1080/24p Is More Detailed Than 720 Mode

PappasArts

PappasArts

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Last night was the Moviola HVX200 seminar. Dough Leighton was there for Panasonic. As usual he does a great job. Nice guy! Ken Yas spoke as well. Ben Rich was there speaking on behalf of his usage of the camera as well Michael Cioni of PlasterCity Digital, a top notch Post house in LA.


Now for no BS; 1080P was brought up more than once. This 1080 that was promised almost a year ago, has not lived up to the""MEGA"" hype. For i 1080P was the thing I wanted the most, for many it was the same. I could care less for under crank or over crank. Nice feature, but image quality is paramount.

Michael Cioni Director of operations and DI supervisor at PlasterCity made it very clear that the 1080p mode does not offer one ounce of visual resolution benefit. After the seminar we spoke, I asked if he scoped both 1080p and 720p. He replied to all of us " yes"..

He went on to say that not only is 1080p an internal up-convert, it also adds odd anomalies while scoped between the lines. He made it very clear that 1080p, was a not to use feature. He made very clear that you use only the 720P mode. He also stood his ground that the ccd is 960x720.


My personal opinion is that Panasonic BS'ed us into thinking that 1080p was the real deal. If it was done right, we should have seen a 50% increase in detail. However from one of the best Post houses in LA, they came to the conclusion it offers 0% increase in detail...


This is very pathetic IMHO. If it even had 20% increase I would have been happier, even though it should be from 40 to 50% increase....

However not the case.

If your a professional is this business, when we hear of a 1080P camera head, we automatically have an associated level of performance that comes with a 1080P signature camera head. 1080p equates to a certain resolution.

The HVX buy all accounts from PlasterCity as I said before offers 0% gain and actual has strange anomalies going on with this in camera up-convert.

Other things. There is no noise issue with this camera. It's very clean. It sees very well under low light. I can confirm it's in the ballpark of 300 to 320 asa. The color is top notch. The camera is built like a tank, tough little bastard. P2 is an awesome step into the future. There are issues with reds brought up last night at the seminar, however I get this issue with Varicam. It's a DCT codec issue I believe as well not being 4:4:4 D5.

I'm not happy with this 1080P issue. I believe Panasonic should comment on this publicly. After last night hearing top people in this business basically saying that there is not a single percentage gain in 1080p just pissed me off that Panasonic promoted it in the first place with ""MEGA HYPE"". The camera is a fine 720p camera, however it was supposed be a 1080p camera too! And it is not....................................

Just my honest Opinion on this matter.........


Michael Pappas
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what a shame! all footage published here seems to support this statement. every footage i have seen so far (even in 1080) had less detail than the jvc hd100, which i used for a short (could the hvx uprez hd from sd?). if you look at the sundance footage of the canon xl h1 , you will know how 1080 has to look. damn, i hope the pal hvx will be better than the ntsc one.

a sad goodbye
mas
 
Michael, on your website you posted some blow ups of footage shot by Kaku comparing 720 to 1080. To me, those blow ups did show a slight increase in resolution. There is a difference although it is very very slight..
 
MAS said:
what a shame! all footage published here seems to support this statement. every footage i have seen so far (even in 1080) had less detail than the jvc hd100, which i used for a short (could the hvx uprez hd from sd?). if you look at the sundance footage of the canon xl h1 , you will know how 1080 has to look. damn, i hope the pal hvx will be better than the ntsc one.

a sad goodbye
mas
Click to expand...

I don't think the HVX is uprezzing from SD. I put the camera side by side with a Sony DSR-500 and even with the detail down to -4 on the HVX, the Panasonic was still head and shoulders above the Sony in resolution. :thumbsup:
 
Michael,

I am not sad about that, really.

Remember, you posted two grabs from Kaku (same framing) that clearly showed that the 1080 had some more visible details.

From what i have seen so far, the HVX's luminance res is a little lower than the H1, but the color res and richness is sooooooo much better than anything i've seen so far in this price range, and even well above that price range.

My eyes can't be wrong, the HVX's image quality is gorgeous.
 
It more seemed to me that he thinks the chips are 720x940 and that you get slow mo in that mode, and don't have to be adding pull down when recording, so you might as well go native, instead of shooting 1080 which is an in camera up rez from the camera charts he shot.
 
I was also at the Moviola event last night and had some questions about the whole 1080p thing. First, I just want to ask the film people here if the 1080p mode concerns are primarily for film-outs? There have been some comments over time about the differences between 720p and 1080i, whether the picture looks better, has more res, etc with 1080i.
Several years ago I saw an exhibit at NAB comparing the picture quaiity of 720p vs 1080i.
They were showing the same foootage side by side and the exhibit had an explantion about the technical differences in the picture. The pictures looked identical as far as the eye could tell. They pointed out significant amounts of moire and other artifacts that are a normai part of intelaced recordings. We all know about moire on pictures that contain stripes but it was surprising to see the amount of artifacts that you really don't know about that cause serious picture degradation. The advantages of progressive scan offset the problems of interlace and produced a very similar picture at a lower resolution.

I mention this for those of us planning to use the camera mainly for video delivery, not film-outs. Differences between 720p and 1080i should be very small.

Does the new HD DVD or Blue Ray support 1080p?
If they do then not having true 1080p on the camera is a problem.

For broadcast material I don't think there is any support right now for 1080p but perhaps others here know more about this than myself. For television delivery 720p should be fine. Film-outs are a different story.

It does disappoint that the 1080p mode does not look better than 1080i or 720p
 
Remember I had to uprez those to 4K and it's slight. 1080p vs 720P should have a minimum of 30% or so increase. It does not.

It really should have been between 40 ant 50% to be honest.

We shouldn't have to even give a second look to a 720p vs 1080p. It's double the pixels. Hell, double! Around 1.4 million of detail should be in that 1080p image. Instead it's half that res. As a 720P it's fine, however as I stated they spent a year bragging about their camera and etc. It's BS in my opinion. I'm just glad PlasterCity Digital said it in a packed room full of people.

This is just my opinion, however I believe Panasonic intentionally under engineered the resolution of the 1080p mode on HVX200 and damn well knew it, while at the same time they were cramming down the worlds throat of a 1080P mode and the "wow" it would be when the HVX200 came out.
 
Another thought here,
Michael seemed to me to be a very sharp and experienced guy. I have absolutely no reason to doubt his observations. However, if you are going to reference Michaels opinions/experienes then you have to remember that he made it extremely clear that he championed the HVX200 as THE camera to use if going to the expense of DI. He made it very clear that HDV creates costly problems in the film mastering process.

Your other options:
1. JVC has seen some good reports, however many have said that the stock lens sucks and the next best lens would cost you another $10,000. Even then it would still be HDV.
2. Canon seems to have the best resolution of this group of cameras. But then you would have 15 frame long gop (at least the JVC chose 5 frame long gop). Or you could record the component HD out of the camera but then you would have an extremely expensive daily rental of an HD deck plus the additional post costs of having an HD deck for ingest and more expensive drive arrays for the media. Don't forget the insurance you will need for the deck rental. Might as well rent a Varicam or similar level camera.

None of these cameras are going to replace high end cameras. As was said at the meeting, these cameras are reasonable compromises to the varying limitations of lens physics and balances of pixel count vs. sensitivity.
 
As Barlow Elton did at Sundance with his H1

1#. Shoot HDVtape at 24f on location.

2#. Back at Studio. Capture SDI out to 1,300 Kona card in DVCprohd100 in 1080.

3#. Apply Cinema tools in FCP. Now you have true 1080P 24fps....

ASk Barlow your self. Sounds quite simple.

Everyone who has compared SDI vs HDV of the same material reports a ever so slight difference. Canons Digic chip and HDV codec engine runs extremely clean. However this thread is not about how good or not the Canon is.

It is about Panasonic leading us on for almost 1 year about a MAJOR feature that no one offered. In the end it was all marketing about a FAUX 1080p as we have been told by very talented people at PlasterCity.

Thats badddddddddd marketing?

How, funny. Canon didn't promise a damn thing. They just said here you go it's called the XLH1 and it is what it is with no 1 year hype.... I respect that!
 
Sproketz said:
Another thought here,
Michael seemed to me to be a very sharp and experienced guy. I have absolutely no reason to doubt his observations. However, if you are going to reference Michaels opinions/experienes then you have to remember that he made it extremely clear that he championed the HVX200 as THE camera to use if going to the expense of DI.
Click to expand...

Hmmm... I'd like to second this, in saying that Michael (from Plaster City) was extremely gung-ho about the HVX as the absolute best available choice in its price range. Yet, he did say that he was sure it was a 720 rather than a 1080 camera. So we're seeing again that it's not pure resolution that matters so much as color resolution and codec. So, yes, perhaps Panasonic may have gone a little far in playing up 1080p, but the end result is that it doesn't matter - it provides a better result (in 720p) than the 1080 cameras (to paraphrase Michael).

But, sure, some explanation from Panasonic wouldn't hurt. Well, I guess that's not always the case. But it would be interesting to hear.
 
How did it actually look, to your eyes, Michael? Did the 720p Blow- up looked good? Close to 35mm? How did you feel compared to the other cameras?
 
Hey guys, no offense or anything, I'm just a lowly DVX100B guy, but I always thought the HVX200 was 1080i, not 1080p? Everyone I spoke with this Fall said 1080i max. The Panasonic brochure I read (p. 5) states 720p is native, but 1080 is in a 60i wrapper. The Panasonic rep I spoke with today also told me that the 720p would look superior, in many cases, over the 1080i. Not sure if I missed anything, but just what I heard.

http://catalog2.panasonic.com/webap...d=14571&modelNo=AG-HVX200&surfModel=AG-HVX200
 
Pal model will have increase of resolution in 1080p, I'm pretty sure you must buy Pal to have something near to "1080p" mode...
 
Danilo Del Tufo said:
Pal model will have increase of resolution in 1080p, I'm pretty sure you must buy Pal to have something near to "1080p" mode...
Click to expand...

Hmm, very skeptical about this... Even tough theoretically dvcpro hd pal in 1080 is 1440... And I'm not seing any ccd revision on the PAL version... So it will still be at its best on 720P resolution, wich is equal in both territories (like you said in the Panasonic broadcast forum :)

Danilo, have you tried messing with the ntsc footage in post? Have you tried any Pal conversion? What are your results?
 
PappasArts said:
. . . It is about Panasonic leading us on for almost 1 year about a MAJOR feature that no one offered. In the end it was all marketing about a FAUX 1080p as we have been told by very talented people at PlasterCity. . . .
Click to expand...

Michael- You said it in your original post, "image is parmount" and I agree wholeheartedly. Funny, I was thinking you reported astonishing results from the film out last month (but I’m probably wrong), memory fails me. I think many have suspected the ccd(s) were 960x720 for some time so it shouldn’t come as much of a shock to us that something had to be enhanced to arrive at 1080p, no? Anyway, Thanks for an honest report –

This only means I will have to furlough Salma, Denzel, and Elvis long enough to save up another $70,000 . . . then I'll be able to get the job done! Not going to bang Panasonic around over it though. If I was that worried about having to project to a 70’ screen I’d either be shooting 35 or looking at a different camera.

Seems like November, Murderball, and a few less notables others made the trip (up from SD), and I enjoyed both of those. I’ll bet I can make my money back on the HVX in 720p rather quickly . . . and I wouldn’t be surprised if Panasonic has another product up their sleeve in the not too distant future anyhow. I mean no disrespect, in fact I admire your willingness to share your thoughts (especially when their not consistent with what I’d hoped to hear) but, I wouldn’t cry foul too loudly – after all, you can buy the thing for less than $5500 (without recording media).
 
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