HVX200 vs EX-1

sylvanimate said:
I would love to hear your thoughts. Not an argument for or against so much as a true discussion.
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Gotta watch iris - don't let it go beyond f8 or the image will go soft due to diffraction. Also bright sunlight pool-side, bit of shade - needs a good white-balance. Tried warm cards?

Play with shutter settings and shutter on/off.

Also note that you gain a stop by switching shutter off, you gain another stop by shooting 720p, but you lose a stop by shooting 720p50/60. The sensitivity balance is tricky.
 
I appreciate this test, but it's tough to judge results on the web. It's pretty compressed. What about high resolution stills?
 
MattDavis said:
Gotta watch iris - don't let it go beyond f8 or the image will go soft due to diffraction.
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Interesting, I was shooting yesterday and stopped down probably past f8 and noticed later a substantial softening of the image. Viewing it at 100% it looked as soft as HVX footage at 100% viewing size so still usable, but I was wondering what the problem was.
 
I shot an equine event yesterday with one of my EX1s and because I planned on getting usable still images from the footage, I used a 22.5º shutter with ND2, which had me between f2-5.6 most of the time on this overcast/hazy sun day.
I'm reviewing footage in Premiere CS3.2 and all of it looks simply stunning--like looking out the window with 20/20 vision. Details down to the pixel level, huge exposure lattitude with a PP that I crafted and evolved over several weeks, deep, rich blacks and dark browns of the quarter horses and their rider's caps. Skies with never a blown highlight. A white plastic fence that retains details, and everything in between, rendered with a high fidelity to the original scenes.
I also shot some 720P/60 so I could slow it down in post for the jump shots. Even so, it was about as detailed as my V1U on 1080p.
Codec handled the high speed pans across foliage with surprising accuracy.
I know the Panny folks in the HPX500 forum are saying the EX1 can't handle motion, but my footage from Sunday demonstrates that it does so in spades. I can pause on just about any frame and it's a crisp 8x10 still photo.
There were photographers there from Quickshots, an instant photo studio in a trailer, but I wonder how many good shots they managed to get with their SLR cameras. I got 1440 great shots per minute, and with sound to boot.
 
I'm editing it now. I'll put some short excerpts on ExposureRoom.com shortly, in a couple of hours. Lots of slow-mo. Using time remapping in Premiere to slow the 60fps footage down for the jump shots. It's looking real nice so far.
 
I hope the compression I am seeing in these clips is form your encoder and not the cam. Lots of lossy in there.

-gl
 
_gl said:
I hope the compression I am seeing in these clips is form your encoder and not the cam. Lots of lossy in there.

-gl
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There is triple compression on online video clips. I compressed it to a small Windows Media file (which looks pretty good, actually), but then XR recompressed it to a much smaller Flash file, which is where 80% of the quality is lost. There is just too much motion for the Flash codec to handle it.

For a scaled down version of an actual frame from the XDCam, I put up a (once again compressed) JPEG image made from the BMP image that XDCam Clip Browser exported from a frame here. This gal was wearing a beige jacket.

http://exposureroom.com/getassetthumbnailimage.aspx?id=cfe89a3af8ee48c18d78b6eab37811db&size=lr" "Click Here to View The Photo Titled: Rider on Horse"



My friend has a Nikon D-SLR and we both took pictures at the horse event. Frankly, although the still images have higher pixel count, the colors are not as realistic, the lattitude is smaller and the red rose petals in the shot he took were lacking in detail as compared to the XDCam footage frame of that scene. Also, the rider's suit jacket was purplish on the Nikon, where's it's an accurate neutral gray on the XDCam, as it was in life. Both cameras rendered the green foliage about the same. My slightly faster ISO/shutter speed yielded slightly sharper details in high motion ares. His images were from Nikon RAW format, while mine were BMPs converted to JEPG and uploaded to XR, which demoted them to 720x1280.
 
That is much better.

Not sure that XR is the best way of getting your work illustrated properly :)

-gl
 
booth said:
Interesting, I was shooting yesterday and stopped down probably past f8 and noticed later a substantial softening of the image. Viewing it at 100% it looked as soft as HVX footage at 100% viewing size so still usable, but I was wondering what the problem was.
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Lens diffraction issues start to become noticeable on the EX1 when closing down past f/8. My JVC HD100 starts to look soft when closing past f/8 too. At f/16 it's horrible.

As a general rule, I never close down past f/8. Usually I will not close more than f/5.6.


http://www.luminous-landscape.com/tutorials/understanding-series/u-diffraction.shtml
 
For video, XR is about the best of the streaming "HD" sites, but until we all have universal Gigabit internet speeds, real HD is going to be a pipe dream.

I was somewhat surprised that they also downsample still images. Looks like the stills mimic the video resolution choices they offer. I should ask Shiv Kumar if he'd consider adding a 'download original' option for photos, as he has for videos. My original video looks quite a bit better than the Flash version. It's a portly download, but not too painful on a fast BB connection. But none of this compares to the master footage itself, which is impeccable.


Re, diffraction.. I did some informal tests just aimed at a building and compared f1.9 all the way to f16. It was not as soft at the f16 aperture as I'd expected. I played with manually stopping it down to a point midway between f16 and C, which was maybe f22 or smaller, and softness really became obvious at that aperture. Of course, aiming at a wall with vertical battons isn't always the best test.

For the horse shoot, I stayed between f1.9-f5.6 most of the time, using ND2 and 22.5º shutter. That seemed to yield very good results.
 
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