HMC150 questions answered...

B

Barry_Green

Moderator
Okay, I'm officially allowed to talk about my experiences with the HMC150. I've been using one for the last several days and I think I can pretty much answer all your questions now, so -- ask away! :)
 
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The videomaker podcast seemed to gloss over the quality of the 21-24 high setting. Does it equal or surpass HDV or is this just too subjective of a question.
 
kurtmo said:
Does Vegas puke with HMC150 MTS files?
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Of course. I don't hold out a lot of hope for Sony Vegas ever going out of their way to be pro-active in supporting competitors' products. I would think that Vegas is likely to be the last editor to have proper AVC-HD support across the board.

Until then, I'd recommend looking at CineForm if you want to use Vegas.

EDIUS has a conversion utility that supports all HMC150 modes right now, including 720/24, 720/30, and 720/60, plus all the 1080 PH modes.
 
I log and transfered the footage into fcp and unless I did something long the footage they posted up is really grainy, even the broad daylight clips.
 
Mark Williams said:
The videomaker podcast seemed to gloss over the quality of the 21-24 high setting. Does it equal or surpass HDV
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Beats the hell out of it. The 720p mode is extremely robust, the only way you would ever stand a chance of getting even the minorest of codec degradation would be to push it to 720/60p and shoot something extremely complex (like surfing, which I did... and it looks totally solid). I would think 1080/60i mode is going to be the most challenging for the codec to deal with, but even then it's much more robust than HDV.

I wouldn't put the 6mbps mode up against HDV; the 13mbps mode is about equivalent to HDV. The 17mbps is better, and the 21mbps looks practically uncompressed when working with 720/24p footage.
 
1.) Does AVC HD support any meta data like p2?
2.) What if any focus assist is on the camera?
3.) What formats and frame rates?
4.) Any NLE natively support this yet?

Have you matched footage against HVX200 do the images play well together. Could this be a B camera on set with a HVX ???
 
ecking said:
I log and transfered the footage into fcp and unless I did something long the footage they posted up is really grainy, even the broad daylight clips.
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I haven't seen their footage and I don't know how they shot, but I've got plenty of footage here that is cleaner than Howard Hughes' fingernails. I shot stuff at the beach, at a lake, at a marina, and I would defy anyone to find a spec of grain or noise. It's incredibly clean.

Under torture conditions in pitch black scenarios, yeah you might see some noise. But in what I was shooting I think it's really clean. I'll see if I can post some footage.
 
(1) On the Apple, how does it work with FCP and FCE? (Were there any problems getting it to edit, other than transcoding..)

(2) When shooting 720/30p (or 720/24p) is the data rate at maximum still around the 21 Mbps speed or does the camera drop down to a much lower rate?

(3) I know that still shots never tell the full story, but could you please post still frame grabs.


Bob Diaz
 
Barry_Green said:
I haven't seen their footage and I don't know how they shot, but I've got plenty of footage here that is cleaner than Howard Hughes' fingernails. I shot stuff at the beach, at a lake, at a marina, and I would defy anyone to find a spec of grain or noise. It's incredibly clean.

Under torture conditions in pitch black scenarios, yeah you might see some noise. But in what I was shooting I think it's really clean. I'll see if I can post some footage.
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yeah, I'd like to see some. Especially surfing.
 
BobDiaz said:
(1) On the Apple, how does it work with FCP and FCE? (Were there any problems getting it to edit, other than transcoding..)
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I don't use the Apple so I can't answer that. The EDIUS transcode is effortless, if slower than I would like -- it takes about 40 seconds to transcode a minute of 720p footage, and about 60 seconds to transcode a minute of 1080 footage.

Pinnacle Studio + is supposed to have native support right out of the box. EDIUS 4.6 doesn't yet support PH mode footage but I expect that it (and EDIUS NEO) will be the first to have proper drag 'n' drop native support.

(2) When shooting 720/30p (or 720/24p) is the data rate at maximum still around the 21 Mbps speed or does the camera drop down to a much lower rate?
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All PH mode footage is the same data rate, whether you're shooting 1080/60i or 720/24p. So the net effect is the 720/24p footage gets 2.5x as much bandwidth applied to it per pixel. The result is that it's smokin' clean and nearly visually uncompressed.

(3) I know that still shots never tell the full story, but could you please post still frame grabs.
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I'm sure I can, but let me verify before doing so.
 
Barry_Green said:
I could post the raw MTS file maybe, but I can't guarantee that you'll be able to see it, that depends on your editor.
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Please post! Please post!

I'm very interested in killer quality slow-mo by dropping 720p60 footage onto a 720p24 or p30 timeline. Barry, did you play around with this with your surfing footage?
 
Note, these frame grabs have been processed through the EDIUS file converter, and then also converted to JPG.
1219173905.jpg


1219173948.jpg


1219173990.jpg
 
shrigg said:
Please post! Please post!
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I'll find a place to host one of the surfing clips.

I'm very interested in killer quality slow-mo by dropping 720p60 footage onto a 720p24 or p30 timeline. Barry, did you play around with this with your surfing footage?
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Yep, looks just like HVX overcranked footage as far as the motion goes.
 
Barry_Green said:
Okay, I'm officially allowed to talk about my experiences with the HMC150. I've been using one for the last several days and I think I can pretty much answer all your questions now, so -- ask away! :)
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Okay, bottom line: What's your official take on how the HMC compares to the HPX170/HVX200A? Close to as good visually but saddled with the AVCHD editing hassles?
 
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