 1 Gig of fast ram, 1 meg cache, blah blah...would that be enough ?

Like I've said before, I love MiniDv but am waiting for something better for my FX work.
wcoxe1 wrote on 9/2/2004, 2:48 PM
farss has it right. The best use of the HDV camcorder may be, at least for a while, as a relly good 16:9 camcorder. I suspect a lot of us feel that way, as HD TV is WAY ahead of it, and no one can afford camcorders in that range around here.

What is the consensus, will they spring ANOTHER system on us in 5 years, with true 1920 x 1080 recording capability on us, and make the HDV obsolete, just like they want to do with Mini-DV?

Look at the Mini-DV life span. Will HDV last about the same time, only to be replaced by something much better?

I just don't see why they didn't to it NOW! Bring out the something better NOW, the technology is there already! I'm sick of changing formats. Analog to Mini-DV, to HDV. 78RPM to 33, to 16 (never caught on) to CD, to BluRay or whatever.

I was reading an analysis the other day about CD technology. Conclusion: the ONLY reason for the development of something to replace CD, as far as the manufacturer's point of view, was lack of profit. There was no longer any profit in the commodity called a CD or CD player/recorder. So, bring out something new and expensive to replace it, and start milking the cow, again.