DVX for home video look? Combined with 7D?

D

DRmoreno730

New member
Hi. I'm sure there has been posts on here before about this.

I am shooting in a few weeks what I want to look like a home video. The ones from the consumer camcorders/palmcorders popular in the early 2000's that shoots on VHS-C tapes (those small fat tapes that you would have to put inside VHS looking adapter to play in the vcr).

Thing is, we also want to combine it with a few shots of HD looking footage. The home videos would be like a flashback.

I originally wanted to shoot the home video stuff on DVX and then the rest on my DP's Canon 7D. My DP on the other hand suggests we shoot HVX for all.
Shoot HVX at 60 frames and then we'll shoot our other stuff (the non-homevideo) at 24.

I'm more worried about the home video stuff actually looking like home video. He's worried about putting different formats on the same editing sequence in post.

Our final outputs would be to screen on Sony HDCAM tape, formatted to 1080i / 59.94 or 1080p / 23.98psf

Any suggestions?
 
You can certainly shoot with the DVX at 60i (Progressive OFF) for a traditional video look, and there are filters you can add in post to mimic VHS. If you're wanting 16:9, just be sure you use 30P instead, as 60i (Progressive OFF) and Squeeze mode on the DVX don't play well together.

As for post-production issues with different formats, it's pretty simple. You can take your SD footage from the DVX and transcode it to HD. It's not going to gain anything, or suddenly look like the SD footage, but it will make the footage compatible with the project. The HVX's footage can also be made to look like VHS using the same filters, and you don't have to deal with transcoding.

Last, you need to consider which of the final output formats you're going to use, and which overall aesthetic you want. If 24p (23.98) is the output goal and the look the look that you want, shoot everything in 24p since your "home video" footage is going to have to be edited at 23.98 (just don't use the cine-like gamma settings). If 24p doesn't matter, and your final output is going to be 1080i/60 (59.94), shoot everything at 30p.
 
I would shoot 24p Normal for the film stuff, and 60i for the home video stuff. You'll get lower res if you combine a DVX's 60i and Squeeze, but that shouldn't be a problem because you're going for a low-res VHS-C look anyway, right?

Edit on a 60i timeline, and output to 60i HDCAM, and all of that should work fine together. Don't worry about editing 24p and 60i on the same sequence -- if you shoot the 24p stuff on the HVX in 24p Normal mode (1080i/24p) then it will be recorded embedded in a 60i data stream, and you can drop it all into the same timeline effortlessly. So if you shoot the "home video" stuff in 60i, and the film stuff in 24p normal mode, they'll both be recorded as 60i sequences and will edit effortlessly.
 
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