Canon XH A1 vs HVX200

If you have any intention to intercut the A1 with HVX or DVX footage its probably not going to work.

if it was between an A1 and a DVX Id take the DVX everytime. HDV just seems really useless to me.
 
I shot a wedding recently with the canon a1 in extreme low light conditions annd all I can say after using the dvx, hvx, and the canon a1 is the a1 produced the cleanest image out of all 3 cams, and the canon a1 intercut so well with the hvx footage at times I forgot which shts were which. it all comes down to cam settings.
 
Personally i prefere the A1. I owned both and the A1 seems superior in many domains:

Resolution: the A1 has much more resolution

Noise: The A1 is one of the less noisy camera for the price. The HVX is one of the most noisy

Banding: The A1 has no banding, or very few when using some extreme settings. The HVX has so much banding that i wondered if it was really a 8 bit camera/codec.




On the other hand, the A1 has some Cons.

Lens chromatic aberrations: The A1 has a lot of chromatic aberrations, but i don't care because they are near the image edges, and as i use it always with the Letus Extreme, the camera is zoomed half way, so i don't see them.

Colors: THe HVX has fantastic colors out of the box. And i find quite difficult to CC Canon clips, but with some work i can get same and even better results.




.
 
Huy Vu said:
No it doesn't. The A1 is a great camera, but let's not make it anymore than what it is. Between the DVX and the A1 in low light, it's a no-contest.
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If the A1 was equal to the DVX in low light I'd be satisfied on that accord since I'm quite pleased with the DVX low light (and not so on the HVX) although some of my counterparts "claim" that they can get to much lower light conditions with their Sony (cmos) HDV cameras but as our two Sony 3-cmos camera experiment proved it was just counterpart "howl" which we often find is the case and thus we are back to our original sales plan with our clients (for two weeks now) and it's gained appointments again where we might not have gotten them.
 
There are huge (to put it mildly) differences between Sony CMOS cameras. The HVR-A1U (one 1/3" CMOS chip) is downright dismal in low light. The HVR-V1U (three 1/4" CMOS chips) cameras is decent in low light (for an HD camera, not a SD camera). The HVR-Z7U and HVR-S270U (three 1/3" CMOS chips) do pretty well in low light from what I've seen in side by side comparisons with some other HD cameras (much better than I would have guessed), but I don't know if they would be comparable to a DVX (or other SD cameras in that class) in low light or not (they might actually do a little better). The PMW-EX1 (three 1/2" CMOS chips) performs very well in low light, and I would be quite surprised if it didn't outperform the DVX. The Sony HVR-Z1U is not a CMOS camera (it has three 1/3" CCD chips), but does fairly well in low light, for an HD camera, in the same general ballpark as the HVR-V1U. Even though it is sold by the Sony's "Pro" division, I don't consider the HVR-HD1000U a pro camera.

Edit: The new PMW-EX3 should perform like the PMW-EX1 in low light. I believe they use the same imaging system and codecs.
 
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Robert M Wright said:
There are huge (to put it mildly) differences between Sony CMOS cameras.. . .
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I bring this up because we often lose wedding business to one of the so called "low light" Sony houses and have had brides whose video was grainy and poor quality send us their material and request us to "fix it up" wherein we ALWAYS send it back and tell them that they should contact their vendor and the damage is already done. I know we could do "something" but unfortunately for them we feel that it's in the best interest of the bride, us, and the industry, for these "claimers" (which we call liars) be found out and badly publicized. Moreover, our experience with capturing MPEG2 from a DVD and trying to do ANYTHING with it is like playing with matches in the hopes of not getting burned. MPEG2 does not fix well (if at all) since the color bandwidth seems sooooooo narrow and resultly anything we'd fix will get our name on it and we DON'T WANT THAT if it isn't 100%. At the worse case scenario we've learned how to "cheat" the DVX into thinking it's shooting something else and while it puts a tint on the image with some color to it we can see very deep into the darkness doing so. The first time my 1st Editor seen it she said, "what did you do to this video?" I told her to look at the end of it and she said, "who turned the lights almost off." The truth was it was the same light just cheated the cameras imaging.
 
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robmneilson said:
If you have any intention to intercut the A1 with HVX or DVX footage its probably not going to work.

if it was between an A1 and a DVX Id take the DVX everytime. HDV just seems really useless to me.
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What an odd statement. In fact the HDV codec of Canon and JVC IMO has worked very well.

I cut an A1 with an HPX often and it looks GREAT! I usually set the A1 for some nice wide shots to mix with my HPX - top stuff!
 
I own an A1, but have shot a few times on the HVX. I find the HVX generally feels clunky and awkward, I dislike the form factor. I was shooting a music video in North Long Beach (of all places) and found that reverting back to my MBP every 32 minutes really wasn't cutting it. Only downside of tape is not having a deck, but I can deal with it.

On the other side of the lens, I find that most of my stuff shot with the A1 is on par if not better than the HVX... especially if you know what you're doing CC'ing.

DVCPRO HD is admired (I gather, generally speaking, among other technical reasons) because the ever popular Varicam outputs on the same codec, giving the HVX a more "professional" feeling.

Ultimately, I went with my A1 because of price, image quality, and because my trusted friend at Samy's loved his. If you need to save money, I'd definitely go with an A1, though in the same vein it should not by any means be considered the economy choice, it definitely pulls its own.

The crux of the thing is, I can't help but finding myself wondering if I should sell my A1 and move to an HVX. Everyone has them. The popularity must convey something. Using them on Cloverfield, and countless other features... must mean something. People always say it all comes down to the image, which is true to a point.

EDIT: Panasonic coddled me during NAB. I watched a presentation as HDV got torn apart next to AVCHD (and since DVCPROHD has a higher bit rate...) I cried.

XH-A1: 4:2:0 } Means that half of our color information is thrown out? Wow.
HVX: 4:2:2 } Lends itself to better keying, and more latitude in color correction.

Just my 2¢
 
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Hopefully the 200A will fix the 1080 24pa top edge artifacting problem which required us to zoom in on an entire film to fix (I have verified this flaw with over 6 cameras). Unacceptable in my opinion. The banding in the grain of the HVX200 is quite prominent also.
 
J_E_R said:
Hopefully the 200A will fix the 1080 24pa top edge artifacting problem which required us to zoom in on an entire film to fix (I have verified this flaw with over 6 cameras). Unacceptable in my opinion. The banding in the grain of the HVX200 is quite prominent also.
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I'm using an HVX200A now with FCP and I see no edge artifacts at all. I'm sure it's a system bug and not an HVX200(A) bug.

Just as well, the banding is a bit better on the 200A, although still exists.
 
Kholi said:
I'm using an HVX200A now with FCP and I see no edge artifacts at all. I'm sure it's a system bug and not an HVX200(A) bug.

Just as well, the banding is a bit better on the 200A, although still exists.
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How's the low light in your opinion? Also, in FCP when editing the material what rendering codec do you use? Or, is there a choice in FCP? And if so, how well does it handle the material?
 
Lowlight's fantastic. Much cleaner image means gain can be used without sacrificing too much image quality which makes it even better.

FCP is just Log and Transfer: Once you do that then you just chop away. Handles it like butter
 
Kholi said:
Lowlight's fantastic. Much cleaner image means gain can be used without sacrificing too much image quality which makes it even better.

FCP is just Log and Transfer: Once you do that then you just chop away. Handles it like butter
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Do you use a laptop or desktop? We're looking into a road program that will require edits "on the fly" and we're thinking a Mac PowerBook and FCP - and - Edius with Windows XP so that we'd have a cross platform dual solution . . although . . this hasn't been worked out completely (as neither is the camera solution) but it's being studied out and with the HVX200A and reports that the low light is markedly improved, well then, we might be back on course to accomplish what we want (other than it's sounding like we'll have to have some ND filters in the daylight stuff huh?
 
Gavin Garrison said:
Panasonic coddled me during NAB. I watched a presentation as HDV got torn apart next to AVCHD (and since DVCPROHD has a higher bit rate...) I cried..
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Panasonic's good at emphasizing the advantages of the DVCProHD codec but downplays some of the weaknesses, like horizontal compression and the high cost of P2 memory cards. They also don't mention that the sensors in their entry-level HD cameras are only 960x540 resolution, which results in soft images compared to most competing models - including some costing only a fraction of the price.

HDV is a decent engineering compromise allowing thousands of videographers to produce good results for clients at a modest price. With proper settings some HDV cameras are comparable to a DVX100 for low-light performance (I've tested this myself), and the Sony Z7U is possibly better. A lot of green screen work is being done with HDV cameras, and if you move up to the Sony EX1 you'll get similar chroma resolution compared to the HVX200 (plus better low-light response).

In other words, DVProHD is nice but it's not something to cry over if you don't have it. End viewers will never view your work at DVCProHD quality anyway, so the practical difference from other HD codecs doesn't matter for most purposes. If you have clients who specifically want DVCProHD then that's that, but otherwise HDV is fine.
 
There is no question that the cost of P2 cards is outrageous (like SxS) and that Panasonic could have captured the market on the card idea had they sold the things for a reasonable mark up but instead what they have done is opened the door to competition and thus may have allowed the penetration of a series of low cost media cameras and thus slammed their customers in the process who end up with P2 should the market move away from it. I think on the broadcast side P2 will remain alive however because the broadcast folks (who we are also) will never want to look like any other market but instead focus on being different (ENG).

On the DVCPro side so far I can't complain other than file storage which requires extensive amounts of space to store, work, and render. Moreover, if editing in native (non compression) then our dual xeon machines just fight miserably to keep up on the render side and thus we must use a compression codec to manage the enormously large DVCPro native material. In other words, we take this huge DVCPro HD material that we chose to get in order to get the "BEST" picture possible then allow it to compress to some generic MPEG or M2T or the like in order to mange the process power and thus would this not have been the same as just going GOP HDV which is compressed?
 
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