What I'm doing over here (having owned an FX1 for 3 weeks now) is to shoot everything in HDV, use Gearshift to make proxies, and do my work with the proxies. I am under the impression that the colorspace differences between DV and HDV are automatically handled with Gearshift, so if it looks good on my "conventional" DV setup (with TV monitor for final checking) then it will look just as good in the HDV domain when Gearshifted back.

In other words, I don't NEED an HD monitor. Of course, it would sure be nice to have, if for no other reason than to blow away visitors with the quality of HDV.

You can shoot in HDV mode and downconvert it to widescreen (16:9) DV on the fly with the camera. It acts just like capturing regular DV. You can then crop to 4:3 ratio in Vegas if desired but you cannot crop to 4:3 DV on the fly with the FX1. I believe the Z1 will do that. You can also shoot in the DV format like a regular DV camera. You can choose 16:9 or 4:3. I would not recomend doing this as there is little to no advantage and it is not as good in quality. Mabey if you had to give the DV cassette to someone else who only has a regular DV camera for compatability sake.

As you are shooting, you can monitor true uncompressed HDV on an HD monitor through the component outputs. You can also monitor downconverted HDV on an SD monitor through the S-video or composite outputs.

I would not recommend allowing the FX1 to down-convert to SD as it basically sucks. I capture in HDV, use Cineform ConnectHD to capture in HDV to computer, edit in HDV and then render in SD. The results are night and day better. Yes you will have to load up on Hard Drives but the end results are much better.

Duncan

> I would not recommend allowing the FX1 to down-convert to SD as it basically sucks

I don’t agree. Unless the FX1 downconvert is very different from the Z1, I’ve downconverted in-camera on my Z1 and then captured the same footage and rendered to SD and I can’t tell them apart. Perhaps it depends on the dynamics of the footage but I can’t see a difference.

~jr

Same thing with my A1. If anything, the downconverted footage looks better than footage shot in SD. I think whoever told you that down-converted footage sucks is giving you bad information.

LK

Gotta disagree with Laurence and Johnny. There is a significant difference between letting Vegas downconvert from CineForm to SD and having the camcorder downconvert.
Capture the same piece of footage twice, once as HDV, once as DV.
Zoom in 25% on both of them after converting the HDV to DV, or both of them straight to MPEG 2. You'll see it immediately.
Or for a better test, shoot footage of a metronome. Just stop the cursor anywhere on the capture where the arm is mid swing.
You'll see a big diff.

This is very interesting because I’m just not seeing it. I checked this thread: DUH ,Down converting HDV and apparently I’m not the only one who can’t see it. So that leads me to believe that under certain circumstances there is no difference but under others there are. I’d like to find out why.

What settings are you using to render to SD in Vegas? I used the NTSC DV Widescreen template from an HDV 1440x1080 60i project (which I assume the Z1 is doing in downconvert mode) and the results were identical to capturing downconvert from the camera. I even used pan/crop to zoom in 50% (360x240) and the results were still identical. I recorded the tree tops and sky, a swing set with a bright yellow canopy, and I even recorded a metronome against a white wall today and took a capture of the arm in full motion. Both captured images from the camera and Vegas render are the exact same quality. No difference. I can’t get the in-camera downconvert to look bad no matter what I do. I can post the results to my web site if you’d like.

So why are some others seeing a difference? I would be interested in understanding why Duncan thinks the Sony downconvert in-camera sucks? This is the second time he’s said this and his other post said he did his own testing so I’m interested in knowing under what conditions we should NOT use downconvert in-camera. Are you shooting in lowlight or extreme sports or ??? I’m just not seeing the difference and the results I get definitely do not suck.

The reason I’m concerned is because from reading this thread, with terms like “sucks” and “night and day” and “significant differences”, a reader would think that the difference would JUMP out at them. I can’t even find it and I’m looking for it. The same is true for others. Which leads me to believe that either there must be a flaw in my testing because I just can’t get the Z1 downconvert to suck, or there are special circumstances under which Vegas is better and what are those circumstances and how do I get that better quality?

~jr

Which leads me to believe that either there must be a flaw in my testing because I just can’t get the Z1 downconvert to suck, or there are special circumstances under which Vegas is better and what are those circumstances and how do I get that better quality?

I am puzzled by this as well, especially since the people making the opposing claims are pretty reliable and have proven they generally know what they're talking about. Is it possible there is a firmware change in the camera that "cured" an earlier problem? That would be my initial suspicion. Unfortunately, a brief Google search didn't turn up any way to display the FX1 or Z1 firmware version. If someone knows how to do this, I would suggest that everyone find out what they've got and see if those having the problem have an earlier version.