I am sorry you feel that way Dreamline. HDV filled a gap of a couple of years very nicely. The Winter Olympics that year benefited a lot from the new HDV.

My Z1u still outshoots a lot of "FullHD" AVC units. HDV units are still in wide use in the industry. Technology improves quickly and even the best of today with be outpaced quickly the way things are going. HDV filled the void during its time and the folks who bought it and used it benefited from it. The HDCAM EX clearly outpaced it in that market. There continues to be new and improved hardware and compression. To be honest with you I can't see why anyone would waste time trashing HDV and its use when it clearly was a good option.

I did not jump on the DSLR bandwagon, because its useful life looks to be even less than HDV's. While clearly a great step forward, the 7D and 5D were not ready for industrial grade production on a wide scale. Sony's new larger sensor consumer camcorder and Panasonic's new industrial 4/3's sensor unit signal that real video production units are going to be here very shorty. Then again, the RED One trumped it to begin with.

dreamline, you're so full of it i'm smiling.......

"I also have the TM700 picked it up on sale and the one thing I wish it had was 1080p 30fps setting so I can shoot in progressive at lower frame rates in lower light settings."

This "trick" used to work with the old Canon HV20, which also didn't have a 1080 30p mode. Use the slow shutter setting and shoot at 60p, but at 1/30 shutter. The SLS settings use frame accumulation to simulate shutter speeds below the frame rate. if it works, post your results.

Would it be remiss of me to point out that the highest grossing movie posted with Vegas was shot with a HDV camera?
That movie probably had one if not the highest ROIs of any movie apart from Blair Witch. Put simply anyone who thinks their choice of camera has anything to do with the success of their business model has rocks in their head.
If today I had had the capital to preorder an Elexa I'd be doing nicely. That would change if I waited a year. As I was reminded only a couple of days ago in this town I can hire a Red, a box of nice cine primes, an operator, and a DIT for $500 / day. I sure hope those guys have already paid for the camera and lenses. I charge $500 / day just to be there :)

Bob.

Dreamline, could you post a link to some of your work, or a place to purchase your DVDs. If you've done successful, professional, work using a 7D and a TM700 I would be interested in seeing the results.

If you are simply the DP or camera operator, that's fine, just tell me which commercial stuff list you in their credits. I'll go check it out.. Always open to different ways of doing things.

I really like my Sony HVR-Z7U HDV camera. I love that I can just grab the clips of my compact flash memory card, copy them to a hard drive, and start editing right away. Because of the compression, a simple off the shelf USB2 drive works just fine (although I usually do use eSATA). Quality looks stunning. Not the shallow dept of field of a Canon DSLR, but aside from that, just wonderful. I've done a number of ads for local businesses at the neighborhood movie theater, and I must say, that even on a full movie screen the quality looks great. I don't know what the other ads are shot with, but my quality looks a bit better than the guys I compete with.

At some point I want a large sensor camera, but not as much for the extra 480 lines as for the shallow depth of field and the lower noise in low light.

AVCHD is a million times better than HDV. Those who bought into a dead format have a hard time believing this. The math is roughly 1 bit of AVCHD comparable to 9 bits of HDV. AVCHD on my Bravia looks like a magic window where HDV looks like little blocks comparable to 8 bit Nintendo. There is more to it than that, but thanks for the good laugh. Seeing people defend HDV is a gas.

In Adam Wilt's preview of the Sony NX5U camera, he mentions that:

"Overall, the NX5U’s FX (24 Mbit/sec) AVCHD looks very good; roughly comparable to 35 Mbit/sec XDCAM EX. With lower bitrates, lower quality: 17 Mbit FH looks a bit better than HDV, 9 Mbit HQ looks a bit worse, and 5 Mbit looks perfectly acceptable as long as there isn’t much motion!"

Link to Adam Wilt's NX5U preview:
http://provideocoalition.com/index.php/awilt/story/preview_sony_nxcam/P1/

For me the question isn't so much HDV vs AVCHD as it is first generation HDV vs AVCHD transcoded into something else that is now second generation. By the time you go to a finished product its: HDV encoded into something else that is now second generation vs AVCHD that is encoded into a 2nd generation intermediate and then rerendered into a 3rd generation final product.

No question that AVCHD can look really good, and that workable AVCHD editing systems are likely the future. For the jobs that need to be done this week though, HDV is pretty darned good.

during the first few days after purchasing my first HDV (1st generation) cam (Sony HC-1), I was disappointed at how the image fell apart while panning across trees, or a grassy lawn down close to the grass - just too much detail for the bandwidth.

I recently bought a Panasonic TM700, and at 28mb/s MP4, it seems to do much better under such demanding scenarios. So far, so good . . .

The TM700 also shoots in 1080/24p. Yeah, this is STORED as 1080/60i (via pulldown) for absolutely no good reason, but it is real 24p once you run an inverse telecine on it.

For equally arcane reasons, much like the 1080p button, you have to set "Cinema Mode" to get 24p. Panasonic does seem capable of actually including all video modes on one menu -- my HMC40 works that way. But apparently, consumers find it exciting and fascinating to hunt use different means for the same function, or at least Panasonic thinks they do.

1080/30p is not an approved AVCHD option, because AVCHD is derived from Blu-Ray, and they didn't support 1080/30p in Blu-Ray. But 1080/24p is supported, native (eg, without pulldown) in Blu-Ray. So why not the TM700?

As for 28Mb/s vs. 21Mb/s or whatever... you really do need a higher rate for 1080p. It's not as if the other modes are being recorded in a substandard way... with half the number of frames per second, you'd get about the same quality video at 14Mb/s, all things being equal. They're not precisely equal -- with less motion within any GOP in 60p vs. 60i, 30p, or 24p, you can get the same visual quality with a slightly lower per frame rate. But make no mistake... 60p is twice the information of 60i or 30p.