DIY Anamorphic Widescreen

I found this article interesting.  Using Anamorphic Projection lenses, this article explains how you can get true widescreen without resolution loss.  There are a number of gotcha's, but it's an interesting idea.

Link

Beware Tapeless Camcorders

This article at the New York Times reflects many things I've been thinking for a while.

I have a Mini-DV camcorder, and I would never give it up for a DVD or HardDrive based camcorder.

Now here are some documented reasons.

Here's the link!

HD to Film - Take Two

DV.com has a new article which discusses the process of taking HD to Film.  This time Mr. Jackman is using the JVC HD100 instead of the Sony.  It makes an interesting comparison, and discusses some of the troubles with compositing HD footage.

Link: http://dv.com/features/features_item.jhtml?
category=Archive&articleId=193402656

HDV To Film

This article on dv.com was an article I must have read 20 times.  It is a facinating presentation of what it takes to get an HDV production on film, and also discusses the differences between them.  It also gives helpful advice with how to de-interlace footage using Adobe After Effects. I've definitely benefitted from this article.

Link: HDV to Film: A Real-World Test

HD Camera Comparison

Adam Wilt at dv.com was involved in two separate review sessions reviewing the latest 3CCD HDV cameras on the market.  The results are intruiging and the articles are an awesome read.

The first review session (January 2006):
http://www.dv.com/features/features_item.jhtml?
category=Archive&articleId=177103305

The second (September 2006):
http://www.dv.com/features/features_item.jhtml?
category=Archive&articleId=192501232

The four cameras reviewed are:
Sony HVR-Z1U
Canon XL H1
JVC GY-HD100U
Panasonic AG-HVX200

They also compare them with two professional level cameras:
Panasonic HDC27F Varicam
Sony HDW-F900/3 CineAlta

RED Camera

The founder of Oakley, the maker of fancy-shmancy sun glasses, is currently working on an amazing digital video camera.  The RED camera, as it is called, will be capable of 4k resolution, with a variety of frame rates.  This camera seems to be the awesomest camera for an awesome price!  Check out an exclusive interview with the man on HD for Indies (link below).  The web site for the RED camera does not give a whole lot of details, which is said to be forthcoming at the NAB 2006 show.

Article: http://www.hdforindies.com/2006/02/hd4nds-exclusive-interview-with-jim
RED: http://www.red.com/
NAB 2006: http://www.nabshow.com/

Canon's Entry into HD

Canon has finally announced it's entry into the HD camera race.

With its XL H1, Canon finally makes a showing in the HD field.  The camera looks like a souped up XL2, with an all-black look.  Adding some professional features such as Gen-lock sync, Timecode In & Out, and others, this camera is aimed at aprofessional market.

The camera uses HDV 1080i encoding, just as the Sony HDV camera's do.

Check out the full feature list at Canon's web site: XL H1

HDV Issues - Part 2

Having discovered the lack of usable HDV support discussed in this article, I have since found a review of a plug-in for Adobe Premiere Pro that seems to provide the means to edit HDV content at a better quality.

DV.com reviewed a CineForm Inc. product called Aspect HD (look under 'Reviews' - free registration is required).  On their rating system, the product scored 4.5 out of 5, which garnered it an 'Award of Excellence'.

Since HDV is more a capture format than it is an editing format, Aspect HD converts the HDV data to an intermediate form that is better for editing:

Aspect HD (and siblings Connect HD for Sony Vegas and the 10-bit Prospect HD for Premiere Pro) works by capturing HDV's native MPEG-2 files via FireWire and converting them to the CineForm intermediate format. This CFHD format is wavelet based, up-samples the MPEG YUV 4:2:0 color space into YUV 4:2:2 color space, and is much less compressed than native HDV. This enables what CineForm calls a "visually perfect" format, which is essentially another way of saying that the CFHD codec is "visually lossless." Basically, Aspect HD converts the native HDV files (which were never really intended for editing) into a more robust format that can support cleaner effects and composites.

I'm happy to see that there is the means to produce high quality HD with Premiere Pro.

There was a qualification made on the quality of the codec used:

However, the codec isn't totally lossless and shows predictable concatenation errors on successive recompression cycles that can be seen by a trained eye. These artifacts are fewer than those typical with DV recompression. CineForm did a good job on the codec--the quality seems substantially better than the quality with editing the MPEG-2 in its native form. But, as when using any compression scheme, recompressions should be kept to a minimum for best quality.

Looks like Cineform came up with a pretty good tool!

Camera Comparison

On DVXuser.com a few months ago, I found what is a very thorough review and comparison of 3 prosumer level cameras: Sony FX1, Canon XL2 & Panasonic's DVX100a.

There is much detailed talk about colour comparison & picture 'looks', which is valuable in a review. Coming from a DVX user site though, you'd have to wonder whether the authors, Jarred Land & Barry Green, have a bias, but they at least seem to be objective.

At one point, the authors say:

Many interested camera buyers were hoping that the Sony FX1 would be the "holy grail" for independent filmmakers, offering high-definition resolution and 24-frame shooting speeds. Unfortunately, this just isn't the case. The Sony has an extreme video look to it, and there's no way a casual or trained observer would think it looked remotely like film. You could maybe hack-job it with post effects to make it somewhat filmic, but you'll be sacrificing resolution every step of the way, and resolution is what this camera's all about. When trying to simulate the film look, fields get dropped and blended, which lower resolution, and the motion will never be the same as true 24fps capture. The DVX and the XL2, on the other hand, actually GAIN resolution when shooting in 24P mode, which narrows the gap between them and the FX1 quite a bit (when talking about resolution on film-simulation footage). And the DVX and XL2 will still look much more filmish than the FX1.

Frankly, I had thought that this was the case... i.e. the FX1 would be loved by the independent filmmakers. Now I cannot say what their opinion is, but according to Mr. Land, it's not what they had hoped for. For highest quality film output, you would definitely want a 24p camera, with additional adjustments, like Panasonic's Gamma Settings, to get the best film-like look you can.

Image comparison is generally a subjective art, and each camera buyer has to make a decision based on their own study of which pictures they like the best.

Link: The 3 Way Shootout - forum discussing the article.
Link: The article

HDV Issues

In an article at EMediaLive.com, Jan Ozer discusses some problems he's had working with HDV in NLE's.  From what he says, there are still some serious usability issues in using HDV.

You can't input HDV and DV on the same timeline in Final Cut Pro, a capability required to edit the input from my multiple cameras. Adobe Premiere Pro produced fuzzy-looking video when downsampling from HDV to DV and lacked multicam capabilities, as does Sony Vegas. Avid Xpress Pro HD has multicam capabilities but doesn't yet support HDV.

So, it came down to Edition, which, in addition to the long rendering times (like 8 hours per set), somehow mixed up the field order on the HDV source video, producing a flicker artifact that took me 3 hours to diagnose, two hours to fix in all the HDV clips in the final video, and 15 hours to re-render. Make no mistake--HDV is still foreign to all these applications, and you should anticipate significant hours of (additional) tinkering to get everything right.

Not having the opportunity to use HDV cameras, nor edit the results, this comes as a surprise to me, and a disappointment.  When software products claim support for a format, like HDV, I'd assume that the quality is there!  Otherwise, what is the point?  It looks like Apple, Adobe, Sony & Avid/Pinnacle have some work to do!

Article Link: http://www.emedialive.com/Articles/ReadArticle.aspx?ArticleID=10266

Avid's DNxHD

Last November (2004) I had the opportunity to attend an event sponsored by Avid.  They of course did their whole marketing spiel as you might expect, and always make sure to say all their trademarked names correctly... (not "Nitris", but "Avid DS Nitris").

Anyway, one of the coolest things I saw there was their new HD compression scheme called DNxHD.  They claim that this compression scheme is as good as uncompressed HD, but with much less bandwidth.  They showed examples, and from what I could see, it looked impressive.  They compared, side by side, video that was compressed and decompressed five times using DNxHD, and a competing HD compression algorithm (I believe it was DVCProHD from Panasonic).  The DNxHD side looked great, the other side... well, not so great.  This got me excited about the possibilities: Uncompressed HD quality at around SD sized bandwidths, wow!

One of the other things that I thought cool was that they said they wanted to make DNxHD an open standard.  Anyone who wants to use this compression can.  They also indicated that Ikegami was going to produce cameras that save to this format.  Great!  A great compression format, and it's freely available.  They even said that you can sign up to get the source code to use it yourself.  That's tres cool.

Since I don't have Avid software, and as a software developer, I thought it would be cool to investigate making a plugin for Premiere Pro that could encode & decode DNxHD.  That way it can be used in a product that I could afford.

So I signed up to be notified when the source code is available, and on March 21, 2005 I got the e-mail I was waiting for.  Well, as of now, I still haven't yet downloaded the source code.  The reason is the Licencing Agreement.  For a company that indicates that it wants DNxHD to be an open standard, they sure don't let you use it for much.  That was really annoying.

Mike Curtis, on his HD for Indies blog, stated he had similar hopes that have also been dashed (see article).

I'm hoping that someone will come up with a truly open HD standard like DNxHD.  Working with uncompressed HD content is very expensive due to the high specs required for the system & disk space, and it would be nice to have a high quality compression scheme that will relieve those requirements.

Here's hoping...

More on Panasonic's HVX200

The new Panasonic HVX200 is an impressive looking machine.  Slated to appear on the market later in 2005, to me, the specifications indicate that it is the only Camcorder semi-pros would ever need!  This thing has unparallelled flexibility and features.

People from the DVXUser website wrote a review on the camera (http://www.dvxuser.com/articles/HVX200/), and it blew my socks off.  I look forward to seeing this one up close.

Widescreen Article

In a previous post, I commented on the supposed 'advantages' of using an anamorphic lens. In this article at DV.com, (free registration required to read), Adam Wilt discusses the advantages and disadvantages of many widescreen methods. About Anamorphic lenses, he states:

"As with many lens attachments, they can soften the image somewhat. They also have different horizontal and vertical focal points; with shallow depth of field, it's often possible to focus the lens on horizontal or vertical detail, but not both simultaneously. Careful design can minimize the discrepancy for a given focal distance, but generally speaking, one must use small apertures and limited ranges of zoom and focus to get sharp pictures from anamorphics."

I guess there is a compelling reason to go the CCD route, rather than with an extra lens.

New Sony HDV Camcorder

Sony recently announced a new HDV camcorder. Details are still sketchy, but here is a link to the press release.

New Panasonic Camera!

It looks like Panasonic is doing it again!

It seems like whenever Panasonic announces a product, it's always leaps and bounds beyond what their competitors have.  Intending to make an announcement at NAB 2005, Panasonic has started some rumblings on their web site for the new AG-HVX200.

This thing sure looks impressive, especially with the available filming modes: 1080/60i, 1080/24p, 1080/30p, 720/60p, 720/24p, 720/30p, 480/60i, 480/24p, 480/30p, and Panasonic's cine-like gamma curves, this thing will be a force to be reckoned with.

Looking forward to getting more information on this one... too bad it's only coming in the fall!