The great 720p vs 720pn question

INLAND EMPIRE was shot on a PD-150. David Lynch has the budget to shoot on anything he wants. Sometimes it's an artistic choice; we're lucky that digital is coming to the quality where we have those choices available and still viewable by an audience.

That little rant aside.

AshG: If you've seen the results I won't argue with you, but there's an article on Studiodaily that has the HVX and a few other low-end pro cams (sub 12k) against the varicam and cinealta. Their story is that the low ends come extremely close. The story there is like with audiophile equipment. You pay 10x as much to get the last 10% quality squeezed out. Law of dimishing returns and such.

My rant. Thanks for listening.
 
Barry_Green said:
Because that's an incorrect assumption, that's why. :thumbsup:


You can have them process the 1080p files if you want, but it's better to start with the highest-quality source you can get, and on the HVX 1080/24p is unquestionably better than 720/24p.
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OK, now I'm really confused... if this is the case, what's all this crap about the uprezzing in camera? I've been shooting 720/24pn because I thought it'd look better uprezzed later. But that's wrong? Can you explain why?

I guess I should just buy the book, huh?
 
Because the camera istn upressing. its down ressing to 720 from the 1080P signal coming form the CCD's. Its a native 1080p camera,(one of the only native 1080p cameras in this price range) theres alot of mis infomration about the HVX 200 from people who have clearly never used one. they see the "specs" and dismiss its potential. but the 1080 footage from the HVX200 is STUNNING. STUNNING. STUNNING. its Sharp, crisp, yet still organic enough to be pleasing. HVX 1080p is alot visually sharper than HVX 720p is, and if your delivery is 720p, to a client, shooting 1080p, then downressing later yields RAZOR sharp 720p. Even sharper than it normally is....
 
MannHands said:
OK, now I'm really confused... if this is the case, what's all this crap about the uprezzing in camera?
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Crap. Misinformed crap. People who are making assumptions, or in some cases those who are actively trying to discredit the HVX in favor of their preferred formats. Or they simply have no idea what they're talking about.

But it's all complete crapola, the 1080/24p is unquestionably absolutely definitely superior to 720/24p.

I've been shooting 720/24pn because I thought it'd look better uprezzed later. But that's wrong?
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Yes that's wrong.

Can you explain why?
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Because 1080 retains more detail. The chips use spatial offset to sample a 1920x1080 image right off the chip. All processing is done in 1920x1080. Then it gets downsampled to whatever the recording format is. For 1080, the camera records 1280x1080. For 720, it records 960x720. Obviously you're going to retain a whole lot more detail in 1280x1080 than you will in 960x720. Furthermore, in the HVX200 the 1080 is much less compressed than its 720 is, so you get milder compression artifacts.

It's not night-and-day different; the real-world difference is about 20% more res in 1080 mode than in 720 mode, and signficantly milder compression. 720pN looks great, it's definitely high-def, but 1080p is better.
 
wow. I'm sold. I guess I just need more harddrive space now.

but, sorry for my ignorance here (I'm trying to learn), what does this mean then: "The 3 imagers are 1/3" CCD offering a 540 X 960 array in a 16:9 native aspect ratio. There is a spatial offset deployed in both the horizontal and vertical direction making the effective resolution of the chip set to be 1440 X 810 pixels."

-what is a spatial offset?
-is that "blowing up" the image from the ccd?
-is there a good picture of this that I could look at?

 
its not something you can see. its an engineering technique. The HVX kinda oerates like a 1chip Cmos/CCD sensor instead of a 3CCD system. the three chips instead of making htree images that are reconstituted into one color image, the HVX chips work together, to create the luma signal. A true 1080 signal. ITs difficult to explain, but it works.... believe me the 1080 form the HVX is great.
 
just curious what you shoot on Timur. And what you back up to. 1080 taking up nearly twice as much space....

also, do you find it harder to nail focus with the stock LCD in 1080?
 
Barry_Green said:
Because 1080 retains more detail. The chips use spatial offset to sample a 1920x1080 image right off the chip. All processing is done in 1920x1080. Then it gets downsampled to whatever the recording format is. For 1080, the camera records 1280x1080. For 720, it records 960x720. Obviously you're going to retain a whole lot more detail in 1280x1080 than you will in 960x720. Furthermore, in the HVX200 the 1080 is much less compressed than its 720 is, so you get milder compression artifacts.

It's not night-and-day different; the real-world difference is about 20% more res in 1080 mode than in 720 mode, and signficantly milder compression. 720pN looks great, it's definitely high-def, but 1080p is better.
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This is enlightening, I'm in the middle of shooting a feature with the HVX and choose 720pn because I had read an article stating the the full sensor was utilized in the 720 mode while to achieve 1080 it was spatial offset. Once the shooting finishes I'll see if I can find that article!
 
That article would be wrong.

The system works by scanning the spatially-offset chips into a 1920x1080 matrix. All image processing is done on that 1920x1080 image. Then, it gets downconverted to whatever recording format you've chosen.

1080p will always deliver the best image the HVX is capable of producing. Always.
 
manvsbear,
There is one more thing you can do to get better resolution for 35mm transfer and that is shoot on a PAL camera if you can. The people at Swiss Effects say that the extra lines of resolution make a "noticeable difference" when transferring from PAL as apposed to NTSC. I would bet it's a side by side comparison, but if that's important to your end goal you may want to consider it. You can check it out here:
http://www.swisseffects.ch/
 
iDV8 said:
manvsbear,
There is one more thing you can do to get better resolution for 35mm transfer and that is shoot on a PAL camera if you can. The people at Swiss Effects say that the extra lines of resolution make a "noticeable difference" when transferring from PAL as apposed to NTSC. I would bet it's a side by side comparison, but if that's important to your end goal you may want to consider it. You can check it out here:
http://www.swisseffects.ch/
Click to expand...

I think that is only relevent when shooting standard definition as NTSC has 486 lines whereas PAL has 576. When shooting Hi-def, I believe the lines of resolution are the same in PAL & NTSC when comparing the same format specs. i.e. 720 in PAL is the same amount of lines as 720 in NTSC: or 1080 PAL has the same amount of lines as 1080 NTSC.
 
actually the PAL Hvx rasterizes 1440x1080 in PAL, and 1280X1080 in NTSC. So seemingly the PAL version would be sharper.
 
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