Another music video

I've been busy, mostly editing, but I have still been doing some work with the HMC150. I've shot another music video with it. It was for The Nobility and they wanted a similar look to their first video which I posted a few months past. It's another one-take and it was shot with a Blackbird Stabilizer. I barely knew how to use the thing so it's not as steady as I would have liked, but it could the job done. A lot of people talk about their arm hurting after using these, but for me it was my right hand. The song is less than 3 minutes but multiple takes add up and my hand was absolutely killing me by the end of the night.

I normally use my own customized setting but this time around I used the Spark setting. The end result was a general crushing of the blacks to minimize the appearance of the black curtain behind the actors. I was going for the look that they were performing in front of a black void and for the most part it appears that way. The actors did a great job not busting too many takes even though they were in semi-absurd scenes.

Click on the video for an HD version:

Mr. Danby/Mr. Blackman from The Nobility on Vimeo.

The Bible

Barry Green over at DVXUser has finally released his book on the HMC150. It's pricey, but it sounds like it's worth it. The book seems to explore exactly how to get the best images out of this camera and how to deal with the various conditions we face when we shoot video. Maybe the book will explain exactly what is Detail Coring. My copy is on the way and I'll weigh in a review in time. People that own his other books all rave about it, so I think it's worth checking out.

If you'd like to order, hit this link.

HMC150 Mac support, finally

Panasonic has finally acknowledged that people who own the HMC150 also might own a Mac. So now you can finally update the camera's firmware. Here's the link for instructions on how to do that.

Another Wedding Down...

We just shot a wedding over the weekend and the results from the HMC150 were impressive. Very little noise and great looking images overall. The only real noise begins to appears at the reception that evening which was indoors. I had to bump up the gain which naturally introduces noise.

I needed to get a second camera, one that was easy for my wife to operate, so we purchased the Canon Vixia HG-20. I wanted to go with a small Panasonic thinking there might be some similarities between my HMC150 and it. However you couldn't buy a Panasonic camcorder with a mic input and a headphone jack for under $1000. With Canon you could, so I settled on the HG-20. It shoots at the full data rate the AVCHD spec offers and it has the combo of an internal drive and can shoot on SD cards. I've looked a lot of the footage so far from the camera and I'm impressed. If you need a second camera, Canon offers a number of options for under $1000 and they include headphone jacks. I mean, seriously, why does Panasonic leave this out?

NOISE!

So there have been a few posts on boards about potential noise issues with the HMC150. I honestly hadn't seen it myself, and I wrote off most of those reports as user error. Indeed many of those threads ended with a resolution that saw some combination of resetting the camera and using different scene files.

I also never had a way to monitor my footage outside of my computer until recently. So when I finally sat down to look at the footage I shot from a wedding this past weekend, I was shocked. There was noise, everywhere... in shadows, which wouldn't be all too surprising, but also in highlights and in perfectly lit scenes. I went back and checked some of my previous footage. I saw a little bit of noise, especially in the shadows, but the footage looked good otherwise. So something happened to my camera just before this wedding shoot.

Here's a sample still from this shoot: noisy mess

So the last couple of days whenever I had some downtime I've been tweaking and testing. I reset the camera, which I'm not 100% sure actually truly reset the camera as much as at least rest the scene files and menu (see this thread for more information) and then searched through the HMC150 board at DVX User and found Barry Green's scene file recommendations. The results were noticeably better and returned my level of satisfaction with this camera.

I noted that the camera looked the best shooting 720p 60, even though the "native" shooting rate of this camera is suppose to be 24p. I noticed just a tiny bit more noise in 24 vs. the 60p footage. Here's a 60p still post-camera reset and using new Scene File settings: much better. There is still some noise present here, but (at least to me) it's much softer and not the hideous distortion you see in the other still.

Ultimately I'm not really sure what happened to my camera. And if you find yourself shooting with yours and you have noise, everywhere, it's not suppose to be this way. I think we have to accept the fact that we're going to have some noise/compression, seeing as how this is not full blown uncompressed HD we're shooting here, but the footage should look relatively clean and beautiful. I'm going to continue to do more testing but I'm definitely going to be much more on guard with what is happening with my camera and you better believe I'll do some last minute testing prior to a big shoot to make sure the camera hasn't gone wonky again.

Note: The Scene File setting tweaks were as follows:

Detail: +2

VDetail: +2

Detail Coring: +1

Chroma +2 (I think this should probably be returned to 0 as the resulting image becomes just a little too saturated, but you might prefer this)

Master Ped: -20

Cine-Like V

More Conversion Time Data

I just shot a wedding with the HMC150 this past weekend. As far as I can tell the camera performed beautifully and as it had to put up with its operator's weaknesses. I'll obviously know a lot more as I get in to the editing process and see how the footage looks, especially in the extremely bright, overly lit-by-the-sun scenes and in the evening, when the light was starting to wain. I also used a Litepanels LP-Micro, so I'm looking forward to seeing how that looks.

One note, which actually surpassed my expectations, was how long it took to convert one of the AVCHD clips to ProRes. I assumed with my Mac Pro 3.0 DP it was about a 50% realtime process. I just processed my longest clip to date - 15 minutes - and it took 5:18 to convert this, thus greater than 50% realtime (or even faster). It's good to know that maybe there's a bump in speed the longer your clip is.

HMC 150 used for a music video

Here's a nice looking music video that was shot on the HMC150 with a Letus Extreme. I'm definitely intrigued with the 35mm adapters.

Slow Motion (60P to 29.97)

So the HMC150 can shoot 60p (frames per second). When you play this back at 100% it looks almost hyper-real. But if you drop it in to a standard HD 29.97 timeline and reduce the speed 50% you can get some incredible slow-mo. I have read that some people first properly conform their 60p footage to 29.97 or 24p (using Cinema Tools), but clearly the quality is good enough to get away with merely using FCP to do the slow motion for you.

In time I'll do a proper Cinema Tools test, but for now, here's a quick and dirty 50% slow mo using FCP: slow mo clip. I'm just getting down how to make these HD clips "web friendly", so the quality probably isn't quite as high as I'd like. But you should get the point.

Transcoding Fun

I just installed Toast 10 and tested to see how long it takes to convert AVCHD to DVCPRO HD. The answer is about real time, or a little over 8 minutes for 8 minutes of footage. The file size was surprising - a :17 clip was 148.9 MB in ProRes, while the same clip in DVCPRO HD ballooned to over 236.2 mb.

At first glance in Quicktime Pro, there was substantial difference in color between the two as well:

In this screen grab you'll see the same frame with the QT window in the background being ProRes and the foreground being DVCPRO HD. There is noticeably less color in the DVCPRO HD. But when you export still frames from each of these clips, something surprising (to me) occurs:

The JPEG above shows the two clips merged together. On the left is DVCPRO HD, and on the right is ProRes. There's no noticeable difference to me other than the frame size diffence which shows the most in the lower center of the image where the trustle's support structure doesn't quite line up. In Final Cut Pro you also do not see a noticeable difference. The scopes do reflect a minor change when you toggle between them.

So I'm puzzled as to why these codecs look so different in QuickTime and yet look almost identical when used inside FCP. Ignoring the file size difference for a moment, DVCPRO HD seems like a possible winner. My assumption is it would be less tasking on my system than ProRes 422, however I cannot ignore the file size difference. For whatever reason DVCPRO HD comes out as the bigger file when using Toast 10 to export.

Perhaps I'm missing something here?

ProRes 422

So you have two options when you transcode AVCHD in Final Cut Pro's Log and Transfer - convert it to AIC (Apple Intermediate) or ProRes 422 (and not of the HQ variety). I chose ProRes. So how big do the files get after transcode? About 5 times as big! So it looks like for every 16 GB card you shoot, you're looking at close to 80 GB in ProRes QTs on your drives. Ouch. Thankfully my system - a Mac Pro Quad 3 - can chunk through these files in about 50% realtime (i.e. - 8 minutes of footage takes about 4 minutes to transcode. That beats digitizing!)

I want to experiment with transcoding to DVCPRO HD next. It looks like I'll have to use Toast to do this. Thankfully Toast 10 came from Amazon today!

An introduction

I just recently decided to start shooting again, and instead of purchasing a DVCPRO HD camera (a format I have a lot of experience with), I decided on the Panasonic HMC150 which shoots AVCHD (a format I’ve never used). I love Panasonic cameras. I love the “mojo” as some people call it… the look they produce. The price was right for me and the fact that these cameras shoot to cheap SDHC cards really won me over. However I was hesitant with the new (to me) codec and how it would play with Final Cut Pro. So this blog will be my attempt at documenting my experiences with the camera, both in the field and in editing.



I’ll post some samples soon, so please check back.