HMC150 questions answered...

[Barry_Green]

Okay, I'm officially allowed to talk about my experiences with the HMC150. I've been using one for the last several days and I think I can pretty much answer all your questions now, so -- ask away!

[kurtmo]

Does Vegas puke with HMC150 MTS files?

[Mark Williams]

The videomaker podcast seemed to gloss over the quality of the 21-24 high setting. Does it equal or surpass HDV or is this just too subjective of a question.

[Barry_Green]

Originally Posted by kurtmo

Does Vegas puke with HMC150 MTS files?

Of course. I don't hold out a lot of hope for Sony Vegas ever going out of their way to be pro-active in supporting competitors' products. I would think that Vegas is likely to be the last editor to have proper AVC-HD support across the board.

Until then, I'd recommend looking at CineForm if you want to use Vegas.

EDIUS has a conversion utility that supports all HMC150 modes right now, including 720/24, 720/30, and 720/60, plus all the 1080 PH modes.

[ecking]

I log and transfered the footage into fcp and unless I did something long the footage they posted up is really grainy, even the broad daylight clips.

[Barry_Green]

Originally Posted by Mark Williams

The videomaker podcast seemed to gloss over the quality of the 21-24 high setting. Does it equal or surpass HDV

Beats the hell out of it. The 720p mode is extremely robust, the only way you would ever stand a chance of getting even the minorest of codec degradation would be to push it to 720/60p and shoot something extremely complex (like surfing, which I did... and it looks totally solid). I would think 1080/60i mode is going to be the most challenging for the codec to deal with, but even then it's much more robust than HDV.

I wouldn't put the 6mbps mode up against HDV; the 13mbps mode is about equivalent to HDV. The 17mbps is better, and the 21mbps looks practically uncompressed when working with 720/24p footage.

[jason.adams]

1.) Does AVC HD support any meta data like p2?
2.) What if any focus assist is on the camera?
3.) What formats and frame rates?
4.) Any NLE natively support this yet?

Have you matched footage against HVX200 do the images play well together. Could this be a B camera on set with a HVX ???

[Barry_Green]

Originally Posted by ecking

I log and transfered the footage into fcp and unless I did something long the footage they posted up is really grainy, even the broad daylight clips.

I haven't seen their footage and I don't know how they shot, but I've got plenty of footage here that is cleaner than Howard Hughes' fingernails. I shot stuff at the beach, at a lake, at a marina, and I would defy anyone to find a spec of grain or noise. It's incredibly clean.

Under torture conditions in pitch black scenarios, yeah you might see some noise. But in what I was shooting I think it's really clean. I'll see if I can post some footage.

[kurtmo]

Originally Posted by Barry_Green

I'll see if I can post some footage.

Please do!

[BobDiaz]

(1) On the Apple, how does it work with FCP and FCE? (Were there any problems getting it to edit, other than transcoding..)

(2) When shooting 720/30p (or 720/24p) is the data rate at maximum still around the 21 Mbps speed or does the camera drop down to a much lower rate?

(3) I know that still shots never tell the full story, but could you please post still frame grabs.


Bob Diaz