OK, I just got the HV20 the other day and am blown away with the quality of the video this thing can produce. I also own 2 Canon MV900 SD cameras that don't deliver high enough detail in anything but direct sunlight. I bought the HV20 to explore using video on commercial websites for things like product demos and short promotional clips. By the way, I am in Italy and am using the PAL version and prefer the quality of the 25p over the 50i.
Question 1. Does anyone achieve better results using HD video instead of SD when converting to FLV? I seem to be getting better results with SD. I am getting better results shooting in HDV 25p and then exporting SD with the camera in DV lock than using the HD video and converting in post.
Question 2. Has anyone compared the difference in quality between the camera shooting HD and converting in camera to SD, or to shooting DV directly? I ask because the quality of the in camera down converted video to SD is remarkably close in quality to the original HD video.
Question 3. Multicam workflow with mixed media on the timeline? I prefer to use a multicamera setup with at least two cameras, and bought the HV20 to be the center, anchor camera and let the two MV900's get the close up shots and other angles. It seems in premiere that multicam editing with HD and SD in the timeline is not so easy, and my trial of Aspect HD isn't working out for me. Anyone doing multicam in Premiere with mixed HD and SD media?
Thanks in advance for any insight into my questions, especially numbers 1 and 3. I hope my initial exploration here helps others whose final destination is the Web. So far, from my limited experience, it seems better to shoot in HDV then use the in camera conversion to SD for material destined for the web. This way I have a HD version always available for other uses, such as display on plasma TVs and the like.
I haven't tried DV lock because most of the responses dealing with this topic have stated they get better results by downscaling HD to SD in post. Your experience seems the oposite. I shoot all my video in HD 60i. Most all that I shoot is for posting on my own website. I know I push the limit for streaming video. In most cases people need at least a 600 to 700 kbs download. I also have been posting only wmv. I haven't got a flash encoder so I don't have any experience with flv but I have read that it doesn't provide quite as good of quality that wmv can provide. That might be wrong since Flash has been upgraded.
If you want to take a look at a sample of one of my more recent posts of something I taped with the HV20, just dial in http://www.johnhartford.org. I have a clip that should automatically start in 10 to 20 seconds on the home page if you have the bandwidth. There are a few other posts that I shot both day and night using the Cine mode with no special editing during post. During this outside jam clip I was using a wireless dynamic mic. I think you can see it sitting in the middle of the circle on the ground at one point in the clip. I may have also had a wireless lavier clipped to my camera bag on a chair outside the circle of pickers. I was just experimenting with audio on this one. It was my first stab with this dual channel wireless rig I bought.
Bluegrass, thanks for the link to the video. I will say that is exceptional web quality video. How was it produced? What NLE software did you use, and what were your settings for exporting to WMV? I have a 4Mb ADSL connection and it streamed perfectly. I have never seen WMV look that good.
I read alot of people not getting good results with the DV lock. I tried putting the HD video in a Premiere Pro 2 timeline and shrunk it to about 54% to get it to a PAL widescreen size. What resulted looked no better than the HD to SD video that came out of the camera. I am discovering that Premiere has some conversion problems that may be affecting my results. Unfortunately I invested in the Adobe Production Studio and it doesn't seem to be as HD friendly as others, such as Vegas.
Here is a link to a new video I just rendered, you can see on my screenshot below. This one was shot in cine mode. for those curious, i actually setup my tripod under the speaker farm that was in front and to the side of the stage to stay out of the sun. I had a Sennheiser 609 silver dyanmic mic up in the air about 8 feet and directly in front of the speaker farm. I would imagine the mic was about 2 feet in front of the speakers. This is a large farm intended to supply sound to an audience going back about a football field length. I used XLR balanced into my XLR-Pro adaptor which mounts on the tripod directly under the HV20. Here is the link to this video which I am uploading to my site as I write this. http://johnhartford.org/videos/beanb...sborneS3-4.wmv. It's about a 60 meg file. It might be intersting for some of you audio heads out there to see if you can identify some of the mics being used by the performers. I think some of them are probably Shure 57's & 58s. You should be able to go ahead and play this in full screen with the 640 resolution. Just for kicks sometime, I'll render a 1480 rez wmv file and post. For those of you who live in rialinda when it comes to bluegrass music, the guy on this film is a first generation bluegrasser and a legend not too for behind Dr. Ralph Stanley.
I'd be curious if any of you that follow this link, did it stream for you OK? if it did, about how long did you need to wait for it to start streaming? thx jkh
The clip on my homepage was shot at 60i automatic. I captured it with Pinnacle 10.7 and rendered it as a 640X480 wmv file, selecting high quality ntsc. here is a screen shot from my output window after it just completed rendering a new clip that i'll be uploading to my site in a few minutes. this one was shot in cine mode. i have experimented with higer resolution wmv files but so far i haven't had any luck with getting them to steam. ii've found the rez that i'm using seems to be the "sweet spot" if i want my videos to have a chance to stream at least with one of the latest Window Media Players. my aim is for the best client enjoyment and that might mean sacrificing rez for streaming ability and possibly not satisfying the low end broadband visitors. as you can see, i do not stress strong color but i think it is fairly close to reality. my own personal likeing will probably make me boost the color a little, especially shooting in the cine mode.
Last edited by bluegrass; 2007 July 14th at 00:58.
As you've probably noticed, that's 16x9 content flagged as 4x3, so it displays incorrectly. It's easily overridden in VLC though.
Isn't the HV20 great? When I think of the results I got with a consumer camcorder of a similar price a decade ago, it makes me shudder! As for two decades ago... !
You might get fractionally better results with smarter deinterlacing, but that's already pretty good.
Would the HV20 audio would be useless in that situation? (i.e. does the attenuator work at that volume level?) Or is your chosen mic just a preference rather than essential?
I have a question as a new user of this camera... you wrote:
Has anyone compared the difference in quality between the camera shooting HD and converting in camera to SD, or to shooting DV directly?
What I would love to know is how do you convert in the camera to SD???
If you're shooting HDV 25p, and encoding 320x240 for Youtube, I doubt there's any visible difference between the various methods of downsizing. There is a bug in the HV20 which adds some flashing lines to the top of the HD>SD downconvert in "PAL" cameras, so that's worth looking out for and avoiding if it happens to you.
If SD looks better than HD, then your software (or the operator!) is doing something wrong.
For higher resolution encodes, the results are visibly better if you start with HD and downconvert in software. Deinterlacing (not relevant for 25p) gives much better results in HD - i.e. any "problems" will be much smaller because you will downsize the problems along with the video!
Workflow for Web?
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Originally Posted by bluegrass
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