Please compare other cameras to the HMC40 here, Thanks.
- Thread starter BobDiaz
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Robert M Wright
Well-known member
A lot of people are still watching SD television on CRTs - even folks that can easily afford just about any huge widescreen plasma or LCD they might want. Just a few weeks ago I was visiting a friend who has an income well into six figures, and noticed she still has a SD CRT television in her living room. It's a pretty nice one, but it really does go to show that a lot of folks just don't give a rat's behind about HD.
Robert M Wright
Well-known member
I live out in the middle of the cornfields, and where I live, they don't even offer any HD channels on cable yet - and boy does what they do give us look like crap on a 60" widescreen.
What about OTA HD? Do you really live THAT far from a closest TV tower? What about satellite TV? What about mail service? DVDs and Blu-rays from Netflix is what I mostly watch, I do not watch regular TV. Also, there is BitTorrent (after all you do have internet access from the middle of your cornfield).
Robert M Wright
Well-known member
I'm about 75 miles from the nearest TV broadcasting tower. I'd have to put up my own tower to get the antenna high enough. One of these days I'll probably get satellite. Currently, I watch television shows over the internet more often than over cable television (the picture is actually usually better), but I'm not a huge fan of mind-numbing television shows either.
Bic Parker
Active member
Dang Robert, it sounds like you have tin cans and string up there (which isn't a great medium for transmitting HD, btw).
Robert M Wright
Well-known member
Sometimes I wonder if tin cans and a string wouldn't get me a higher bandwidth connection!
The absolute highest speed broadband available out here is 1.5Mbps coming at you (and that's a very recent improvement over the previous 1Mbps max). I like living out in the country, but moving here was a bit like stepping back a decade, as far as communications technology. With our zippy broadband service, that ain't exactly what I'd call cheap at a little over $50/mo (+ modem rental), at least they are generous enough to give us 20 whole whopping megabytes of space for hosting a website! I had an interesting conversation with somebody down at the main office about when they might be considering perhaps moving into this century and offering up at least enough space to store more than a couple MP3s. The tech support is pretty gosh darn laid back too. My (rented) DSL modem died a few weekends ago, and it was a real trip just getting hold of a live tech. They used to have an "internet help desk" manned by a tech 24/7, but apparently did away with that on weekends (budget cuts?). Now when you call the telephone company and select the option for "if you are experiencing problems with your internet connection press (whatever)" you simply get a recording that says they will be back in the office Monday morning and to call back then...
The absolute highest speed broadband available out here is 1.5Mbps coming at you (and that's a very recent improvement over the previous 1Mbps max). I like living out in the country, but moving here was a bit like stepping back a decade, as far as communications technology. With our zippy broadband service, that ain't exactly what I'd call cheap at a little over $50/mo (+ modem rental), at least they are generous enough to give us 20 whole whopping megabytes of space for hosting a website! I had an interesting conversation with somebody down at the main office about when they might be considering perhaps moving into this century and offering up at least enough space to store more than a couple MP3s. The tech support is pretty gosh darn laid back too. My (rented) DSL modem died a few weekends ago, and it was a real trip just getting hold of a live tech. They used to have an "internet help desk" manned by a tech 24/7, but apparently did away with that on weekends (budget cuts?). Now when you call the telephone company and select the option for "if you are experiencing problems with your internet connection press (whatever)" you simply get a recording that says they will be back in the office Monday morning and to call back then...
Robert M Wright
Well-known member
Oh, the upshot was, after trying different options on the automated menu ("if you have a phone service interruption" works better even though I was calling from my home phone), managed to get through to somebody at an answering service who, after two calls and lots of prodding, finally agreed to page an on-call tech, and when the tech got out here and we got talking, he told me that management is now actually at least talking about the possibility of offering HD channels on their cable-tv service...someday maybe (there's only one company for both phone and cable-tv here).
Robert M Wright
Well-known member
What I had been doing is renting DVDs at a gas station about 10 miles up the road (next town over). They had a thing on Mondays, where new releases were only a 99 cents over-night (and they had a pretty decent selection), so every two or three weeks I'd go rent a dozen of so for cheap-a-cheap. They stopped doing movie rentals there a couple months ago, so I probably will do Netflix in the near future.
with a set top antenna, I can get a channel from 70 miles away and on the other side of Austin, which isn't exactly flat. You might look for a high rated antenna in the $30 range. Digital has a better range than the older stuff.
Netflix is pretty cool, and the option to stream movies is also nice if you a) have small children or b) enjoy the occasional direct to DVD action movie or older selection.
Netflix is pretty cool, and the option to stream movies is also nice if you a) have small children or b) enjoy the occasional direct to DVD action movie or older selection.
Slo-mo works fine from 60i. I did it for my home stuff. This guy did it for this amazing video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=96BBXEwm3B8
BobDiaz
The Professor
With all due respect, no. The following still image is from an interlaced source. I magnified the image to make it easier to see the scan lines. As you can see, the person moved between fields resulting in a mis-match.
There are 3 ways to do slow motion on interlaced footage:
(1) Combine both fields: This results in the full vertical resolution, but we see a "feathering" effect in the image.
(2) Use both fields, BUT show only one field at a time in the slow motion: Sharp horizontal edges of objects will appear to vibrate up and down using this trick. This does give the best slow motion appearence.
(3) Use just one field: This avoids the vertical jitter, but drops the vertical sharpness to 1/2.
Back in the days of SD, yes I did slow motion using both fields and it looked OK to most people, BUT I did see the vertical jitter in the video. Most didn't notice, but it was still there.
Bob Diaz
Obviously, you cannot use both fields for scenes with motion. Deinterlace with "single field" into 30p and with "bob" into 60p and use latter for 0.5x slomo. Yes, the resolution is halved. No, it does not look that bad, especially if the camera is capable of high resolution to begin with. To reduce twitter you may want to blur detail vertically a bit. Sure, 60p is better, but 60i is not "horrible horrible".
This has been deinterlaced with "single field" from 60i into 30p: http://www.vimeo.com/5450665 I think it is fine for a Web video. For home viewing I use full 60i, and additional temporal resolution makes up for lower spatial resolution.
This has been deinterlaced with "single field" and then slowed down to 24p, because at that time Vimeo did not support native playback of 30p: http://www.vimeo.com/2695330 It made pretty decent DVD because there is no line twitter.
What's the point of using slo-mo on a scene with no motion?
:engel017:
I guess we all have out pet peeves. Given your intolerance for the least bit of 'jello,' you seem more relaxed about this brand of weakness...which might even look worse on a 65" screen depending on severity of each case...
I meant, you cannot use both fields in one frame. You sure can convert each field into a full frame, which gives nice 0.5x slomo.
You don't know the full story. I also have the V1U. I used to have the HC1 and the HF100. All are CMOS cams.
All I have is 50-inch plasma, and I watch my stuff on my TV in 60i mode, and it looks fine.
BobDiaz
The Professor
I would expect that when taking a 60i source and converting it into a 60p result, that the missing scan line would be replaced by taking each pixel above, adding it to the pixel below, and taking the average of the two for the result. This approach is simple and does fill in the missing scan line, but is still limited to the number of lines in the field as far as vertical resolution: either 540 for 1080i or 240 for 480i.
Another problem is that on 4:2:0 color there's a big gap in the vertical color sampling. This can result in odd color artifacts.
SOURCE: http://provideocoalition.com/index....anasonic_ag_hmc40_1_4_3_cmos_hd_camcorder/P1/
Dropping down to a lower resolution does help reduce the problems. If you take a 1080i and drop it down to 480i video, your source is so high in resolution, these issues are minor. Take a 1080i and drop it down to 720p and you do reduce some of the artifacts. You still can't get a true 720 scan line resolution out of 540 scan lines, but the two are close.
This gets into a subjective area. So if you're happy with the results, that's great. Will some people be happy with the results? I'd say yes. Will everyone be happy with the results? NO! So, depending on the user, the 1080i format may or may not be OK.
Bob Diaz
Exactly. This was the point of my original message: if someone needs only 60Hz image rate, then an interlaced-only camera might work just fine. It is not like 60p unveiled something radically new that has not been achievable with 60i. You can get 30p and slomo from both, though 30p from 60p will look better, of course.
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Adam Wilt's is probably using an Adobe product for those screenshots, which has a broken h.264 decoder (even for progressive material)
The interlaced chroma issue exists, but it's not as bad as depicted on those screenshots when using a non-broken decoder
This is from HMC150 interlaced AVCHD footage. These were point resized 2x to simulate a zoom
Read this thread for more info; kudos to studio1972 and Thomas Smet for detective work. That was on progressive footage, but the example I posted above is from interlaced footage from HMC150. The broken decoder affects all h.264 footage from my testing.
http://96.30.23.131/showthread.php?t=195510
Barry knows about this issue and apparently reported it to Adobe
Barry_Green
Moderator
It has been reported to Adobe.
I doubt Wilt used Adobe though, he's a big FCP user, but I'll ask him.
I doubt Wilt used Adobe though, he's a big FCP user, but I'll ask him.