Sony HDV demo movie- check it out

SonyEPM wrote on 9/10/2004, 9:02 AM

Hi all-

I recently shot a little demo piece using a prototype of the just announced Sony HDV cameras. This footage is being used as part of our presentation at IBC in Amsterdam but I thought some of you might want to check it out too.

Camera: I can't respond in any sort of depth about the camera details other than to say it really rocks- excellent quality all around, very much in the PD-170 class of fit and finish, image quality and ergonomics. There will be tons of official info released in the next couple of months so I won't go into this any further here.

What I shot: Using a Sony HDV PAL prototype (very low #), I shot flowers and various nature scenes here in Madsion on a bright summer day. All shots are statics (I had only a cheap tripod available at that time so I didn't do any slick crane shots or anything). All footage shot in 1080i PAL, factory settings, no add-on filters. Manual exposure, manual focus at all times. I tried to show off color, contrast, DOF and detail etc.

How I edited: I used an (unreleased*) capture app to pull the footage off the camera. Footage was loaded on the Vegas timeline (shipping version, Vegas 5.0b), project settings 1440x1080, upper field first, PAR 1.333, 25fps, audio 16/48. A few dissolves, an ACID-created music bed, and Vegas' text generator were used. No color correction was used- footage is straight off the camera.

* Capture- right now this camera isn't shipping and even if you got your hands on one, Vegas 5.0b cannot capture HDV natively. This will of course be addressed in a future version of Vegas, details TBA. Cineform will also be updating their capture applet to work with Sony HDV in the future, some other capture alternatives may also possibly surface soon.

Delivery: It'll be awhile before everybody has an HDTV set and it'll also take awhile for disc-based HD players to proliferate but probably everybody reading this has a high rez display sitting a foot from their face right now- your computer screen. HDV is great for computer delivery! So I rendered the project in Vegas 5.0b to Windows Media using the following settings:

Audio: CBR, WMA9, 192/48
Video: CBR, WMV9, 1280x720, 25fps, 5 kfps, smoothness=90, 5Mbs

On my barebones 2.4 Dell this project took ~7 minutes to render (crossfades, title overlay throughout, mask on the very last shot under the title, "best" quality).

How you should play it: Download the file to your computer. Open in Windows Media Player. When the video starts, hit alt-enter and WMP should go to full screen.

This file plays back fine on Sony laptops so it should playback fine on any decent desktop. If you can't play it back in WMP without hiccups, surf on over to Microsoft - there's quite a bit of info on how to test and tweak your system for HD playback.

File location:

The URL: ftp://md-ftp.sonypictures.com

Username/Password (case-sensitive):
dude
Sweetn3ss

------------------------
We can't answer a mountain of further questions about all this right now (and sorry, I can't provide native HDV footage from the Sony cameras) but we look forward to reading your reponses. Have fun-

-Sony Vegas engineering team

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Comments

Stonefield wrote on 9/11/2004, 11:32 AM

Can't log on.....any help with this ?

Oops got it now....Had to totally shut down my firewall...gonna check this out...

mhbstevens wrote on 9/11/2004, 1:11 PM

Great ACID loop but can you tell me what source events you used. I can nbever get an ACID loop to sound as "tuneful" as this one.

Thanks,

Mike Stevens

bowman01 wrote on 9/11/2004, 10:48 PM

hey guys, for all of you having problems using the browser to log into ftp, try using an ftp client.

Alliante wrote on 9/12/2004, 12:12 PM

I just burned this footage to DVD just for S&G..... I can just say.... WOW.

Very nice.

frazerb wrote on 9/12/2004, 1:38 PM

Why 1440x1080? The builtin Vegas presets seems to be 1920x1080. Does it have something to do with it being PAL?

Buddy

AzaK wrote on 9/13/2004, 12:06 AM

Interesting, but really we need full bandwidth, native output files to really see what it can do. Oh, and we need to see some decent movement in there also.

RexA wrote on 9/14/2004, 1:14 AM

The clip looks great but reminded me of a nagging Windows Media Player question.

Is there any way to get the player to start playing a clip in full screen mode? All I've found to do, is hit play and then hit alt-Enter to expand to full screen. PITA. I've never seen the first few seconds of a clip in full screen mode. Something like this clip deserves to stay in full screen mode, but I've never found a way to keep the player there.

Did I miss a great trick or configuration somewhere?

MarkGrant wrote on 9/14/2004, 5:11 AM

"Why 1440x1080?"

HDV's native resolution is 1440x1080 anamorphic, I believe.

Nice video, but it would be great if we could see some full-size original MPEG footage :).

frazerb wrote on 9/14/2004, 5:15 AM

By "anamorphic" do you mean the image is squeezed down to 1440 in the camera and then stretched to 1920 when played?

Buddy

4110 wrote on 9/14/2004, 6:03 AM

Mozilla Firefox doesn't work either but I did get it ok with Explorer.

MarkGrant wrote on 9/14/2004, 6:07 AM

"By "anamorphic" do you mean the image is squeezed down to 1440 in the camera and then stretched to 1920 when played?"

I believe so, yes. Though it sounds like the Sony camera has rectangular CCD pixels so there's no need to optically squeeze the image.

rique wrote on 9/14/2004, 7:11 AM

I don't have WMP10 yet so I don't know if it's different but for MP9 there is a program called "Windows Media Player 9 Series TweakMP Power Toy." I kid you not. I think I got it from a DVD or CD that MS sent me but its probably available on their website. Using it you can tweak MP to expand soon enough to see the begining of a file in full screen mode.

Another trick is to hit Ctlr P to pause the play then hit Alt Ent to set it for full screen so that when you hit Ctrl P again it will start from full screen mode.

JJKizak wrote on 9/14/2004, 3:43 PM

I downloaded the file, played it in media player 9 fine, put it on the V5.0B timeline and played fine, rendered it to the Cineform transport settings for NTSC 720 X 30P, changed the file ending to tp, put it into my MY-HD file player, played it on the Sony HDTV and I thought it was just great. There was no banding but there was a very small slight touch of pixelation on every scene change. It happens so quick you really have to look for it otherwise is just like what I receive on the local HDTV broadcasts. I have noticed this pixelation on other broadcast channels. It is usually extremely quick and reminds me of the old distortion called "transient response" If the camera works that good I will be purchasing it. The colors and focus are plenty good for me. If it has optical stabilization I'm sold.

JJK

BarryGreen wrote on 9/18/2004, 11:24 AM

<<"By "anamorphic" do you mean the image is squeezed down to 1440 in the camera and then stretched to 1920 when played?">>

HDTV is 1920 x 1080. HDV 1080i is 1440 x 1080 (and so is Sony's $100,000 HDCAM format). The HDV and HDCAM cameras record at 1440x1080 and it gets upsampled to 1920x1080 on playback.

Actually the Sony chips sample at 960x1080, so they're somewhat subsampling the horizontal resolution already.

mhbstevens wrote on 9/19/2004, 10:04 AM

I had started a thread a little back about using a PAL camera to take NTSC. Now that we are to HDV do the PAL vs NTSC difference manifest so to the same degree. Will the PAL output still have more resolution than the US version to make up for the slower frame rate?

Seems to me that with HD now would be the time to standardize these two beasts. Is anyone trying to do this?

michael_morlan wrote on 9/20/2004, 3:19 PM

Regarding merging the PAL and NTSC standards, I'd offer one observation:

While I imagine unifying the choice of resolutions is a no-brainer, there is still the issue of 60Hz versus 50Hz power sources. The main reason television technology was created with two different frame-rate standards was to minimize the effects of electro-magnetic interference from the respective power sources. CRT Televisions, being, essentially, electron guns, are very sensitive to EM transients. (Even today, professional video engineers have to spend a great deal of time adjusting pro-level monitors to counter the effects of nearby EM fields. Once they move a monitor, it has to be recalibrated.) Matching the video frame-rate to that of the A/C power source avoided a variety of interference artifacts, most notably, a horizontal line of distortion passing through the video picture at a regular rate. (If you've ever had two CRT monitors side-by-side set to different scan frequencies, you would have seen this effect as each monitor slightly distorts the other's picture.) Even today's monitors would need extreme EMI shielding to offset the effects of nearby power lines.

jeremyk wrote on 9/20/2004, 4:03 PM

The main reason television technology was created with two different frame-rate standards was to minimize the effects of electro-magnetic interference from the respective power sources.

That's true, but no longer relevant for NTSC. The 29.970 frame rate means that any power-related artifacts (hum bars, whatever) crawl slowly (and annoyingly) up an NTSC screen. Might as well not be synchronized with mains power any more.

mhbstevens wrote on 9/20/2004, 8:16 PM

I just opened this HDV short (wmv format) and notice that the time line is out of sync with the output monitor.

Why could this short have been distributed in a .veg format for better viewing in Vegas?

Mike

John_Cline wrote on 9/20/2004, 9:17 PM

Hey, how about posting about a minutes worth of the original HDV file so I can experiment with it?

John