For those lucky to be using HDV

Stonefield wrote on 5/4/2005, 11:03 PM
Couple quick questions from a guy who is quite far from being able to use HDV but....I'm very curious....

How is the slow motion ?

Are there any improvments with keying and/or using blue/green screen?

Do the Vegas ( or After Effects, etc ) filters react any differently ?

How does the footage look projected on a LCD projector ?

What are the frame captures like ? ( I've seem some from Spot...beautiful )

Is a HDV piece downconverted to MiniDV look better than something recorded natively on a good MiniDV camera ? or.....HDV to MPEG-2/ MiniDV to MPEG-2 comparison ...

All this hoopla about HDV and I've seen so few samples....please share folks.....Anyone that knows me knows my work so you can understand why my subject matter would benefit from this new format.

Stonefield

Comments

Serena wrote on 5/5/2005, 12:48 AM
Well that's a comprehensive list of questions and I'm sure there are many to answer them. But I can give you a start, because I'm still exploring the basic elements. First, I'm presently editing using the Cineform HDconnect intermediate and this behaves very well in Vegas 5 (but I haven't tried Chroma-Key) in terms of slow motion, filters etc. Edited projects I've put down onto widescreen DV (mpeg2 DVD ; downconverted the image) and I've been pleased with that projected onto a 3 metre screen (wide, not diag) using a Sony VPL-HS10 LCD projector. Plugging the camera directly into the projector (using the component output from the camera) gave an excellent image at 1080i. Here it might be worth saying that my standard for a satisfactory image is 16mm film, so I was pleased how well Sony HDRFX1 1080 50i compares. I haven't done a straight comparison (I'd really have to shoot the same scene with both), but my quick impression was that the 1080i was better in terms of resolution. The limited depth of HDV (8bits in luminance) is a hassle that I'm learning to deal with, which again reinforces the observation that "film look" is everything to do with film emulsion and nothing to do with 24p and scratches!

hope this helps a little.

Serena
farss wrote on 5/5/2005, 4:22 AM
I think a bit of investigation into the HDV specs would answer a lot of your concerns.
If you consider it as discrete frames then it'll perform the same as DV with more resolution as the color sampling is the same as PAL DV. Therefore all FXs should work the same.
Same would go for SloMo although even if you're in PAL land you could shoot at 60i (same res as 50i) and get a slight improvement in SloMo from the higher frame rate.
I've seen well shot HDV on a BIG screen and it looks pretty impressive. At the same time badly shot HDV looks really bad, much worse than badly shot DV.
From what we're seeing downconverted HDV to DV25 looks better than what you get out of most DV cameras. Downconversion to 4:2:2 gives better results of course. I'd say the main limitation with the Z1 camera is the optics, then again a real HiDef lens would buy you 10 Z1s. The lens is still better than what you get on a 170, it's just that now you've got so much res you can see the limitations of the lens. A good matte box may address some of the problems I've seen.
If you use a HDV camera much as you would a 35mm film camera you will not have any problems with the major limitations of HDV, for your kind of work you'll be fine.

Bob.
tnw2933 wrote on 5/5/2005, 2:07 PM
Stonefield,

I have completed two HDV projects shot with a Sony HDR-FX1. Each project was about 25 minutes in final length after editing. One proejct was done in Vegas 5.0d using the Cineform HDConnect program for capture and conversion to the Cineform intermediatry files. The project edited in Vegas 6.0a was captured as m2t (raw HDV) files using the internal HDV capture of Vegas 6.0a. I then used Gearshift to convert to a DV proxy file, did all my editing, used Gearshift to convert all clips back to m2t, and rendered. Each of these projects has been rendered as both a HD wmv9 file and as a SD 16:9 DV file. I burned the latter to a DVD and viewed this in my home theater which consists of a Faroudja DVP-3000 processor feeding a Runco 980 Ultra projector displaying a 76 X 43 in. image on a Stewart Studiomatte 16:9 screen. I was able to view the wmv9 HD file on the same home theater system using an Avellink DVD player outputting a 1080i HD signal.

I had several slow motion clips in the first project. All looked superb.

I have not used blue/green screen keying, but the examples that I have seen on the web with HDV have appeared good to me. Keying titles and scrolling credits over HDV footage in these projects looked excellent.

I do not have or use After Effects filters, but all of the Vegas filters reacted just as they did with DV material as do the Pixelan filters.

I use a CRT projector in my home theater, but I have also viewed these two projects on an HP L2335 23 in. LCD display that has 1920 X 1200 resolution and shows the HDV footage as a 16:9 image on this display. It looks excellent, although in my opinion no LCD projector or panel can equal the 3D image quality (due to excellent black levels) of a well set up and maintained overhead front CRT projector. I did note that those clips on which I did color corection needed to be viewed on my CRT SD monitor to get the color correction I wanted. In other words, I could not adequately judge color correction by viewing on the LCD display or to put it another way if your are distributing for LCD display then you should judge and do color correction on an LCD display, and similarly for CRT displays.

Frame captures are stunning. Spot's are good examples, and I have captured equally beautiful still images.

Yes, I believe that HDV fed into Vegas and then encoded to 16:9 DV in Vegas does look better than DV footage from any consumer/prosumer camera that I have seen. I think this is due to both the enhanced color space of HDV and to the fact that Sony designed the FX1 to be a 16: 9 device from the ground up and no pixels are wasted even in SD DV.

There are lots of DV clips on the web. HDVinfo.com has some. See for yourself. You will begin to understand that there is a reason for the hoopla over HDV for those of us not able to capture or edit uncompressed HD.

I hope this helps.

Tom
Stonefield wrote on 5/5/2005, 7:37 PM
Some really good info here....Thanks so much guys....
MH_Stevens wrote on 5/5/2005, 9:25 PM
And don't think of us as lucky. We're just the avant garde, the trail blazers the dummies on who's backs the next generation of vidographers will ride.



epirb wrote on 5/6/2005, 2:09 PM
>Faroudja DVP-3000 processor feeding a Runco 980 Ultra <

Tom ,
Nice set up, Im jelly-ous ; ) ISF cal'd ?
tnw2933 wrote on 5/6/2005, 5:47 PM
Yes, I have had the system ISF calibrated, and I have it checked once a year.

Thank you for your kind comments. I do enjoy the system a great deal.

Tom