New Full HD Cameras

Comments

PerroneFord wrote on 8/17/2010, 5:16 PM
"If HDV is a joke then so is all video, because no matter how good it gets it's still video."

Not sure how you arrive at this, but clearly it's a foolish statement.



"How far it needs to go is a matter of opinion. If you want to go all the way, then shoot Super 16mm on Kodak Vision 3 stocks with a full HD telecine. "

Why not 65mm? Hell shoot IMAX with an 8K scan. That's all the way.

"I know 1920x1080 video may be a step up... but were only talking about resolution here. Your still stuck with the same limited exposure latatude, shadow detail, poor density and color saturation that is inherent to all video formats regardless of resolution. "

Wrong. Well sort of. ALL media have limited exposure latitude, shadow detail, poor density, and color saturation. Really it just matters what you're comparing it to. The best digital cameras have already surpassed Kodak's Vision stock in these areas and are closing in on Vision2. Vision3 is another step ahead to be sure, but what was "good enough for Hollywood" just a few years ago, is where digital is today. So you may want to define your terms a bit better.


"My question is, you may have the higher resolution of 1920, but with the AVCHD compression, where does the integrity of the overall image performance fall between HDV and full uncompressed HD?"

Good implementations of the full AVCHD spec fall well beyond the HDV spec, and are generally equal to XDCAM at about 50Mbps. So roughly at a level on the edge of broadcast quality. Clearly no where near Uncompressed HD. By the time the h.264 codec, in full implementation is approaching 100-150mbps, it's virtually indistinguishable from Uncompressed though.

"I don't plan on running out to buy a new camera for another 3 or more years... but it's still interesting to keep track of HD video evolution, and the ability to easily work with it. "

Good, but you may want to do some more research on the current state of the art, because it sounds like you are well behind the times. At least in terms of professional cameras. What happens in the $900 consumer camera space is another world altogether.
farss wrote on 8/17/2010, 5:50 PM
"HDV was a joke. I feel sad for any sucker who went that route and now has to defend their lame purchase. "

I feel sad for any sucker. If you couldn't wrangle a marketable image out of a HDV camera then trust me, your wasting your money buying any camera.

Bob.



sguandal wrote on 8/17/2010, 7:42 PM
My reply might not be right on the thread of the discussion, but please bear with me. I have a Canon EOS 5D that shoots 1920x1080 HD movies (format is .MOV). THe images are great and all, but when I try to import them in Vegas Pro 9.0, it takes a really long time for them to be placed in the timeline, and the system invariably crashes (my PC is quite well-equipeed in terms of clock speed, Intel Quad, 8GB of RAM, etc.). What's the problem here?
Skratch wrote on 8/17/2010, 8:13 PM
"Wrong. Well sort of. ALL media have limited exposure latitude, shadow detail, poor density, and color saturation. Really it just matters what you're comparing it to. The best digital cameras have already surpassed Kodak's Vision stock in these areas and are closing in on Vision2. Vision3 is another step ahead to be sure, but what was "good enough for Hollywood" just a few years ago, is where digital is today. So you may want to define your terms a bit better."
It's not even close. Film and video are apples and oranges. HD video is really good "video" but even on shows like "Planet Earth" may come at a higher resolution, super clean image... but the highlughts and shadows blow out and burn out almost as easily as my 2004 Canon Optura mini DV. Film stocks have been changing and improving since the beginning, and so has video... but they are not the same... one consists of silver halide crystals and dyes in a gelatin base, the other an electronic representation of illuminated pixels. I am behind the times on HD camera models/codecs and trying to catch up. I think HD video is a great thing... curious and excited, but not militant. My response was pointed at hostile name calling in the previous post calling HDV users suckers, and my point is there is always a bigger fish... untill you get to 65mm that is.

PerroneFord wrote on 8/17/2010, 10:29 PM
Skratch, I grew up with film. Shot it for over 20 years and still shoot it. I'm aware of how it works.

The cameras used on Planet Earth are a FAR cry from cutting edge when it comes to digital technology. For that, you need to turn to shows like Apocolypto or 21 shot on the Panavision Genesis, or shows like District 9, shot on the RED.

Are you aware that the current RED is at 12.5 stops? Or the new ARRI Alexa is at 14 stops? Vision2 5218 was 14.5 stops. I have Kodak's specs and have seen the latitude charts.

Two years from now, digital will have as much latitude as Kodak 5219 (Vision3 ISO500), and will be far cleaner at rated ISO.

At the high end of this market, it's getting very, very close.
ritsmer wrote on 8/17/2010, 11:54 PM
@ squandal: There have been countless posts about this here. Try to search on i.e. 5d and mov etc.

You will find like this:
http://www.sonycreativesoftware.com/forums/ShowMessage.asp?ForumID=4&MessageID=719171
Rob Franks wrote on 8/18/2010, 3:07 AM
"HDV was a joke"

I'm not so sure I would go as far as to call HDV a "joke", particularly after it has served so well. I think HDV lived (or began) in a time of limited technology (relative to itself) and in a world that was leaving 4:3 but not yet arrived at 16:9

I certainly would not go back to HDV today..... but at the time.... I was sure glad to have it.
megabit wrote on 8/18/2010, 4:59 AM
" Version 1 of the HDV spec didn't allow it, it had to be recorded at PsF but now the Z5 and other cameras record "p". "

Bob, I still am a little confused about all this PsF vs. P stuff. Even the CineAlta EX1 has been sad to record "native progressive" - but when I started using the nanoFlash, I realized that 25p is really PsF (you need to set the nF to "PsF->Progressive" or it will record 50i)...

So, is it possible that the HD-SDI is PsF, but when recording to SxS the camera does the "true" 25p? I don't think so...

AMD TR 2990WX CPU | MSI X399 CARBON AC | 64GB RAM@XMP2933  | 2x RTX 2080Ti GPU | 4x 3TB WD Black RAID0 media drive | 3x 1TB NVMe RAID0 cache drive | SSD SATA system drive | AX1600i PSU | Decklink 12G Extreme | Samsung UHD reference monitor (calibrated)

farss wrote on 8/18/2010, 7:21 AM
"So, is it possible that the HD-SDI is PsF, but when recording to SxS the camera does the "true" 25p? I don't think so... "

No it is as you suggested. It records "p" but sends PsF down HD SDI. The reason is faily simple as I understand it. At the time the HD SDI spec did not permit progressive so to comply with the spec Sony split the frames into fields. Since the camera was designed the spec has been changed. This is the explaination from Sony.
Another reason I think is some routers and switchers cannot handle progressive.

Bob.
sguandal wrote on 8/18/2010, 7:39 PM
Thank you for the link. However, I still found no answer to my problem, so here I go again after additional unsucessful trials, hoping somoen gives me the right answer. No matter how hard I try, I am not able to have any video playback at all from my video clips in .MOV shot with a Canon D5 Mark II camera. The files are in 1902x108-x24, 30 fps. They can be imported in Vegas Pro 9.0d, but when I put them in the timeline, only the sound plays, no video at all. As if this was not enough, after a couple of minutes the program simply crashes and I have to close it by Task Manager! No hardware or software issues here: I run Windows 7 64 bits on a quite fast PC. What is going on here?!? Please HELP!!!
A. Grandt wrote on 8/18/2010, 9:55 PM
squandal said:

We have previously discussed the shortcomings of the 5D and .Mov format when using Vegas.

The conclusion then was that .MOV suck in Vegas, and that the 5D is not exactly standards compliant. It is doing something weird with the h.264 codec.

Add to that that h.264 may be a good streaming format, it is not good for editing.

The solution was to transcode to a DI, like Cineform. With Cineform it may cause the video to become 5 times larger, but a test showed that on a Vegas system which crashed at 20 5D .MOV clips, had no problem at all at 300 copies of the same clip in Cineform format. (I got tired of making copies after 300, it would have gone higher).
The problem is that with .MOV, Vegas tries to allocate a lot of memory per .MOV file, causing the FileIOSurrogate to simply run out of allocatable memory. It's 32-bit, even in 64-bit Vegas, as it handles the 32-bit codecs if I recall.
A. Grandt wrote on 8/18/2010, 10:03 PM
As for your video problems, did you by any chance update your QuickTime lately?

QT updates tend to break Vegas' QT support, don't ask me why, but it happens with a regularity that just screams to me as being a little too consistent to be accidental.
JJKizak wrote on 8/19/2010, 5:03 AM
I'm one of those HDV suckers. I like it just fine.
JJK
Dreamline wrote on 8/19/2010, 8:50 AM
HDV at 1440 1080 looks terrible when compared to the canon 7d. The real HD milestone was the Canon 7d not Sony HDV. Sure glad I spent half the money for a better camera and didn't listen to old videographers and their lame hype.

The Canon 7d has the WOW factor that HDV never had.

In fact video studios where I live who did take the HDV bait are out of business.

They went out of date with the cameras they bought that were never in date. lol

Most people who never understood the HD revolution bought into this lame HDV format. They were talking about TV standards and never realized it was the computer/gaming community that was leading the video revolution not the TV networks. The networks can't keep up with the Gaming Generation quest for the HOLY PIXEL.

Please, I don't expect you to get me. I'm the next generation and if you don't take the time you will never get it.

Old generations defend 1080i as if it was their mom stating the history of TV and movies as their defense.

Please, Sony make Camcorders 1080p 60p to match the LCDs we bought. 30p is is too "small" for me.

We all know 1080 60p cams are coming. 30p is easy to make and is already out of date. Hell my pd150 shoots 15p. Do you really think 30p is that much better?

60p is the REAL DEAL. The tm700 proved this. I don't have all day to school you because I'm too busy working.

After the next HDV dropout you get let me know how fine you really are. HDV was a lame format from the outset.
CClub wrote on 8/19/2010, 11:50 AM
I bought into the HDV. It just seems that there are intervals where you have to leap. I'm a part-time videographer, and I bought several V1U's. I made much more than my money back, but I'm definitely going to be getting rid of them in the next short bit.

How about this camera just released: full-time autofocus on a DSLR? What??:
http://photography.bhinsights.com/content/nikon-d3100-features-1080p-hd-video-full-time-autofocus.html
JJKizak wrote on 8/19/2010, 1:58 PM
Well with HDV no good I guess that all the TV stations and networks in the USA will have to replace all of their transmission MPEG2 equipment with what? They will have to replace all of the satellites with newer bandwidth channels? So if there is no HDV what do we watch on TV?
JJK
sguandal wrote on 8/19/2010, 5:22 PM
Reply to A.Grandt who answered my request foir help in handling .MOV files in Vegs Pro.
THANK YOU! This is what I neeed to find out. Indeed, even the support from Canon acknowledged that they do not claim compatibility with Vegas, (they asked "does it work with quicktime? can you play them in the camera? can you see them in your HDTV? then leave us alone!") neither do they intend to come out with a plug-in to solve the problem. I am going to try the suggested Cineform.
It's a real pity, though: I have done a huge amount of work with Vegas and fully enjoyed it with various movie formnat, SD or HD; and now that I have my dream camera (which I boutght 80% for the outstanding, cinematographic HD capability) I can't use it!! :-(
rs170a wrote on 8/19/2010, 5:45 PM
sguandal, I'm surprised that no one has yet mentioned Epic I.
It's only $45 and a lot of folks seem to like it for dealing with files from 5D and 7D cameras.

Mike
musicvid10 wrote on 8/19/2010, 5:54 PM
I'm even more surprised no one has suggested Sony MXF.
It's still part of Vegas, am I right?
Does work very well with 5D / 7D clips in my tests. Really nice even at 25Mbs.
Also interfaces with x264 without the colorspace conversion bug reported with other intermediates.
PerroneFord wrote on 8/19/2010, 6:46 PM
The codecs from these cameras is hanging on by a very thin thread. Reducing their quality even further by compressing one long-GOP codec with another one, isn't exactly the path to great results.

sguandal wrote on 8/19/2010, 6:51 PM
So then, Perroneford, what would you recommend for me?
PerroneFord wrote on 8/19/2010, 7:54 PM
I recommend:

1. You get your Quicktime installation in order

2. I recommend you do a search of this forum because I have personally addressed this question at least 10 times since December

3. I suggest you transcode to one of the codecs I suggested in those many threads

4. I suggest you use one of the two programs for transcoding that I listed.


So here's the short version...

Codecs = Cineform, DNxHD, Matrox VfW
Programs = Prism, Mpeg Streamclip

A. Grandt wrote on 8/20/2010, 9:42 AM
sguandal, it's time consuming as heck, but you can use Vegas to transcode the 5D .MOV titles to for instance Cineform (it's in the .AVI container settings). But as was said, you need to fix the Quick Time.
This Knowledgebase entry should provide some insight.

Others have mentioned it before, but it seems that while QT works pretty well on Mac, it does seem to screw up more often than not on PC's.
Dreamline wrote on 10/9/2010, 1:08 PM
Hey I'm not the only one that thinks HDV is bad. In fact Barry Green has noted that he is NOT a fan of it either. If you bought into HDV, you really didn't do your homework in understanding HD. I've watched the studios where I live go practically under with their lame looking HD.

My HD looks awesome and my business thrives in a bad economy. I just bought a house, a new car, and I'm planning for my 1st child next year. Thank God I didn't buy into the hype on the forums about HDV from old people who don't have a clue. In fact mpeg 2 is an old mans codec with no place in HD. The Titans are dead and the time for the Olympians has arrived. Good ridden.