Which is better for Chroma Keying HV30 or 40? [Archive] - High Definition Digital Video Forum

View Full Version : Which is better for Chroma Keying HV30 or 40?

Dirtwad

2009 February 13th, 03:23

I was about to purchase the HV30 then I found this forum and have read about the 24p pull down issues. I just want to use it for green screening and I am using a program called DV Rack that records straight to my pc. I key my footage with Ultra 2 (Serious Magic/Adobe)

Are there any advantages for me to buy the HV40? Will the 24p pulldown issue effect me if I am recording straight to my pc? Will I get a better quality recording or key if I record to the mini dv first and then transfer to my pc?

Thanks for any info!

Dirtwad

2009 February 13th, 18:35

I guess I should add that I am green screening for internet only. It will just be spoke persons for websites and some You Tube videos.

I have a Best Buy Gift card for $980. that I can use for the HV30 right now or I can wait for the HV40 if it will be better for recording straight to pc.

Dana Love

2009 February 13th, 21:28

You'll find no effective difference. Keying with HDV is a bit of a hoot, though.

SenorKaffee

2009 February 14th, 04:19

You could say both are equally bad, but it will work. Since even YT is 720p now, chromakeying for the Internet in theory needs to be as precise as for a BluRay production. O_o

Lightloch

2009 February 14th, 12:25

If you're shooting for the internet, consider using the HV30's native (no pull-down) 30p mode.

CycleWriter

2009 February 14th, 13:58

Any responses regarding the 40 would be theoretical in nature since no one has yet gotten their hands on one. I'd be hesitant to make any decisions based on such observations, but as the improvements to the 40 appear to mostly be aimed at those desirous of film-like output, I doubt that there would be much difference between the two as far as your application is concerned.

Dirtwad

2009 February 14th, 21:41

Thank you all for responding!

I used a borrowed HV30 to record a guy climbing to the top of a flag pole at the Tennessee state capital building. It was over 230 ft high.. posted the video on you tube
YouTube - Poteet - Proud to be an American Tree Service Company

Now I am hooked. The camera is amazing.

Please help me understand a few things.

Since 90% of my recordings will be green screened and then wind up as a flash video with a transparent background or simple .flv internet video ....

Will I get a better key or clearer video if I record to tape first and then transfer through firewire or HDMI or will it be better to just record live/straight to my pc via firewire or HDMI?

Is there a recommended shutter speed for green screening HD video?

Are there any other settings I should know about that will help?

I wish the HV30 had manual white balance...it appears in the menu but only has preset settings.

I would like to contribute to this awesome forum but since I have boogers for brains abaout this camera, for now, I can only offer information about trademarking,branding seo and graphics.

Thanks again!

Luxaltor

2009 February 14th, 23:08

There is a small boost in quality if you record directly to your computer via HDMI and a live capture procedure. There was a thread somewhere on the forum where someone did some side by side comparisons and although its a small difference, the difference is there.

As far as green screening goes, you want to try to stick to progressive (24p or 30p). Shooting in 60i will give you the "jaggies" commonly found in interlaced footage which makes chroma keying a head ache to complete.

As far 24p vs 30p, if the output is mainly going to be internet then I would suggest 30p, but ultimately it depends on what look you want to go after. If you were making your own indie films and putting them on youtube then you may want to do 24p but 30p works well for just about everything else. Really, film in both, see what you like better.

roblavender

2009 February 14th, 23:41

Thank you all for responding!

I wish the HV30 had manual white balance...it appears in the menu but only has preset settings.

The HV20 and the HV30 both have manual white balance... From the menu go to the white balance section, it is the last icon on the left.

Simple to use. Once you have your lighting set, or are in the area you wish to shoot, simply put a white card (or grey card) in front of the camera so that the card fills the screen, hit the select button and the icon will flash for a few seconds until white balance is acheived.

You do need to be in programed mode (manual) and not in automatic in order to use this feature.

Directions for manual white balance are in the owners manual.

Dirtwad

2009 February 15th, 01:56

There is a small boost in quality if you record directly to your computer via HDMI and a live capture procedure.

What about live firewire capturing?

Should I get an HDMI cable or will Firewire look good enough for internet videos. I am simply recording people giving little 30 second greetings to be played on their web sites..."Welcome to my site...etc. not much movement just speaking.

Luxaltor

2009 February 15th, 02:50

Dirtwad

2009 February 15th, 09:06

Okay, I bought the HV30. With tax and shipping it came to $853 through Best Buy.com

Thank you Rob I did not know it had manual WB control I thought it was just a bunch of presets. DV Rack has a WB monitoring section that works with the manual WB control on the HV30.

I am wanting to get the video quality that you see here http://sitespokespeople.com

I have the code and instructions for the transparent .flv background if anyone wants it.

From what I have gathered from this forum I am going to record in 24 -30p via firewire and if that does not key very well then I will have to buy a black magic HDMI card and cable.

Thank you all for helping!

iThinkergoiMac

2009 February 15th, 16:51

Yeah, a live firewire connection should work. I think you can do live firewire captures? I've never tried that with an HD camera, just SD.

Yup... I've done it...

Dirtwad

2009 February 15th, 19:09

Yup... I've done it...

Done which Firewire for sd or hd? If HD how was the quality through firewire?

iThinkergoiMac

2009 February 16th, 10:50

Sorry, should have been more specific. I imported HDV through FW. I didn't see much of a difference between the tape and the FW direct capture. I didn't look very hard, though... I had the camera hooked up to the computer to capture video off the tape and then randomly decided to see if the computer would capture via FW and it did.

I was in 24p Cinemode... still 60i...

oneearth

2009 February 17th, 23:46

I would say an HV30 would be better, because with the money you save you could buy an intensity pro hdmi capture card for your PC and bypass recording to HDV all together & go straight into your pc. And it's more than a "small boost" in quality, you get full raster(1920x1080 as apposed to 1440x1080) and a much wider color space to work with.
You have to have your greenscreen setup near your pc for this of course.
This way you can capture to uncompressed or a 4:2:2 codec will be much better for keying & you remove the pulldown on the fly as you record to the pc.

Dirtwad

2009 February 18th, 15:55

Thanks Oneearth! I did not know that the HDMI would help with chroma keying...I am gonna buy the HDMI card...looks like $250 from B Magic.

I sincerely appreciate you all taking time to help us noobs..I would like to offer FREE graphic or seo help to any of you that responded. I have been making sites,logos and seo for companies in TN...even some Fortune 500 companies.

Thanks again for your help!

Dirtwad

2009 February 18th, 16:12

Tosh Layton

2009 February 18th, 23:31

Thanks for the feedback iThinkergo,

After I get an HDMI card I will record some chroma key with live FW and HDMI and then both again on tape and post the 4 to compare.

I am curious to see if the 4:2:2 will be key better than 4:2:0

You know what the "pros" do,,, They test, a lot. I look forward to your tests. But I have a feeling that when you pull key from your HDMI (not tape to HDMI) you will have much better results and much faster results.

Color space is tough to understand but one thing I like to keep in mind is the more color information you start with the more you can do with it like chroma key or color correcting. 422 has SO much more color information than the 420 of HDV. So pulling a key is much easier. The same is true of 444 vs 422. I think recording as close to uncompressed as possible is best but since I don't really do much chroma I am not really an expert.

Get this book: Digital Movie Making 3.0 by Scott Billups. He makes understanding colorspace much easier. I highly reccomend.

Dirtwad

2009 February 18th, 23:52

Get this book: Digital Movie Making 3.0 by Scott Billups. He makes understanding colorspace much easier. I highly reccomend.

The book looks great I am getting it from Amazon for just 10 bucks - Thanks!

Tosh Layton

2009 February 19th, 00:37

Yeah I found the book about 2 days before I went to Sundance but didn't want to spend the cash or time reading it till I got back. I forgot aboiut it till a few days ago when I was again in the book store in my favorite section and saw it and got it. I should have ordered it online, but oh well, it's an excellent read and well worth what I paid, at least so far..

Sean Michael

2009 February 21st, 13:27

I've done a lot of chromakey with my HV20, shooting in 60i. It works fine, at least for Internet distribution. (I would've preferred shooting progressive with an HV30 though.)

Honestly, I think you should focus first and foremost on the lighting. IMHO lighting is more important than your choice of capture method. Get the green screen lit in a perfectly even fashion, and get your subject well lit in a manner that avoids any light spillage from the screen. If you get the lighting right, you'll obtain the results you seek.

Dana Love

2009 February 21st, 16:31

Get the green screen lit in a perfectly even fashion, and get your subject well lit in a manner that avoids any light spillage from the screen.

Or use the Reflecmedia (http://www.reflecmedia.com/) system.

Sluggy

2009 February 21st, 18:59

"Murder at the Pharaoh's Grave", my son Ben Kadie's film, has extensive greenscreening most of which, I think, came out well. Here are some stills. (http://www.slugco.com/movies/PharaohsGrave/#Stills) His "receipe":

HV30 shooting 30p
If possible, use outdoor sunlight
Key with After Effects, which is very forgiving of shadows and good at removing green spill.

- Carl
carlk @ slugco.com

Dirtwad

2009 February 27th, 00:58

HV30 shooting 30p
If possible, use outdoor sunlight
Key with After Effects

Wow your son did a great job!

Unfortunatley, my green screening needs to be indoors and After FX is a bit out of my budget.

Are there any other good alternatives programs for chroma keying?

Is there a more affordable HDMI card than the Black Magic Intensisty card?

I was hoping to pay no more than 150.

Shadow2

2009 February 27th, 22:17

Wow your son did a great job!
I was hoping to pay no more than 150.

http://store02.prostores.com/servlet/tubetape/the-24/CompositeLab-Pro--dsh--FXhome/Detail

found this on a web site that i've been looking into buying a green screen off of... might fit your budget quite well....

lordtangent

2009 February 28th, 16:39

What about live firewire capturing?

Should I get an HDMI cable or will Firewire look good enough for internet videos. I am simply recording people giving little 30 second greetings to be played on their web sites..."Welcome to my site...etc. not much movement just speaking.

Firewire capture would be identical to recording to tape since the signal that goes over firewire is HDV (the exact same format used for tape recording)

I'm from the camp that asserts that direct LIVE HDMI capture is vastly superior to tape recording. I think that especially in the case of trying to do keys from the material, you will find that bypassing the HDV compression will be a big help.

Depending on what you plan to put behind your green screen subject, you might even be able to do the key in real-time and save yourself some time in post. The Black Magic Intensity ships with a tool called "On-Air" that claims to be able to graphics keying (graphics over video, not chroma key) and there is also Conduit Suite (http://www.dvgarage.com/prod/prod.php?prod=conduit2), which ships with a real-time GPU accelerated version of it's nodes that work with any video input. Conduit Suite is supposed to be able to do chroma key in real-time.

Erik Bien

2009 February 28th, 17:54

I'm pretty sure if there were a less expensive alternative to the Intensity card, someone would've spilled the beans about it by now. Duke, lordtangent or another of you guys that have one correct me if I'm wrong, but live capture 1920x1080 at 4:2:2 also requires the speed of a RAID, yes?

Even despite that, if you're going to be chroma keying in a studio 100% of the time I think it's more than worth the hassle and expense: even if you light your screen and your talent perfectly, chroma subsampling (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/4:2:2#Sampling_systems_and_ratios) can spoil it all with jagged/sizzling edges.

Even if laying down a finished composite at capture is impractical, one kind of "old school" trick to save on post work when shooting chroma-key in a studio equipped with a chroma-key switcher was to live-key out the green walls and floor and replace them with a full-screen chroma green graphic. This can also help quickly determine if your screen is lit evenly enough.

lordtangent

2009 February 28th, 18:49

Eric,

You are correct that the interlaced 4:2:0 chroma sub-sampleing is a killer for getting clean keys. (As bas as 4:1:1 used to be in some ways)

As far as getting serial digital (HDMI) into you computer I'm not aware of anything even remotely as cost effective as the stuff from Black Magic. The thing is, they focus entirely on I/O. Some of the higher end cards do have hardware HD to SD conversion, but otherwise the assumption seems to be everything else will be handled by the host system. This is quite different from systems like the original Video Toaster and Toaster Flier, which had a lot more hardware for handling video themselves. Anyway, I like it. I don't want or need a "video studio in a box" All I need is a way to get "video" into the computer. I prefer the fact that everything from there on out is software based. (Pretty much the modern "post DV" way of doing it...) I only mention all that because we seem to be getting to a new threshold now where between the faster CPUs and GPUS the host box itself is getting fast enough to do real-time stuff in HD. It's a big milestone!

Black Magic Designs provides both an Uncompressed and MJPEG based codec. You MIGHT be able to get by using the MJPEG codec if you have a fast enough single drive. The results will still be better than HDV becasue it's I-frame only and 4:2:2. But a RAID would be a better idea. I'm getting by with a 4 disk RAID-0 built off the on-board SATA ports of and BIOS based RAID on my mother board. With it I can do full 1080p uncompressed. Since I pretty much always shoot 24p... I then IVTC process the footage and the output gets put into (lossless compressed) Lagarith codec. After processing the file size is about 1/3rd what the uncompressed was. I also make SD-res J2K or Lagarith codec proxies during the 3:2 pulldown process for editing.

The system sounds like a lot of steps by my projects are pretty low volume and FX oriented so I have the time for "hand crafting" everything like that. And really, the conversion process of a days shooting never takes more than overnight anyway.

Ian-T

2009 February 28th, 22:22

You sound to me like you can use Neo Scene.

Dirtwad

2009 March 3rd, 02:09

I'm pretty sure if there were a less expensive alternative to the Intensity card, someone would've spilled the beans about it by now. Duke, lordtangent or another of you guys that have one correct me if I'm wrong, but live capture 1920x1080 at 4:2:2 also requires the speed of a RAID, yes?

What is the speed of a RAID? Wiki does not help and I cannot find it in this forum.

Is my pc fast enough to process video captured with the Intensity card?
(at 1920x1080 4:2:2 etc) I have a Sony Dual processor - 3.2ghz (combined total) with 4gig ram (though only 3.5 ram is recognized) I am going to buy the best video card that I can for 200-250 bucks.

From what I have learned from this forum I will need to buy the HDMI capture card,Neo Scene and something like Sony Vegas 8 in order to get a clean look like this http://www.vdolife.com/ or http://www.ispeakvideo.com/

Here is a decent deal for Vegas,Neo Scene and some extras http://www.videoguys.com/cineform.html

Please let me know if there is a better deal somewhere else before I buy the package for $549

I am skipping the free 24 pulldown software only becuase I am a techno peasant and Neo Scene appears to be a much easier process.

Thanks for your help guys!

Dirtwad

2009 March 3rd, 16:23

... and there is also Conduit Suite (http://www.dvgarage.com/prod/prod.php?prod=conduit2), which ships with a real-time GPU accelerated version of it's nodes that work with any video input. Conduit Suite is supposed to be able to do chroma key in real-time.

Unfortunately, Conduit appears to to be Mac only :(

There is $950 left in my video budget. This should cover the cost of The Intensity card, Vegas and a new video card. Hope I will not need a faster PC to run it all.

Thanks for the great feedback!

piningforfjords

2009 March 5th, 22:52

Raids will vary in speed quite a bit depending on the raid controller (there might be one on your motherboard), the number of drives on your RAID, the way they are organized RAID0, RAID5 are likely what you would use, and lastly the speed of the drives themselves. Your best bet is to duplicate the setup of a success story from this board. If you wanted to trail blaze find out if your motherboard has a build in RAID controller and get 2 fast drives (15K rpm would be safer) and set them up for RAID0 and see if they keep up. I would be pretty surprised if they did. If they don't you may have to get 3 or 4 more drives and go RAID5. Luckily the prices and capacities of drives have come way down.
Alternatively read up on standalone RAIDs and pick one. Or just try Firewire and see if the quilty is good enough. Eyeon Fusion is a good compositor/keyer. Best of luck.

Dirtwad

2009 April 7th, 02:10