An hour with the HVX

dougspice

dougspice

Veteran
So I had to stop by EVS earlier and pick up some rentals. And then I had to wait around for a long time for people to call me with info. So I spent all that time playing with the HVX, of course. It was hooked up to the Panasonic 42" plasma screen, and anyway, here's my thoughts.

- Noise was the first thing I looked for, since that's been all the discussion lately. Lighting in there was fairly low but far from dark, meaning I was running at about an f/4 with no grain. There was a very small amount of grain in dark/black areas. Nothing I was even slightly concerned with. Watching some outdoors/dusk stuff that had been shot already, with definite shadow areas, I didn't see anything that caught my eye. In other words, while I have not seen any actual night footage, I think anyone complaining about noise must have their camera settings wrong and/or is a pansy.

- The slo-mo is great.

- The focus ring is awesome now. This was always one of my complaints about the DVX - too much give in the focus ring. Now, though, it's smooth, precise, and has just the right amount of resistance.

- Very little noticeable difference between 1080 and 720. It seems to only manifest itself in very fine details and I really doubt most people would ever see the difference. On the other hand, I didn't really closely inspect the way the display was set up in the showroom; it's possible it wasn't displaying true 1080 I suppose.

- Depth of field was surprising/pleasing. Fairly shallow from anywhere in middle zoom on up, with a nice clean bokeh. Still not really the "film look" if that's what you're going for, but definitely not as sterile as DV images I'm used to.

- The focus assist is nice. Oh, but Push Auto still doesn't work in progressive modes. Continuing disappointment there.

- Menus, menus, menus. I'm quite sure an awful lot of people are going to need to read the manual for this camera. In other words, you can expect whole new generations of "what's that clunking sound?" asked over and over and over again.

That's all I can remember right now. It wasn't really a scientific investigation, but there were specific things I was looking at. All in all I feel very confident in plopping down my money for this camera.
 
thanks. It's great to keep getting different POV's on the camera. Thanks again for posting for the impatient.

J.
 
Great report - did you pump Rush for HVX delivery info?? The Panny Monitor is only 720p rez. Only recently at CES Panny announced true 1080p screens.
 
I tried asking for some shipment info, but there was a war-weary "Nobody knows, kid" look in his eye, so I figured not to push it. Anyway, I figure the more it's unknown, the more people ahead of me on the list will get tired and drop out. None of you have $6000 anyway, I know it! ;)
 
Oh, and I'm pretty sure the monitor it was playing on was the TH42PHD7UY (Panasonic doesn't make it easy to remember these things, do they?) which is technically capable of 1080i. Whether it was configured for that, I can't say.

edit: but only 1024x768 native pixels, I've discovered, so that might be the cause. Regardless, my point stands that for the time being almost no one outside of actual networks will probably be able to tell the difference between 1080 and 720.
 
dougspice said:
I think anyone complaining about noise must have their camera settings wrong and/or is a pansy.
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:thumbsup: This post gets my vote for 'best post of the week to incorporate the word "pansy"...'

- Very little noticeable difference between 1080 and 720. It seems to only manifest itself in very fine details and I really doubt most people would ever see the difference. On the other hand, I didn't really closely inspect the way the display was set up in the showroom; it's possible it wasn't displaying true 1080 I suppose.
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Did you record and play back, or just watch the live image? The live image is extremely close between the modes, you'll only really see a difference if you record and then play back the footage.

Oh, but Push Auto still doesn't work in progressive modes. Continuing disappointment there.
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Don't know what you mean -- I just tried it in 720/24p mode, and "push auto" most definitely does work. Tried it in 480/30p also, and it works there too.
 
barry why would you NOT notice the difference between 1080 and 720 in live mode but you would notice a difference if it was recorded? Isn't it the same signal?
 
I'm also confused about that, but the answer is: no, I didn't record. Which signal is being output over the cable, then? What would you be recording if you recorded that analog signal?

Barry_Green said:
Don't know what you mean -- I just tried it in 720/24p mode, and "push auto" most definitely does work. Tried it in 480/30p also, and it works there too.
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Huh. I most definitely could not get it to work. I tried it in 720/24p and it did nothing. I tried switching the focus mode, tried pressing it WHILE the focus mode toggle was in auto - nothing. Then I switched to 480i and it worked perfectly. I believe I then also tried it in 1080i and again it worked. Also, the button felt really stiff. I couldn't be sure at first that I was actually pressing it at all. But it seemed more like it was designed that way than that this particular unit was flawed. I don't get it.
 
Are you sure the plasma screen you viewed even supported 1080i or was it just 720p? Personally, I haven't seen any Plasma sets around here that support 1080i. So, it's possible the monitor was downconverting the signal... hence they both looked the same.
 
dougspice said:
- Very little noticeable difference between 1080 and 720. It seems to only manifest itself in very fine details and I really doubt most people would ever see the difference. On the other hand, I didn't really closely inspect the way the display was set up in the showroom; it's possible it wasn't displaying true 1080 I suppose.
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When I get an HVX(emphasis on "when", not "if") I'm going to record in 1080 as much as possible, for 2 reasons.
For one, the resolution difference is slight, but it's there. :thumbsup:
For another, 720 and 1080 have the exact same compression ratio(6.7--1080 has twice the pixels but half the framerate, so it equates to the same compression as 720), so thecompression artifacts will appear smaller. :grin:
 
Gman said:
Are you sure the plasma screen you viewed even supported 1080i or was it just 720p? Personally, I haven't seen any Plasma sets around here that support 1080i. So, it's possible the monitor was downconverting the signal... hence they both looked the same.
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Downconversion is pretty much what happens with all of these Plasma/LCDs TVs. They say they "support 1080" but all that means is you can throw a 1080 signal at it and it will downconvert it for you without problem. If the native resolution of the monitor is 1024x768, then that's all you're gettin folks. No 1080 anything. Unfortunately, "1080" is a hot marketing word, so it gets thrown around an awful lot. I don't know why anyone would bother to buy an HDTV, however, that doesn't support 1920x1080 natively.

I think that's also the reason that most people aren't noticing "much of a difference" between the two modes on the camera. If you don't plug it into a monitor capable of displaying the difference, then it stands to reason that you won't see any. If the camera isn't capable of resolving a mode higher than 720, then the entire mode itself is pointless. Indeed, they may have included it so that they can still look like they're competiting with the other 1080 cameras on the market (another reason they're not releasing those CCD specs), but even if it is only a 720p camera, it's got a lot more going for it than most of the 1080i alternatives anyway.
 
rgdfilms said:
barry why would you NOT notice the difference between 1080 and 720 in live mode but you would notice a difference if it was recorded? Isn't it the same signal?
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Because the 720p mode records fewer pixels overall. In 1080 mode it's recording a luma grid of 1280x1080 (which 720 happens to fit well into); in 720p mode it records 960x720. That subsampling costs some res.

The live signal is independent of any codec, completely uncompressed, so you'll see some difference but not as much as you would in the recorded/played back signal.
 
dougspice said:
Which signal is being output over the cable, then? What would you be recording if you recorded that analog signal?
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Raw, uncompressed, live video, at either 1080 or 720, depending on how you have the menus set up. It can cross-convert, so you could be shooting 1080 but have the component output set up for 720. Or the other way around. Or it could be set up to output the same signal that will get fed to the compression engine too (i.e., shoot 720, it outputs 720 uncompressed).


Huh. I most definitely could not get it to work.
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I guarantee you it does, I'm sitting here right now doing it, and push-auto works in all progressive modes (480p, 720p, 1080p). Works in interlaced too. And the button is silky smooth and easy to press, so I'd say that whatever was going on was an issue with that particular unit. I have my official serial-numbered production unit and it's working fine.
 
Barry,

How fast does the auto focus work in Progressive mode? IF I remember correctly, my DVX100 will not auto focus, and the A and B models will, but at only 40% the speed of Interlace.

So how does the speed of the HVX in P mode compare to the speed of the dvx in I mode?

Also, has anyone figured out the Remote focus port? Is it using the same kind of resitance based input as the zoom on the DVX?

Thanks Much

Ben
 
Havent' fiddled with autofocus much, but I'll try it here: I'll try 60p vs. 12p. Hold on...

12p took about twice as long to focus as 60p did. So yes slower frame rates do = slower AF performance (as is to be expected).
 
think anyone complaining about noise must have their camera settings wrong and/or is a pansy.
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Whew!

I was reading reports about noise on the HVX... and started to get depressed. Mind you, I haven't seen any stills with noise yet, but reports persist. Ya put my mind at ease.


Very little noticeable difference between 1080 and 720. It seems to only manifest itself in very fine details and I really doubt most people would ever see the difference.
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I think Barry indicated (correct me if I'm wrong) that 1080 has about 30% more res than 720.

Now that might sound like a lot. When the 8 megapixel Canon 20D was announced to have 30% more pixels than the Canon 10D's 6 megapixels, I got real excited and wanted to upgrade.

When I got to compare the prints from each camera I was hard pressed to tell the difference. Turns out that 30% more pixels equates only to 15% increase in resolution on the horizontal and 15 percent on the vertical. Needless to say, I decided it wasn't worth it to upgrade.

I think for me 720 is adequate, since I'm probably not gonna do film-out.

Side note:

Started to get depressed again when reports started to come in that the HVX was third in the res chart race, behind the Canon H1 and the Sony Z1.

Even if that's true, I like the HVX enough to buy it on the strength of it's other goodies.
 
Barry,

Now that you've had quite some time with the HVX (preproduction version and now hot off the production line), can you relay to us your overall impression of the cameras picture. I'm not looking for anything fancy, maybe just a "not bad", or an "A Okay" or a "you guys aren't gonna believe this $%#@!!$# thing!!!". Is there anything holding you back from telling us we finally have the camera we've been dreaming of? I mean, you're the EF Hutton of DVXUser. When you talk, people listen.
 
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