Looking for secondary camera for Sony V1U

[Transmission2]

I just bought the Sony V1 today and Im looking around at what my options are for an inexpensive B Cam. I primarily need the additional camera for static shots of people performing music.

Would the Sony HDR HC3 be a good fit? Would I be able to cut between the two cameras and have it look ok?? Are there any other cameras that may be better?

:)

[philnerd]

I'm sure an HC3 or a Canon HV10 would do a nice job (actually, the Canon is one of the sharpest pictures around).

However, I suspect you might be interested in getting a decent audio track on your B-Cam, just in case you need to fall back on it. You might look at a used sony HC1 for the mic input. Better yet, if you can spring a bit over 2K there's the Sony HVR-A1U. XLR inputs and a solid little cam.

[magi1500]

The A1U has a (single) CMOS chip, the same chip the V1U has (although the V1U has three). I think either the HC1 or the HC3 might have CMOS. (I've used the HC3. As long as its getting enough light it looks great.) I had an A1U before buying the V1U and I really liked it.

The one problem you'll have is if, like most of us, you bought the V1U for its progressive abilities. All the inexpensive B cams mentioned in this thread are 60i. If you're shooting 60i with the V1U and the A1U, it will match great (I shot some 60i with my V1U outside in the sunlight and it looked very similar to my A1U footage). But if you're shooting 24p or 30p I'm not sure how well that would cut together.

[Mark Dog]

hey transmisson can you post some footage looking to get a v1u to maybe but not much footage to look at especially any with people , so please please post some footage quicktime would be nice :)

peace n luv

Mark Dog

[Transmission2]

magi1500:

Thanks for your info. The thing is I do want to shoot on 30p so that kind of gives me a dllemma. Do you know if there's anyway I'll be able to process the 60i footage of the A1U to match the 30p from the Sony V1U? And do you know if I lose resolution if I shoot 30p on the V1?? I really prefer the smoothness of 30p, it has a nice feel so I want to shoot with it. I need to run some tests with my Final Cut to see if I can digitize the 30p footage. Do you know if this is possible with FCP 5.1.2??

Please reply quickly if you can. thanks for your help!!! :)

[magi1500]

Transmission,
Again, sorry I didn't respond sooner (MacWorld).
I did plenty of 24p, 30p, & 60i tests with my V1U and on a 24 inch 1920X1080 monitor (so I was getting pixel for pixel) I did not detect any resolution difference. Possibly I needed a larger monitor but with 24" the res looked the same to me.

I like the 30p. I shot 40 minutes of the toughest stuff I could throw at the camera, and I had 2 frames with 24p mode that blew out the bit rate (had a bunch of digital blocking). Admittedly, this was stuff with so much motion and hard light (I was trying to push it) that you'd probably never encounter this in a real shooting situation. HOWEVER, I never blew out the bit rate in 30p. I bought it for the film motion, so I'll be using 24p myself. I'm just learning what I can and can't do with it. (Man, 24p with the Cinema picture profile is killer!)

Anyhoo, one experience I did have with my A1U: I shot 60i and deinterlaced in Final Cut Pro to 30p. I defintely lost resolution. At least enough that you might be able to tell the difference if you dropped it into a 30p sequence with V1U 30p footage. You could probably test this by shooting 60i and deint in FCP and comparing that with 30p footage.

Also, with 30p, you can capture HDV 1080i60. This is camera native and takes up way less space. (You wouldn't need to convert it to AIC on capture because you only need to do that if you want to pulldown the clip in cinema tools.)

I did a test where I shot 30p, captured as HDV 1080i60 and did a software encode into a standard def DVD. Just be sure and change the field dominance of your FCP HDV sequence to NONE. That way when you software encode thru Compressor, it will see it as Progressive footage (or maybe you can just change that variable in Compressor? Not sure...)

[Transmission2]

Hey Magi..no worries..thank so much for getting back to me.

So i did decide to go ahead to start shooting the doc 30p, and loading it via the 1080i60 easy setup through final cut. Is this a proper method for this footage? Am I seeing true 30p motion? I am digitzing footage fine, and I like the way it looks, but I just want to be sure that my workflow is correct; so I don't have too many problems later.

after my 30p footage is digitized 1080i60 do i need to perform a pulldown on it in cinema tools? If I don't do a pulldown, does that mean im seeing 60i footage?

Sorry...Im just a little confused about this stuff. Hopefully you can help me wrap my head around it.

thanks again!

p.s. whats the Cinema picture profile?

[magi1500]

Re: Pic Profile. On your V1U, if you open the viewscreen and look at all the VCR control buttons you just revealed, on the bottom right there is the little pic profile with six presets. One of them is Cinema; it basically turns on cinegamma type 1 and cinematone color and a couple of other things. There are two slots for customizable presets. One can save or load pic presets on / from the memory stick, so hopefully some D.P. types will come up with stuff for us to download from the web...

The nature of how the V1U records 30p means you're kind of always getting it progressive. The cam shoots 30 frames per second. Each frame is recorded with sequential lines (every line from top to bottom) in 1/30th of a second. As opposed to shooting 60i, which captures one field (half of a frame, or every other line from top to bottom) in 1/60th of a second. So if someone moves across the screen fast enough, the lines aren't really going to match up (interlaced jaggies). This is how the Canon XHA1 shoots, but then it applies software to deinterlace the footage into 30p.

The V1U shoots those 30 truly progressive frames, but then breaks them up into separate interlaced fields so that it can lay them to tape (the tape can only handle 60i). This is kind of what is known as progressive segmented frames, or psf. PSF allows us to live progressive in an interlaced world.

When you capture into FCP, FCP always combines fields to make frames to make it easier to edit, but if you opened interlaced material in something that doesn't do that (like cinema tools), in 60i you would see the interlaced stuff exagerrated. If the material originated as psf, it would still look clean even in cinema tools even though it was laid to tape and captured as 60i.

So the short answer is, if you're shooting 30p you can basically work with traditional workflows and you should be fine.

In the case of 24p, the cam shoots 24 progressive frames per second, then, so that it can lay it to tape (which requires 60i), it adds in a 3:2 cadence so that it pulls it up to 29.97, and then separates the frames into fields (so the 29.97p becomes 59.94i) and lays it to tape at 60i. So after capture, you'd need to remove those extra frames.

30p has no need to add frames. So no pulldown is required.

Are you capturing HDV 1080i60 or AIC 1080i60?

You don't need to use AIC because you're not pulling the footage down.

Either way it should look the same, but with HDV you'll take up way less space and you get to keep your timecode in case you need to recapture your tapes.

Either way, your HDV 1080i60 or AIC 1080i60 sequence (whichever way you captured) will work properly. You may want to open the sequence's settings and change field dominance to NONE. Try it and make sure the footage still looks good on a TV screen (not a flat panel monitor). But that should be all you need to do. If you're going back to tape, you might not want to do this. But for most other stuff (like DVDs) you probably will want to do this.

[Transmission2]

Wow....thank you Magi. That totally makes sense to me now, and I feel relieved that my 30p decision is the way to go. Thanks for taking the time to explain it to me!

I don't think I've seen 24p from this camera so Im anxious to see it. I tried to do a test using the technique that you mentioned in an earlier post, but I'm not sure if it worked because I couldn't see much difference between the 24p and the 30p. After I did the reverse telecine in cinema tools I did in fact have all progressive frames, but the actual picture didn't look any different.

I guess I just need to play around with it.

Do you think Im making the right decision shooting 30p for this documentary?? (I know that's an aesthetic question, but just give me your opinion...that's what Im after.)

cheers!

[magi1500]

Yeah, 30p vs. 24p really is an aesthetic choice. The difference is subtle but significant. Either way, you'll get the natural beauty of progressive images. 24p just gives you that film feel for motion. 30p gives you more of a video feel. If you were shooting a fictional drama, I'd go with 24p. But I could totally see 30p for a documentary. I guess it would depend on what it was about and what you wanted to say with it. I shoot short films and want to emulate film so I use 24p. But I did do a short experimental documentary and it was important to me for the audience to realize I was talking about real people with a real problem so it was the one time I chose 30 fps.

You're still talking about the same absolute value amount of time. I'm either capturing 24fps or 30fps but it is still one second. With film, you're actually getting less information about what is going on, but that is exactly what the human eye has been trained to recognize as film for almost a century (24fps was decided on in the late 1920's when sound came about...) I am by no means a specialist on any of this stuff. I'm more like a director with a tech interest than a techie with a director interest. :)

[orangechair]

Hey Magi, I have really enjoyed your posts, very informative. I have 2 quick questions. I own an A1U and I am looking to buy a V1U and was wondering what your thoughts are as far as mixing the footage between the 2, particularly if there is any good way to approximate the 24p the V1 is shooting with the A1U? Second question is related to the first, I helped a friend who was a camera short on a little doc she was shooting and I am wondering if you have any experience mixing footage from a dvx with the A1U? She was shooting f5(regular 24p) in letterbox mode and I shot hdv and then downconverted in the camera to give her regular old letterboxed dv 60i, which is how she is editing. Wondering if there is a filter you have used to make the motion of the footage look more similar or if you have some color correcting advice to help match the different looks of the footage? There is no need to edit in true 24p for this project but I would like to have them match up a little better. Should I have shot in cineframe24 for the film look since there is no 24p output? Sorry, this so long.

[magi1500]

Those are the three cameras I've used the most (DVX, A1U, & now V1U). With A1U & V1U, 3 chip vs. 1 chip will come into play a little, but at 60i they should match up okay. You might get away with using the A1U's cineframe 30 mode (I thought it was too stuttery looking), but the cineframe 24 mode is horrible. It produces unusable footage. There have been several companies that make plug-ins and the like for Final Cut (and I'm sure for other NLE's) that will give your 60i footage a 24p feel. DV Film Maker comes to mind, but I have never tried any of these programs. I'm not sure if they do a decent job. But that might be a solution to try to get the motion of your A1U footage and your DVX footage to match better. Maybe putting a Magic Bullet color effect on both cam's footage would also help hide the fact that they came from different cams...
Frankly, it was my inability to get that beautiful progressive look (24 or 30 fps) out of the A1U that made me sell it the day Samy's Camera (L.A.) had the V1U in stock. I wanted the DVX but in HD, I just don't like the HVX P2 workflow at this time.

[orangechair]

Thanks for the info. I was worried about that but for this project it is not a big deal, I am just trying to look to the future. One more question about the A1U as I am relatively new to it, am I missing something or is there a gain setting that I just cant find? It seems like when you turn up the exposure it just turns on gain automatically which is very frustrating. I lied one more question, Is it better in your experience to downconvert HDV to DV with the camera or should I capture it HDV and downconvert in in my computer.

[magi1500]

If you are sure you don't need the footage in HD (and for matching your DVX100 you don't)... My experience is you're better off downconverting in the camera. The quality is the same (if not better) and you can do it in real time. Rendering HDV into DV with your computer will take forever. As far as gain on the A1U, I'm not sure. I don't recall having that problem so maybe there is a setting?