What size is the footage of the HMC150?

Square pixels, full raster. 1920x1080 and 1280x720. The progressive footage of 1080p is stored as full progressive with no pulldown and no interlace artifacts. It's pretty much the ideal storage system for working with computers.
 
Barry_Green said:
Square pixels, full raster. 1920x1080 and 1280x720. The progressive footage of 1080p is stored as full progressive with no pulldown and no interlace artifacts. It's pretty much the ideal storage system for working with computers.
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Barry Green,
Have you tested this compared to the 170?
If so, how does it compare footage wise?

I know the 170 has more features, but due to the price of the P2 cards, and knowing how many things I have turned down due to the long run nature of them (when I had my Hvx200- just sold it), I am wondering if I would be better served getting the 150 over the 170?

If it really is close, I think I will get the 150 untill something full raster, AND P2 card pricing comes down.
 
The 150's footage is quite competitive with the 170's in most cases. It's 4:2:0 instead of 4:2:2, and long-GOP instead of intraframe. The 720p looks as good or better on the 150 than it does on the 170 in most instances; the 1080 looks better on the 170.

The workflow and integrated P2 establishment, the VFR, the SD recording, the HD-SDI and firewire streaming, those are all reasons to go with the 170 instead of the 150. If you don't need those things, the 150 is pretty compelling, especially considering the price advantage and the media costs.

The only place where a 150 could prove problematical, footage-wise, is if you're shooting something that exceeds the long-GOP codec's ability to handle. Usually that will mean something with smoke/fire/flashes/sparkling/fog/rippling water, but frankly I wasn't able to break the 150's codec in the brief testing I had with it so that might not even be much of an issue (especially in the PH recording mode).
 
Barry_Green said:
The 150's footage is quite competitive with the 170's in most cases. It's 4:2:0 instead of 4:2:2, and long-GOP instead of intraframe. The 720p looks as good or better on the 150 than it does on the 170 in most instances; the 1080 looks better on the 170.

The workflow and integrated P2 establishment, the VFR, the SD recording, the HD-SDI and firewire streaming, those are all reasons to go with the 170 instead of the 150. If you don't need those things, the 150 is pretty compelling, especially considering the price advantage and the media costs.

The only place where a 150 could prove problematical, footage-wise, is if you're shooting something that exceeds the long-GOP codec's ability to handle. Usually that will mean something with smoke/fire/flashes/sparkling/fog/rippling water, but frankly I wasn't able to break the 150's codec in the brief testing I had with it so that might not even be much of an issue (especially in the PH recording mode).
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WOW, I have not even considered that camera untill now.
AS for the long gop, yeah I don't care too much for that, but I convert everything to cineform codec anway, so that is a non -issue.

I would have thought the color issue would have shown through, but I will take your word that the FOOTAGE, doesn't seem to suggest that it does.

I no longer shoot SD. It seems easier to just down-convert it in post.

As for the codec limitations, knowing what they are, I would likely just rent something else if I were shooting smoke/fire/flashes/sparkling fog.

I haven't seen many under 10k cameras that produce rippling water the way the eye sees, so that is a given.

WOW, it's kind of hard to not get this camera, if for nothing else as a straight event footage camera.

One last quetion.....

Does it have 2 sd card slots to record to or just one?
 
Barry,
on the HMC150 official brochure I read: "Intra-frame prediction. The process generates predictive pixel based on the adjacent pixels within each frame..."
Maybe I'm wrong but this would be a sort of intra frame long gop, very different from HDV inter frame long gop (and probably more efficent in many situations).
 
No, it's still inter-frame long GOP. What that brochure is referring to is that AVC has the ability to predict information within each frame, which MPEG-2 can't do. But it has nothing to do with the GOP; AVC-HD has the same kind of GOP structure as HDV does.

It's just a lot more efficient at compression, which means that it can either a) deliver much more resilient results at a comparable bitrate, or b) deliver comparable results at a much lower bitrate. Sony says that 9 megabits of AVC-HD is equivalent to 25 megabits of HDV.
 
OK , thank you very much or the clarification Barry. I have so much to learn about AVCHD. Tommorrow I'm going to change my HVX200 with this new HMC150 because I'm working alone on a very long and exacting project and the HVX is a little heavy (not to mention the problematic P2 workflow if you are alone in the field).
I really hope to have done the right thing.
 
Francesco.. You won't regret this cam.. I Like shooting with it way more than the 200 for a lot of reasons.. but mostly since the footage is so comperable... and even with less noise and better in low light. The SD cards offer lots of flexibility and with FCP now working as advertised... it's really not a problem with things...
 
Barry_Green said:
b) deliver comparable results at a much lower bitrate. Sony says that 9 megabits of AVC-HD is equivalent to 25 megabits of HDV.
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I'm here to tell you the the 6Mbps HE mode looks just as good as the 17Mbps of a Z1U. And the HMC's far superior low light ability makes it a clear winner. I recently shot around 30 hours of HE mode for a conference which was 2 fourteen hour days plus 4 hours on the first evening.

Plugged into AC power, the HMC150 is an awesome long load event capturing MACHINE! I got 374 minutes per 16Gb card, that's 6 hours 14 minutes EACH! But aside from the load time, the image was fine for the simple talking head footage that this event consisted of. Even pans look fine.
 
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