zoostory
Well-known member
Hey my friend David (filmstox) and I got our hands on a HVX today and did about 2 hours of testing. I have about 4 minutes of test footage of all sorts of things. I have some good clips, shutter angle, overcranking, highlites, etc... however, I have no place to host, if anyone wants to lend a space, I can upload these clips as 720p24p quicktimes in DVCproHD for your perusal.
Also, something that I haven't seen much yet is people posting their post workflow experiences. So let me share what we did today and how it went.
First off, we ran the camera at 720p24p with all 4 audio tracks recording on a 4 gig card. The camera lasted exactly 10 minutes, 40 seconds, and 40 frames. So if you are doing 720p24p, that means close to 11 minutes a card for 4 gig... not bad at all!
Then we transfered to David's laptop. He has a PC (I am a mac guy so forgive me my lack of knowledge). More or less, he installed a driver, copied the files straight from his PCMCIA slot, took about 8 minutes for 2.5 gigs.
Then I hooked up my iPod via USB2, copied the files over to my iPod, ran home, and copied them to my computer. I run a dual 2.3gHz G5. I placed the files on an internal Maxtor 250gb hard drive, no raid or anything.
I then went into FCP 5.04, went to file > import > P2 I pointed the little pop up window to the root of the P2 folder on my hard drive, it immediately recognized and brought up thumbnails for each clip, as well as time data. I was easily able to import all clips with one exception. Once clip was DVCPRO50 SD for testing purposes. The import dialog didn't like mixing and matching, it would crap out on that clip and not import the rest. So instead of doing import all, I selected everything but that clip and hit import. For roughly 5 minutes of footage it took 2 minutes to import and convert everything to quicktimes. Obviously, this import also reads all the metadata, as it took all of the files that were overcranked and automatically marked them to run at 23.976. So everything I shot for slo-mo was indeed slo-mo. It's only a slight pity that the camera itself cannot playback the cranked footage at the desired speed, yet it's nice to see that FCP so easily handled it!
I layed down the footage and started editing. Rememeber, all I have is one 7200 rpm drive. I have to say, I was amazed at the speed of editing. In fact, much more responsive and clean working with this than with my Z1U footage converted to AIC.
I also brough the footage into shake and did some heads up comparisons of the YUV colorspace of the 4:2:2 HVX footage to my Z1U footage. It comes as no surprize that the 4:2:2 footage is a lot more precise in the U and V channels. However, I was mildly surprized at the amount of noise in particularily the V (Cb) stream. I'm not sure if it was because of the settings in the camera however.
I must also say that the footage looked great played back today on a 50" plasma, and on my 24" dell 2405 LCD flatscreen.
Of course, now the question is, here I am, Mr. Indie geek guy with my movie shot in 720p, edited at home on FCP, now what. It's a weird place right now. It kills me to downconvert to SD and DVD. And it kills the pocketbook to go up to film. So we desperately need people to catch up. We need better home options for viewing this stuff! For indie distro.
But overall, I was amazed. The lens, for prosumer, is very strong. The camera has some weight to it. The tapeless workflow is A-MAZING. I want tape to die now. And for my post VFX needs, this stuff is so much better than any 411 or 420 stuff.
I'm sold.
Again, I have clips that I can share if anyone can help me out with some hosting.
Cheers
zoo
Also, something that I haven't seen much yet is people posting their post workflow experiences. So let me share what we did today and how it went.
First off, we ran the camera at 720p24p with all 4 audio tracks recording on a 4 gig card. The camera lasted exactly 10 minutes, 40 seconds, and 40 frames. So if you are doing 720p24p, that means close to 11 minutes a card for 4 gig... not bad at all!
Then we transfered to David's laptop. He has a PC (I am a mac guy so forgive me my lack of knowledge). More or less, he installed a driver, copied the files straight from his PCMCIA slot, took about 8 minutes for 2.5 gigs.
Then I hooked up my iPod via USB2, copied the files over to my iPod, ran home, and copied them to my computer. I run a dual 2.3gHz G5. I placed the files on an internal Maxtor 250gb hard drive, no raid or anything.
I then went into FCP 5.04, went to file > import > P2 I pointed the little pop up window to the root of the P2 folder on my hard drive, it immediately recognized and brought up thumbnails for each clip, as well as time data. I was easily able to import all clips with one exception. Once clip was DVCPRO50 SD for testing purposes. The import dialog didn't like mixing and matching, it would crap out on that clip and not import the rest. So instead of doing import all, I selected everything but that clip and hit import. For roughly 5 minutes of footage it took 2 minutes to import and convert everything to quicktimes. Obviously, this import also reads all the metadata, as it took all of the files that were overcranked and automatically marked them to run at 23.976. So everything I shot for slo-mo was indeed slo-mo. It's only a slight pity that the camera itself cannot playback the cranked footage at the desired speed, yet it's nice to see that FCP so easily handled it!
I layed down the footage and started editing. Rememeber, all I have is one 7200 rpm drive. I have to say, I was amazed at the speed of editing. In fact, much more responsive and clean working with this than with my Z1U footage converted to AIC.
I also brough the footage into shake and did some heads up comparisons of the YUV colorspace of the 4:2:2 HVX footage to my Z1U footage. It comes as no surprize that the 4:2:2 footage is a lot more precise in the U and V channels. However, I was mildly surprized at the amount of noise in particularily the V (Cb) stream. I'm not sure if it was because of the settings in the camera however.
I must also say that the footage looked great played back today on a 50" plasma, and on my 24" dell 2405 LCD flatscreen.
Of course, now the question is, here I am, Mr. Indie geek guy with my movie shot in 720p, edited at home on FCP, now what. It's a weird place right now. It kills me to downconvert to SD and DVD. And it kills the pocketbook to go up to film. So we desperately need people to catch up. We need better home options for viewing this stuff! For indie distro.
But overall, I was amazed. The lens, for prosumer, is very strong. The camera has some weight to it. The tapeless workflow is A-MAZING. I want tape to die now. And for my post VFX needs, this stuff is so much better than any 411 or 420 stuff.
I'm sold.
Again, I have clips that I can share if anyone can help me out with some hosting.
Cheers
zoo
