Sanyo VPC-FH1 Issues

hazydave wrote on 9/19/2009, 1:14 AM
I recently got a Sanyo VPC-FH1 to play around with. This is part of an effort to stop wearing out expensive cameras doing everyday stuff... and as well, to have at least one halfway decent camera that's using solid-state storage.

For those who haven't seen it, this is a very tiny SDHC based AVCHD camcorder. Nothing to write home about on controls or features, other than the video quality is amazing for a $400 camera. The single 1/2.5" sensor rivals my best camera, but the really cool thing is that it can record 1080/60p. If nothing else, that lets me decide on 1080i or 720p for making Blu-Ray legal video after the fact, not while shooting.

This some some pretty heavy duty video. On my Q9550 system, I can't play it back in realtime on WMP or VLC, though it works in Splash Lite, but sucking down up to 75% of CPU (there's no video acceleration on the GPU used in any of these).

Loading 1080/60p AVC into Vegas, though, it always crashes. Since this is the first real 1080/60p video I've played around with, I can't be sure, but it looks like a bug in the MPEG-4 import module, not an issue with 1080/60p in general. My intial though was just to drop this into Vegas and render to MPEG-2 or something for editing. That failed, though it does appear to work fine in Nero Vision 9... if you've ever used Nero Vision, you know this to be embarrassing to Vegas, that Nero does anything better than Vegas.

Anyway, given the cheap price, tiny size, and good low-light performance (among the best in any consumer camcorder), this is a decent extra camera. Sound is undexpandable, but I would have other cameras and at least one field recorder if I used this seriously. Only digital image stabilization, which has issues, but also doesn't break if you drop it.. this would make a better backpacking camera by far than my Canon HV-10. Big win today... my daughter's JV Soccer game looks GREAT in 1080/60p.

Comments

LReavis wrote on 9/19/2009, 11:48 AM
I've been playing around with the HD2000 - basically the same camera except mic input (and this one gives full ISO/shutter speed/aperture control - not sure if the VPC-FH1 does?). Anyway, I recently posted in another thread a portion of a test pattern shot with the Sanyo showing near-800 lines of resolution! I really was pleasantly surprised.

I've been putting the files on the timeline of Vegas 9b and rendering out to a more useable intermediate while retaining the 60p format, which I love. I've even played around with green-screen keys, pan/crop, color correction, etc. No problems. Really getting to love this camera.

However, once I put all my clips from my recent Alaska cruise on the timeline and it crashed. Perhaps you're putting too many on at once?

WinXP 32-bit, Q6600 on Asus P5B, 8 GB RAM (anticipating Oct. 22 release of Win7 64 bit).
hazydave wrote on 9/19/2009, 12:10 PM
Yeah, pretty good for such a small, relatively cheap camera.. and yeah, the FH1 does give you those controls... I think the form-factor and lack of the mic input, headphone output, and cold shoe are the main differences. Well, and the FH1 ran me $420.

I kind of figured people would laugh when I suggest this rivals (and sometimes exceeds) video from my $3000 Sony of a few years back. Not only that, crazy manual control for an entry-level consumer price point.. you can set manual shutter speed, you can set averaged, center weighted, or spot metering for auto exposure, even set the ISO. I have a Panasonic pocket P&S still camera that cost nearly as much, and doesn't offer this kind of control. Oh, and a wide-angle adaptor from some old Sony Digital8 camera I have collecting dust around here fit perfectly.

I got this to potentially replace my "C" camera.. and it has.. I'm putting that one (one of those Hitachi Blu-Ray models) up on eBay this weekend, in all likelihood.

So far, I've just tried a single clip at a time, in both Vegas 8c (ignored it), 9b 32-bit (loaded it, crashed after the audio rendered) and 9b 64-bit (same). But this was always into an existing project template... maybe I need to try it from scratch or something. Though actually, it turns out Nero 9 isn't as bad as I expected... it's actually using all for cores for rendering. So I have a work-around, though I like Vegas much more, and have access to more alternate formats there.

And yeah, I put some of the 60p soccer video (shot yesterday, a few hours after the camera arrived) and it's spectacular (though you need a PS3, or the camera itself I guess, to play it back at 60p). I'm still kind of in shock at the quality... I guess Sanyo's got to "try harder", not being one of the "big four".... I did read they do their own CMOS sensors.
LReavis wrote on 9/19/2009, 11:33 PM
really strange, your problem . . . just for a test, I put four short green-screen clips from my Sanyo on the timeline for a total length of 1:52 seconds, keyed out the green with New Blue keyer, and rendered. 40 min. later I had a perfect file, no crashes or sneezes. Rendered to 59+ fps (twice 29.97) with Cineform set to progressive. Project properties set to progressive 59+ fps, best rendering quality, 8-bit color. In the Video tab of Properties, I set dynamic preview RAM to zero; rendering 1 thread only.

While it was rendering, I also was browsing the web with Linux virtual VMware machine; also I worked a while on an Illustrator drawing and printed it out. All went smooth as silk.

Previously, I have rendered to 29.97 fps, no problem (you could do this with the free version of Cineform installed on Vegas 9b - see other threads for how to do that). Even 32-bit float color space projects rendered OK, albeit slowly.

Set your CPU/memory timing/voltages to default values, set up properties/options as shown above. Surely there must be a way to get these files to render in Vegas on your system. I've had more than my share of rendering crashes with Vegas, but never with Sanyo files as long as I don't put too many on the timeline at once.
Jay_Mitchell wrote on 9/20/2009, 10:12 PM
NeoScene will solve your troubled relationships with the Sanyo VPC-FH1 and Sony Vegas Pro 9. The only thing that I wish the camera had right now is a LANC port for use with a Varizoom controller. I love mine!

Jay
LReavis wrote on 9/21/2009, 10:52 AM
at first I also missed the LANC for the same reason - I couldn't use my Varizoom. But I found that the autofocus is quite accurate, even though slow, and by pressing the "up" button on the remote, you can lock the focus once you get it. Also, the remote allows zooming out/in, so there's not too much need now for Varizoom for for the way I usually shoot (I rarely zoom during a take - only before, then I'd leave it set for the duration of the take)
hazydave wrote on 9/22/2009, 11:32 AM
You can also add focus lock as ab "operation shortcuts" on the set button.. there are a few functions that are only available there, or on the remote.
hazydave wrote on 9/22/2009, 11:38 AM
So the NeoScene application works fine with FH1 1080/60p files.. and it can output at a full 60p? That might do it for me.. I've been thinking of upgrading to a recent CineForm since I got into AVCHD last year. I used the bundled version (came with Vegas 6 or 7) back in the early days of HDV, but it hasn't been necessary lately. But I do believe it'll be some years before my PCs are fast enough to deal well with AVC, particularly at 60p.
Jay_Mitchell wrote on 9/22/2009, 2:20 PM
Yes! NeoScene has a new update that has fixed all issues with the Sanyo VPC-FH1 and VPC-HD2000 mp4/h.264 AAC files. It works perfectly with 1080p/60 and 1280/720p files. I use it every day in my business and it works in Vegas Pro 9 64bit without even a hiccup. Great little camera - NeoScene is a must!

http://www.cineform.com/downloads/NeoScenev137b122-090910.zip

Jay Mitchell
LReavis wrote on 9/23/2009, 11:18 AM
yup, NeoScene is the way to go; I had been using PicVideo, which renders faster and has many optional settings, but it is too expensive in the 64-bit version. Also, the image quality is slightly better with Cineform
John_Cline wrote on 9/24/2009, 1:41 PM
I just got my Sanyo VPC-FH1 a few hours ago. It's a LOT smaller than I thought it would be and it looks FAR better than I expected. Wow, $400 HD cameras aren't supposed to look this good! As has been reported, Vegas is perfectly happy with the 60p files once they have been converted with NEO Scene.
LReavis wrote on 9/25/2009, 3:33 PM
after more than a week spending most of each working day experimenting with chromakey, I've found that the Sanyo definitely gives a cleaner key than my Sony HC-1 - even when I deinterlace the latter and render at 60 frames per second progressive. I set the Sanyo for ISO 50 to minimize noise and use plenty of light on the talent and quite a bit on the greenscreen (although I'd llike more in order to bring level of green up to the recommended 70% of light on talent). Other settings: Aperture F2.4, shutter speed 1/30th second (in order to minimize judder when reduced to 720p, 24 fps for the web).

I put Smart Smoother first in the FX chain (not very aggressive), then AAV Colorlab to slightly adjust color and contrast (and slight Chroma blue if I want to get ever last hair to show in the output, which precludes blur for the mask), then use NewBlue V2 Chroma Key.

For Close-up shots (telephoto) where I don't have to worry much about variations in their restricted-area of the green screen, I set sensitivity to 0.0 in the Chroma keyer, with color range at 42.

Finally, I put a Sony Unsharp Mask after it all to punch up the image a bit. Result? Judge for yourself - keyed with Sony generated media acqua color on track underneath:



Here's what it looks like without the aqua:
hazydave wrote on 10/10/2009, 12:50 AM
Ok, maybe not everyone's finding VPC-FH1 or HD2000 files crash Vegas, but it's not just me :-). And I did get Cineform NeoScene, and it's very good for fast editing.. even last year's HDV stuff. You do need a fast HDD... 1080/60p transcodes in CineForm run around 28MB/s.

What I have found, though, is that Vegas really doesn't have a problem editing AVC + AAC in MP4 wrappers at all... if just doesn't like Sanyo's.

I came upon this accidently... I was trying to find a way to catenate MP4 files that are logically the same file (stopped due to 4GB limits or whatever). There aren't many good MP4 tools around (the few tools that exist seem generally buggy), so I actually catenated files to an MKV (Matroska) wrapper rather than MP4. All good, only Vegas doesn't edit MKV... oh well.

So I ran another multiplexing tool (probably mp4create... that seems a bit more stable than mp4box, which crashed all the time trying to do this), and got my .mp4 all-in-one. It's still fully functional 1080/60p (no actual video/audio editing done, just messing around with the transport streams), and whaddya know... these work just dandy in Vegas... no crash.

The only clue.. mkvmerge (the tool used to create the .mkv files) complains about the Sanyo .mp4 files having a negative timecode. I do wonder is that's what makes Vegas go insane...
hazydave wrote on 10/10/2009, 1:17 AM
PICVideo... that old MJPEG thing? Well, I guess that gets you a very DV-like format for HD editing. But I like Cineform particularly because it's different -- it's wavelet based, not DCT-based like MPEG-2 and MPEG-4. So while you might technically get some compression noise as with any psychovisual lossy compression, it's not going to reinforce any of the AVC or MPEG-2 artifacts.
LReavis wrote on 10/10/2009, 11:43 AM
I presume you run mp4creater on a Linux box? or can you do it in a virtual machine, such as VMware offers? or is there a Windows version?