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.

Canon 7D

Canon recently announced the Canon EOS 7D which can shoot 1080p 24p HD video, as well as 720p (including 60p for overcranking). The format of choice for Canon is AVCHD. The camera is intriguing because I'm already considering going the route of getting a 35mm adapter for my HMC150, but I do not currently own any professional lenses. We're also wanting to get a "real" DSLR camera, so why not combine the desire for shooting HD video with the ability for nice DoF videography and a nice DSLR?

There are a few videos that have popped up featuring footage from this DSLR shot by some of the best in the business. Here are a few of the links:

• FreshDV @ the Provideo Coalition has a link to the short Perya. Beautiful!
• Philip Bloom's "Random Dublin"
• Another Bloom short called "Dublin's People: Canon 7d 24p"

What's clear by these samples are that the 7d seems to remain relatively stationary, shot almost as if they were taking stills. I love these kinds of shots where the action exists within the shot (as opposed to whip pans and intentional "shakycam"). Because this camera uses CMOS sensors, there's the risk of "jello" or rolling shutter, so it appears the filmmakers were careful and played to the camera's strengths. I have yet to see evidence that there is rolling shutters with the 7D but I'm sure it's possible.

Gentle Giant

I recently helped direct and shoot a music video for a great band called The Nobility. The video was shot using my Panasonic HMC150 at 720p 24p. In post we added some looks in Magic Bullet Looks and further dirtied up the video a bit using Nattress Film Effects. All of this to hopefully capture the look of an old filmstrip PSA. I'm pleased the results and the camera performed well.

Here is the video for your viewing pleasure:

"Gentle Giant" video from The Nobility on Vimeo.

Scary Thought...

Here's a scary thought... you've been shooting footage for 30-40 minutes on your SDHC card and suddenly you get a CHECK CARD warning. You check the card, it records again just fine and you assume it was a temporary blip. But what if, when you're ingesting that footage in to your system, you discover the clip is unreadable or completely missing? The HMC150 does not have a redundant system for recording media - you have one card slot and thus one card that can record media at any given point. Of course many cameras are this way, and if you're still recording tape there's always a risk of the tape breaking, but with tapeless media it just seems all the more scary.

There's a long and eye-opening thread about a handful of people who are seeing these kinds of problems with one particular brand of cards - Transcend. There seem to be twice that many that have replied to say they own the same brand and size of card and have had zero problems. It's worth checking out.

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.

ProRes Conversion Times

I've noted before that I'm getting better than 50% realtime performance with my Mac Pro Quad Core 3.0 when converting to ProRes. But this is using a SD card reader plugged in to a USB 2 port. With the Canon HG-20, we were using the internal HDD and because of this we had to plug the camera directly in to the computer with the provided USB cable. The resulting transcode times nearly doubled. We shot about 3 hours of material with this camera and it took a little under 3 hours to transcode. So basically you trade the convenience of having an internal storage option with the Canon with much slower transcoding times.

Note: The Canon HG-20 does accept SD cards, so you can bypass recording to the internal drive you if you so choose.

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?

Neo Scene

I've been trying to give Cineform's Neo Scene a shot this morning. I had originally downloaded the trial a few months ago but got incredibly busy. I fired up the app anyway and attempted to do a test for the speed and it crawled to render one frame. I was then reminded that Cineform only provides a 7 (7 days, really??) trial of the software. So, okay, the performance had to be the results of an expired trial, right? I deleted the files and downloaded a new version and I still see the same speed results.

I want to assume there's some little file somewhere that tells Neo Scene to not function properly because I'm trying to get use out of it beyond it's trial. I'm hoping this is not a clue as to the speed of the app. I guess I screwed up and should have fully tested it when I initially downloaded it, but it's hard for me to want to take a risk on buying the app if I can't gauge the speed.

A commenter on here said he's found that NeoHD is a lot faster than Final Cut, but what about Neo Scene? It's quite a bit cheaper, but I was hoping that was from the source file limitations and not because of speed. If anybody has an opinion on what I might be experiencing (i.e. - the software is crippled OR that's just how slow it is) please let me know.

The next Final Cut Pro

A number of people have been posting/tweeting rumors about when the next version of Apple's Final Cut Studio will come out, but there's been little talk about what will actually be in it. Will it be a major upgrade or just enough of a change to warrant a whole new version number?

Scott Simmons wrote up some of the things he'd like to see addressed, and a couple of them are my major hopes. Simply FCP should NOT open the previous project, at least not in a multi-user, multi-edit suite environment like a post house. If Apple truly thinks its product is making major penetration in to post houses across this country, and is NOT simply being used by one editor/producer on one long project, then they need to get serious about the way its software handles projects and users settings.

A Project and User Prompt

Yeah, like Avid, but who cares? There should be two modes you could put FCP in to and this can be asked when you install the product for the first time. You could edit in the traditional FCP way which would be to always load the previously opened project and the previously used user settings. However, we should have the option of a "post house" style with a window prompt asking us which project we want to open and which user settings. I have clients where one machine might have two editors working on it on the same day. And three different projects might be worked on. It would be nice to know from the start which project you're opening and who's settings are going to be loaded. And about the user settings - they should be consolidated under one global user setting name. Give us more things to tweak and all of those things that are listed under the User Preferences menu item? That's absolutely silly to call it that if one user can change something deep down inside that menu structure and it affects EVERY user who comes after him. Make those settings customizable to a particular user's name. So when I select my project and my name at the beginning, then I'll record EVERY keyframe when I ride the audio mixers. You might not want to do that, so you change that under your user setting name and you'll know from the start what FCP's behavior will be.

Capture/Render Scratch Settings

Another pet peeve of mine that FCP does is how it treats capture scratch settings (where you digitize and render to) as a global setting and not something that's a project-level setting. I think it should be the latter. Apple gives us editors a lot of rope to hang ourselves, especially in multi-user and/or multi-project environments. For example: have you ever worked on multiple projects in one day? Do each of those projects live on separate drives? So do you remember to change the capture scratch EVERY time you open a different project? Or when you take a seat for the first time in a few days at a busy edit suite, do you always remember to check the capture scratch settings before you proceed? If you do, you're awesome. I bet most of us forget every now and then and sometimes this can be a critical mistake. Like what if the producer wants to view a project you've been working on in another room. They load that partition, open the project and there's media and/or render files missing. D'oh!

Apple could cure us of some of these ills by simply making the capture scratch a setting for that project. So when you open that project, FCP will automatically make the appropriate partition set as the capture scratch. If for some reason that partition is not mounted on the desktop, you'll get a warning prompt to do so. Easy right? Maybe there's an obvious reason why Apple shouldn't do this, but it seems to make sense to me.

I can think of further things that would help with media management, like having the ability to import music/graphic files/photos from within FCP, and FCP knowing what to do with the files. For example: you load a music CD, import some tracks and FCP automatically saves it to a MUSIC folder on the appropriate scratch disk, imports the music to the drive as 48K AIFF AND imports those tracks in to your project.

We'll see what the next version holds, but I'm hoping it's something like the above.

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.

AVCCAM Road Show

Panasonic is doing a roadshow to show off their AVCCAM products, including the HMC150. Click here to see if it's coming to a town near you. If this presentation is anything like the one they showed at their NAB booth it's extremely impressive, including close up comparisons between HDV and AVCCAM. Hint - AVCCAM wins, hands down.

Final Cut Pro Instability

I know I cannot speak for anybody else when I write this, but FCP is extremely unstable once your project reaches a certain size. I've seen this on multiple machines for several different clients. I've seen my own extremely stable machine because a constant crashfest when the project's size tips the scale north of 50 MB or so.

For a while now I have been editing three documentaries for the PBR (Professional Bullriders) to be distributed on DVD by MTV. The shortest one is about 52 minutes long, the longest just shy of 60 minutes. I have gone from having one big giant project with everything in it (this was a mistake, clearly, and this was months ago when it was a LOT smaller than the three are today) to multiple projects for graphics, music, and cuts. The cuts project itself had grown to over 260 MB and it was simply comprised of the three sequences. So now I'm gone to a "final cut" sequence for each DVD. And yet even with this final step FCP still crashes just as frequently. One example bound to produce a crash is when I copy and paste something as simple as a Title 3D. The file size for each DVD final cut is about 55 MB. Again, north of 50 MB, the theoretical limit I've selected for when FCP becomes unwieldy.

During this long term edit I've had numerous smaller projects come and go, all without major problems. Sure, I occasionally had a crash or two, but nothing like what I'm experiencing with the DVDs. I know another production company that's editing a 1/2 hour series for Speed Channel and they have constant crashes with their larger projects. They have been trying to find creative ways of limiting their file sizes.

I would hope the next version of Final Cut brings about more stability with this app. There are more features I'd love to see as well, but I would just love the app to work the same it does with a small project verses a large. We want to pretend like Final Cut is perfectly acceptable for large projects, but sometimes you have to wonder if it really is. Or maybe it's just me...

Blackmagic Intensity Pro Arrives

My Blackmagic Intensity Pro card has arrived and the install was a breeze. I need to try to find a way to calibrate my LCD screen as best as possible. I know there's only so much I'm going to get out of this "cheap" HD monitoring solution, I'm not relying on this for broadcast critical work, but getting a decent calibration is going to be key to at least get a close representation of how my stuff looks.

I'll be sure to post my thoughts on the card soon.

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.

HMC150 at NAB

I wish I took some pictures of this, but it's worth pointing out that Panasonic was really promoting the HMC150 and the AVCHD codec in general. They had dedicated almost twice the floor space to these cameras versus the P2s. They also constantly ran a reel showcasing the codec in action.

Blackmagic Intensity Pro

One thing that should generate more posting out of me is the fact that I just purchased the Blackmagic Intensity Pro card. Blackmagic Designs announced at NAB that they were dropping the price to $199. B&H Photo Video has the card for a little bit less than that. My main use of the card will be for HDMI monitor to a 24" LCD HD display.

The quality of the video should be good, but the LCD screen I will be using certainly is not reliable enough for broadcast mission critical color. But I don't find myself doing that type of work at home. For corporate, web and wedding videos it should provide you a decent reference of what your video looks like.

The card also features the ability to digitize video from HD camcorders with HDMI out, like the HMC150. So I'm going to be interested to see the quality of the image. From what I understand, when you digitize directly from the HDMI port of the HMC150 you're getting the full resolution of the camera BEFORE any AVCHD compression is added.

1080 vs. 720

Apparently 24mpbs is the maximum data rate available for the AVCHD codec. At this data rate you get incredible images. If you intercut with the HPX170, it's extremely difficult to tell which was shot with which. What's intriguing is that you get this maximum of 24 mbps in BOTH 720p and 1080p. So immediately you can see why most people say that the sweet spot for this camera is 720p. You get all of that extra data to pour in to 1280x720. So it's case closed, right? Apparently not.

Barry Green, one of the gurus over at DVXUser, and writer of several books on the DVX and HVX cams, has been doing a lot of digging around with the HMC150 to see just what you can do with it. He thankfully surmized that AVCHD was superior to HDV, and he also assumed through his testing that 720p on this camera was indeed the way to go to the maximum bang for the buck. However one thing kept nagging at him - color sampling:

"With the HMC150's AVCHD format, the frame gets resized and then the color gets cut to 1/4 the resolution (using 4:2:0 color sampling, like HDV or XDCAM-EX or XDCAM-HD). Which means that on a 720p frame, you get 1280x720 of brightness, and 640x360 of color. Whereas with 1080p mode, youll have a 1920x1080 frame, which may only have 1440x810 worth of detail, sure, but -- the chroma sampling will be at 1/4 the res of the full frame, meaning 960x540 of chroma. Well, that's a big difference, right? 640x360 = 230,400 chroma samples, vs. 960x540 = 518,400 chroma samples, or about 2.25x as much chroma...

The question then becomes: would you gain much by shooting in 1080 mode and downconverting to 720? You wouldn't gain much of anything in terms of overall image resolution, but you'd more than double your chroma res... So, does it make a difference? Um, well, yeah."

Check out the thread for more thoughts and observations from Barry. I would think that if you transcode to ProRes you should see identical file sizes in either 720 or 1080 since the camera uses the same data rate for both, but I'm going to test this for myself and see. So assuming nobody debunks this theory, I guess I'm going to start shooting in 1080p now instead of 720p. Might as well get every bit (literally) you can out of this camera!

ATT&T U-verse

A slight departure from the purpose of this blog, but I wanted to give a mini-review of AT&T's U-verse product. We recently switched from Comcast and we were glad to do it. Price wise you’re looking at more bang for the buck - more channels in general and more of them in HD compared to Comcast at similar price points. We're also getting the full 18 mbps internet that they offer, which is substantially faster than what Comcast currently offers in Nashville. So for roughly the same price we're going from having Comcast's basic digital TV package and 6 mpbs internet to having over 200 channels and 18 mpbs net. Not bad.

Internet

Now with Comcast you get their "burst" which skews speed tests and accelerates the first few minutes of your downloads, but with U-verse we're getting consistent download speeds that are more than 3 times faster than the sustained speeds from Comcast. Now all of this will change when Comcast unveils their faster internet products (some markets are already seeing these speeds), but since I live in Nashville - and we rarely EVER get something sooner than later here - I think U-verse will remain the fastest internet offering for now. There are rumors that AT&T will double their maximum download speed sometime in the near future, but that will probably require a price increase. So for now I’m very satisfied with the speeds I have.

Negatives

There are a few negatives, namely that the HD quality seems to vary. Some channels are great, others show artifacts and strobing effects. AT&T is apparently using a different compression scheme than what Comcast uses, and that they periodically improve the feeds as the technology improves. So hopefully the HD channels that are lagging now will improve in time. Also, if Verizon FIOS is what you’re after, you’re not going to get a fully suitable replacement here with AT&T. Unless you’re in a brand new neighborhood, you’re probably only going to have fiber to within 3,000 feet or so of your house. From there it’s over traditional phone lines. The install process took 4-5 hours, including them having to run a new twisted pair line from the pole to our house. AT&T will definitely spend the full day with you, if necessary, to get their product up and running. But in the end it seems like FIOS delivers substantially faster internet to their customers. But with the costs they incur to full wire a town, it’s no wonder that FIOS is offered in limited markets.

Finally what really puts U-verse over the top for me is some of the features they offer, namely the ability to watch DVR recorded material on any box in the house, being able to watch and/or record 2 streams of HD and 2 streams of SD at the same time, the ability to schedule programs on the net, and a better looking interface. The latter is pure aesthetics, but hey it counts. U-verse’s DVR interface is no TiVo, but it’s close.

I'm a bad blogger

My apologies for the lack of posts, but as an editor by trade my free time to experiment and play with this camera can come and go. Right now it's "go". But next week I'll have some time, thankfully, and I'm looking forward to it.

I'm interested in exploring my options of HD to SD. I know I can transcode to Proress 422 and then convert via Compressor to SD, but the results seem to produce flickery results. Lines at angles become jaggy. I'll have to post an example, but what motivates me to type this is right now I'm watching the SEC Tournament via AT&T Uverse. I have an SD TV still in the office and I wanted to see if I could watch the HD channel instead of the SD one. The answer is yes, I can. It's letterboxed and in general it looks great, but it produces similar results as Compressor. Lines are jagged, lots of shimmers. My assumption is the Uverse box is doing the conversion for me and it's hardware, so I'm wondering if this is the kind of results I should expect either using software or hardware down converting options? But I swear I've used an AJA Kona card before with perfect results, but sadly it's out of my price range right now.