Sdi

[jamestmather]

Hi everyone,

I have just pulled a pretty heavy u turn towards the canon in favour of a hvx in my head as I'm reading worrying reports of shadow noise etc. Also the pretty impressive res charts for the canon have piqued my interest -

My questions are these (and do forgive me if I am a little ignorant on some of the cameras issues but a canon rep couldn't explain the following)

1. Does the camera artifact with heavy movement due to compression.

2. does it suffer a preceptible res loss at 24f

3. does 24f look good (subjectively)?

4. whats the eyepiece look through like? Good contrast and colour? i'd like an onboard LCD personally but if the look through is good enough then okay.

5. Is the focus ring repeatable and dependable or that crazy servo spinning system (any sort of feet/inches/distance readout?)

6. can I output uncompressed SDI to some kind of portable firestore or does it require a system with some heavy import card? (the web is woefully silent on the matter of uncompressed SDI output - and Is this output suitable for Greenscreen or expanded colour space work)

7. Does the camera have reasonable latitude? highlight clipping?

8. and lastly, what about noise?

answering any of these questions would be a big help

Many thanks

James

[Elton]

James,

I've got a shoot today, but if no one's answered you by this evening, I'll give it my best shot.

[jamestmather]

Thanks, would appreciate a nod in the right direction

[johncordell]

1. Does the camera artifact with heavy movement due to compression.

i've not noticed it at all. i've only been shooting 24f so far. also, i will point out that it's not been a common complaint for this camera, which tells me something.

2. does it suffer a preceptible res loss at 24f?
not sure, i haven't spent enough time in 60i to tell.

3. does 24f look good (subjectively)?
to me it looks spot on. i was previously a dvx100a owner, and i can't see anything "wrong" with the 24f mode of the canon. this is another point where the general concensus seems to be that whatever is happening to create 24f works well.

4. whats the eyepiece look through like? Good contrast and colour? i'd like an onboard LCD personally but if the look through is good enough then okay.]
the eyepiece and onboard LCD are one in the same on the canon. contrast and color are fine, but there arern't nearly enough pixels to do the picture justice. i always use a production monitor myself, so i'm not super stressed about how great the LCD is or isn't. note that i do find that the combo of peaking mode and magnifying allow me to nail the focus using the onboard LCD.

5. Is the focus ring repeatable and dependable or that crazy servo spinning system (any sort of feet/inches/distance readout?)
with stock lens, you can configure readout in feet or metric. i have a chroziel follow focus on mine and find focus to be pretty darn repeatable. by that i mean if i mark a spot on the follow focus, returning to that spot yeilds the same focus distance readout. i can then leave that spot and return to it many times and it will stay close to spot on. i have seen it drift a bit if i spin focus back and forth quickly many times. also, if i focus past the edge of the focus range then of course all bets are off on the mark i've made.

6. can I output uncompressed SDI to some kind of portable firestore or does it require a system with some heavy import card? (the web is woefully silent on the matter of uncompressed SDI output - and Is this output suitable for Greenscreen or expanded colour space work)

if by SDI you mean HD-SDI, catching that data stream uncompressed is quite challenging right now. basically would require computer plus kickass RAID array. you could rent a deck that can record a compressed version of the HD-SDI, and it would be much less compressed than the HDV that lands on the tape. i suspect more products will emerge in the next year or two that will enable us to capture the camera output at less compression than HDV. For green screen work, I expect I'll lug my Mac in order to snag the better image.

7. Does the camera have reasonable latitude? highlight clipping?
Seems ok to me, but I'm no expert.
8. and lastly, what about noise?
I am happy with how clean the image is, but I have run into noise on some of the stuff I've shot. When I compared it side by side with an HVX200 at Birns and Sawyer here in L.A., I definitely felt like the H1 was cleaner.


answering any of these questions would be a big help
No problem. By the way, I was on track to get an HVX for many months and then switched to the Canon at the last second. So far I haven't had any buyers remorse. I feel like they're both great cameras and neither would likely have been a mistake for my planned usage model (narrative stuff with the goal of looking like it might have originated on film).

[jamestmather]

John, Many thanks for getting back and giving such concise answers. Very much appreciated. Looks like I'm swinging towards the canon.

Thanks again

James

[Elton]

Hi James,

John's post was spot-on, I'll just add a few thoughts:

1) It's possible to break the codec with extremely high frequency movement, but it's a very finite macroblocking, and almost always never noticeable unless you want to watch your footage with a magnifying lens. You can also adjust detail settings to massage away that possibility too. And of course, there's always SDI tap if you've absolutely got to have no motion artifacting whatsoever. There'll be portable SDI solutions in the future...but in short: don't worry about it.

2) Practically imperceptible. Maybe 10 to 20% at most, but it's still so damn high res that no one would ever think it was anything other than true 1080 24p. It just looks great.

3) Quite good. The motion's there. The cadence is correct.

4) None of the cheap hd's VF's are high res. It's ok given that they're all pixel challenged, but peaking and magnification modes easily help with critical focus. I use peaking almost exclusively. btw, you can get a 500 line Canon b/w CRT VF if you don't like the LCD. Probably gives you nearly twice as much resolution as the LCD.

5) It's a crazy spinner, but with a lot of useful information, and yes, I think it's repeatable, especially outfitted with the rig John describes.

6) SDI acquisition is only really all that practical if you rent a HD deck or cart a computer and go tethered to it. The computer thing works pretty well for greenscreen.

7) Pretty good latitude, and the knee control really helps to control clipping.

8) Noise? What's that? Hah hah, well there is some but it's not bad at all. Very clean for the resolution and size of the imager, and oh yeah, the low light is excellent. There's also noise reduction features in the menu if you have to gain up for some things.


HTH,

Elton

[jamestmather]

Again, many thanks for the feedback - very much appreciated. I think the camera sounds phenomenal I must say. Thanks very much for taking the trouble.