Res Fest-LA Comparison of HVX, Canon, JVC, and Sony!

[taubkin]

Yeah, but add-on lenses for the HVX are going to be really expensive! Better to maximize the possibilities on both ends rather than later on. That said, I'm not really a fan of using longer lenses just to blur the background. Faces look dull and lifeless with longer lenses, so I try to avoid using them. I'm actually happier to separate the person from the background using other methods (scenic, colors) than depth of field. It was a fad, I guess. Still the "holy grail" for littlecam moviemakers of course...

I wouldn't want to use ant add on lenses with an HD camera. I saw the stock lens of the Z1 transfered to film, and it already looked too soft for me. Maybe for TV, though..

 

[Anhar_Miah]

Barry, with Canons HD-SDI, I heard it was only 4:2:2 uncompressed , BUT the P2 will also record at 4:2:2 (but 100Mbs compression) so in theory at least the quality should be just as good (colour info) ie XLH1 >>HD-SDI >>decs Vs. HVX200 >>P2 ??

 

[Shaw]

Faces look dull and lifeless with longer lenses

Some would say that they look much nicer - especially for close ups. Depends on the look you are going for I suppose.

 

[Barry_Green]

Barry, with Canons HD-SDI, I heard it was only 4:2:2 uncompressed , BUT the P2 will also record at 4:2:2 (but 100Mbs compression) so in theory at least the quality should be just as good (colour info) ie XLH1 >>HD-SDI >>decs Vs. HVX200 >>P2 ??

Well, theoretically the quality could be much better with the Canon approach. You'd have 4:2:2, but you'd have *no* compression artifacts.

The questions that arise are based on two basic things: what *else* (besides compression and sampling) is happening to the video signal, and *how* do you propose to record that HD-SDI stream?

Compression and color sampling are but two of the many, many elements in the signal chain. It's like the bread your sandwich comes on -- it could be wonderful fresh-from-the-oven bread, but if the meat is rotten and the cheese is moldy, it's still an awful sandwich, y'know?

We don't know how the Canon's chips and resolution and sampling and gamma curves and latitude and noise levels compare to Panasonic's chips and resolution and sampling and gamma curves and latitude and noise levels.

All we could say definitively is: *if* all other things are equal, then the theoretical potential exists that an HD-SDI recording would be superior to a P2 recording, but ONLY IF the method used to record the HD-SDI signal retains the full fidelity!

People are talking about piping the HD-SDI signal out to a DVCPRO-HD deck. Well, yes, you could do that, but you just gave up every advantage your signal had over the P2 DVCPRO-HD recording -- so what's the point? The Canon would be tethered to a $26,000 deck, vs. the Panasonic able to record portably to its tiny on-board cards... so why do it?

The advantage to the HD-SDI is if you can record it in its full glory, most likely to a RAID of hard disks, and that's gonna set you back maybe $20,000. And it's going to keep you tethered to that computer. But if you do that, if you bite the bullet and configure the system like that, then yes you can have better-quality final recordings.

Other than that, it's all theoretical. Someday somebody may invent a portable FireStore-style device that can record an HD-SDI type signal, but consider that the Viper Filmstream has pretty much that same kind of thing, and it costs $54,000 and records only 10 minutes.

I would think the future would lie in developing some sort of lossless codec as a first step -- the Video Toaster 2 used to support "uncompressed" SDI editing because it used a mathematically lossless codec to shrink the file sizes by something like 40%. But even with something like that in place, you're still talking about a data rate of around 120 megabytes per second; that's still going to require a RAID of maybe four hard disks in order to be able to record.

(unless they implement a lossy compression system, such as DVCPRO-HD or H.264; that'll shrink the data rate, but it'll also be giving back the advantages you were trying to gain by using HD-SDI).