I hired Jarred and his HVX recently for a shoot, basically we were shooting elements in front of a greenscreen for compositing into a shot (no need to mention the project name in this thread). Jarred has written about this shoot elsewhere and his impression of the noise. It's true that between frame-averaging and some tweaking in Ultimatte we got usable footage (and the end results are damn-near amazing), I was still very surprised by the amount of noise visible.
It's one of those things that you don't notice at first glance, but once it's pointed out to you it's impossible to miss (even at a glance). So much motion, pretty much everywhere, and not just in gradients to lower-light (though that's where it's easiest to see). It looks kinda like film grain but *much* more hyper. Once we'd noticed it I even saw it on the SD out (we also hooked up a DVX and did see it there, so it's not extraordinary--just something I didn't expect from this camera).
Now, I've read that the JVC has similar levels of noise and that the Canon is far worse, but they weren't an option for this shoot anyway (because of HDV's crappy colorspace).
We tried all the modes, some were so horrible for noise it's hard to understand why they were included at all. The two that showed it the least were Cinelook-D and crush-blacks (I think that's the name).
I guess it's just that I had thought this camera was damn-near god's own creation, it certainly seemed perfect spec-wise for our shoot: 4:2:2, 1080"p", getting the data off the P2 cards was the only concern. The colorspace was fine, getting what we needed off the P2 cards turned out to be easy, unfortunately it's not nearly true 1080p (absolutely didn't want any interlace 'slip' in some frames), but 720pN was good enough--except the noise made our specific application harder. Having pixels in motion along the edge between your element and the greenscreen adds artifacts, not as bad as DV compression would have been of course, but still pretty scary for something being blown up to film res.
Any bets as to whether the HVX-200b will have big improvements to noise or a mode (maybe even a firmware upgrade for current models?!) with active noise reduction?
It basically comes down to the fact that somebody had posted on here a couple weeks ago that they tested the HVX and decided the quality just wasn't near good enough for their application. I had read that and I dismissed it out of hand, right up until I was looking at frames in motion on a 21" monitor--then I understood perfectly what he'd meant. Though even for us it's not necessarily a deal-breaker, as I said, I was surprised.
Well, that rambling is my experience and my thoughts as relates to *my application*. I fully agree that as a ~$6k camcorder it's great for many things... independent films shot entirely on it, probably anything for TV, etc. should be fine. But for shots one intends to incorporate with VFX, or even as the 'little camera' in conjunction with a VariCam or higher-end HD camera I really have to wonder if it's just too different to be intercut.
It's one of those things that you don't notice at first glance, but once it's pointed out to you it's impossible to miss (even at a glance). So much motion, pretty much everywhere, and not just in gradients to lower-light (though that's where it's easiest to see). It looks kinda like film grain but *much* more hyper. Once we'd noticed it I even saw it on the SD out (we also hooked up a DVX and did see it there, so it's not extraordinary--just something I didn't expect from this camera).
Now, I've read that the JVC has similar levels of noise and that the Canon is far worse, but they weren't an option for this shoot anyway (because of HDV's crappy colorspace).
We tried all the modes, some were so horrible for noise it's hard to understand why they were included at all. The two that showed it the least were Cinelook-D and crush-blacks (I think that's the name).
I guess it's just that I had thought this camera was damn-near god's own creation, it certainly seemed perfect spec-wise for our shoot: 4:2:2, 1080"p", getting the data off the P2 cards was the only concern. The colorspace was fine, getting what we needed off the P2 cards turned out to be easy, unfortunately it's not nearly true 1080p (absolutely didn't want any interlace 'slip' in some frames), but 720pN was good enough--except the noise made our specific application harder. Having pixels in motion along the edge between your element and the greenscreen adds artifacts, not as bad as DV compression would have been of course, but still pretty scary for something being blown up to film res.
Any bets as to whether the HVX-200b will have big improvements to noise or a mode (maybe even a firmware upgrade for current models?!) with active noise reduction?
It basically comes down to the fact that somebody had posted on here a couple weeks ago that they tested the HVX and decided the quality just wasn't near good enough for their application. I had read that and I dismissed it out of hand, right up until I was looking at frames in motion on a 21" monitor--then I understood perfectly what he'd meant. Though even for us it's not necessarily a deal-breaker, as I said, I was surprised.
Well, that rambling is my experience and my thoughts as relates to *my application*. I fully agree that as a ~$6k camcorder it's great for many things... independent films shot entirely on it, probably anything for TV, etc. should be fine. But for shots one intends to incorporate with VFX, or even as the 'little camera' in conjunction with a VariCam or higher-end HD camera I really have to wonder if it's just too different to be intercut.
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(Im the only PC guy who complain, but I have no HVX200 of yet 
