The Videoddgrapher

Looks like I'm not the best man for a blog. Anyway here's a small plug for your spending dollars.

I needed to update my analog to DV capabilities for a variaty of reasons. The main one was that I needed a better method to go from and to BetacamSP. I made a purchase of a Canopus ADVC700 and it's a VERY good box for the $1550 it cost from VIdeoguys in Long Island, NY.



The component in and out gives that bit of sparkle to the video but the most important is the genlock capabilities of the unit. Now I can go straight from the computer to the Beta deck without the need for a switcher or a looped video setup. One less heat producer for the summer, hooray!

It fits in the equipment rack, has a number of adjustments available by menu and it has a good VU meter. It's worth the money if you have a complex edit room and do a lot of analog capturing.

Well things have been busy which was not the case when I started this excursion in poor time management. So my misfortune, a very distressing case of stomach virus, leads to an actual update.

So I have this tantalizing HD-100 camera, is that the end of it? No, of course not. Does anything that went with my PD-170 work with the HD-100? Let's see, some microphones and cables, the lights and the headphones. That's it. Time to spend some more money! Here's what I ended up with on a limited budget:

Tripod: The tripod I had for the PD-170 was overwhelmed by the weight of the HD-100 with a battery. I have older tripods from my past years with big heavy cameras but I am loath to return to lugging those around. Directed to the Amvona eBay site by the wonderful forums at DV Info net (link to the left), I found very reasonably priced, well constructed, new tripods for auction. I got one, an AT-9903, for roughly $350. How they managed that price I don't know, but while I didn't get the greatest tripod (no fast pans allowed) it certainly works for interviews and other calm shots. http://www.amvona.com/ is the company site. I would give you an eBay link but Amnova tripods are curiously absent from any seaches I try. Perhaps they made their mark and are happier to sell direct now.

Case/Bag: I have an oversized Petrol bag for my PD-170, http://www.petrolbags.com/, which has done it's job very well. It was just a little too small for the HD-100. On a visit to a camera rental house I saw that their rental HD-100s were not doing so well in standard soft camera cases. A design flaw in the structure of the HD-100 (and I assume the new HD-200 and 250 as well) places the viewfinder at risk of snapping off if the soft bag is crushed in with lots of other baggage. That was something I felt worth an investment to prevent.

At the time, only Portabrace made a soft case that protected the viewfinder, at the expence of 6 extra pounds of weight to a normal 6 pounds for a soft bag alone. It does get heavy. I got the available bag but since then PortaBrace has come out with a case designed with the HD-100 in mind, http://www.portabrace.com. Petrol and Kata also have viewfinder support cases now. I'm happy with the Porta-Brace bag but it can be tiring on long shoots, it's just a bit to big to be comfortable for my body shape (skinny).

Filters and Matte Box: I made a purchase of a set of Schneider 4x4 filters to go in my very cheap matte box I got from an enterprising individual who runs http://www.indiesnap.com/. I got the matte box in anticipation of a low budget movie shoot that..... NEVER HAPPENED..... BOTH OF THEM! Well that's the breaks, maybe 2007. At least I'm ready for lighting issues that a matte box can help solve. The indiesnap matte box, while limited in function, is so much cheaper and lighter then anything it completes with that I recommend it to the snottiest cameraperson. The one drawback is that the filter area allows light to hit the lens at certain angles. I solved this with a trip to the craft store. A $5 ribbon of wide velcro solved the issue. I would talk about the filters but I haven't had a need to use them yet.

DTD Recorders: One day I had a shoot and there were no HDV tape to be found anywhere. I gritted my teeth and used off the shelf Fuji DV tapes. The dropout was persistent and severe enough that I had to edit the project (a music video thank goodness) around the dropout. It was so low budget that a reshoot was not possible. By the way, the dropout wasn't noticable on the small monitor that was brought along. I vowed to only use HDV tapes from then on until I was hit with the worst dropout I've had in twenty years of shooting with some JVC HDV tapes. That's when I was informed that HDV tape is no more then regular DV tape from the center of the giant spool when they make it! This is a bind. It was clear that a DTD recorder was calling to me from the near future.

Well, there isn't much in the way of a useful DTD recorder except from Focus Enhancements. Notice the lack of a link? Well they'll have to make up for a lot before I give the very, very minor satisfaction of a link on this incredibly unimportant blog. They have, without a doubt, one of the most customer unfriendly executive mangement teams around. They sell equipment with the promise of support and then change the terms of support. This has happened more then once and not just to me. Check out the forums. Anyway I have an FS-4 ProHD and it works well after a lot of stress about upgrades. I originally had a FS-4 HD but found out that Focus wasn't going to ever offer updates for it. This is a big issue since nobody had settled on a method for capturing HDV to disk yet. There was nothing in Focus' materials that stated, "we will not offer upgrades for this model". Fortunately I was able to return the FS-4 HD and exchange up (with extra money) to the FS-4 ProHD.

The promised upgrade arrived but without support for 24p QuickTime recording. They promised that that was forthcoming but now (as of December 28, 2006) it seems that that was really only for owners of the JVC repackaged version of the same device, the DR-HD100. So I recommend that all users of the HD-100 to avoid any direct purchases of Focus Enhancement DTD devices and get a DR-HD100 thru your friendly JVC dealer. Don't have one? Here's a link I'm happy to post: http://www.ggvideo.com/.

Uh-oh, the stomach virus is rumbling (or is it the sound of Focus Enhancements changing their attitude?)

Next sporatic post - shooting experiences.

Labels: Amvona tripods, indie snap matte boxes, JVC HD-100, Porta-Brace bags

So I tossed P2 out the window. That leaves three manufacturers to choose from; Canon, JVC and Sony. Now I have never been a fan of Canon's cameras. Why? I can't really say except that I never really liked the image quality of their DV cameras and I really didn't like the way the cameras looked or felt on my shoulder. This might seem like a contradiction when you read on but let's just say that my body build didn't agree with the Canon HDV camera. My brain also didn't agree with the $9000 price. The other two brands I have experience with so I focused more on their qualities.

Before I go on with this stream of self-justification let me explain my equipment owning philosophy. I never own equipment that I can't reasonably expect to pay off in a year or so. I frequently use high-end equipment but that's where rental houses and other production facilities come in handy. Why have a $30,000 DigiBeta deck when I can take a job to my friendly DigiBeta house when I really need to use the deck and then come back to the office and edit away until I need to use the Digi-Beta again? A good friend is exactly the opposite, he buys the best camera he can afford and nothing else except a monitor for the office. He is considered an expert cameraperson and he knows little about the rest of the technology. Works for him.

Sony: Using Sony equipment for over 25 years, there's no denying the expertise and quality they bring to the production house. Sony consistently makes equipment that's usually in the top 40% but rarely in the top 10%. The first real pro camera I started with was the Ikegami HL-79 in the early 1980's and while the Sony was never a slouch in the professional camera department, Ikegami cameras just looked better slightly less "video". And that's seems to hold true now, Sony make great VIDEO cameras. Their PD-170 DV camera is absolutely remarkable. Pull it out of the bag and start filming, it self-adjusts accurately (most of the time) and the auto-focus really works well. While Panasonic decided to explore the "film-look" and indi-film potential of DV, Sony stayed rigidly with the classic video look. And that's the case with their HDV cameras, great HD video but a film-look seems to be an after-thought with little thought.

JVC: A company with a spotty track record but they have secured a place as the company that makes low priced professional equipment that work while not with the high specs of Sony or other companies. They made the cheapest 3-tube color camera and are a standard in low end studio set-ups. You can't get a cheaper yet good looking studio camera elsewhere. Their SVHS decks were the best around. When the DV revolution came about JVC sort of fell off the map. Their reasonably priced (but over $5000) shoulder mount GY-500 pro DV camera made sales to local news and community access studios but for some reason they couldn't make a decent equivalent to the PD-150 or Panasonic's DVX100. Somebody at JVC must have seen an opening for their HDV camera. What's the two main problems that the small three chip cameras have? Internal servo controlled lenses and a wrist based balancing system. The small cameras are great for run and shoot situations but for extended work they can be a big pain in the arm especially Panasonic's brick shaped cameras. Having complete manual control over the lens can be a real boon to your camera work. A HDV camera under $5000 with a real lens and a shoulder mount, a great idea. And I keep getting requests for film looking video.

Taking advantage of a couple of trade shows, I played with both cameras (at the time the Panasonic HVX-200 was always kept in a Plexiglas box) and once I played with the HD-100 lens and saw the image on the screen I was hooked on the camera. Now JVC has always had a reputation of selling a low grade lens with their shoulder mount cameras and this camera is no exception but the lens seemed good enough for most work.

After playing with the camera I watched some footage shot with the camera on another screen and the next issue became apparent. HDV is an MPEG based format which was developed for compressing video data for playback not for origination. Now it was being utilized for HD recording! How would this affect the excellent image the camera seemed to be capable of? Watching a plasma screen, the results seemed very good until a shot of a penguin floating on water came up. Nothing in the image was still and the MPEG compression became very apparent. This worried me until later when I found out that the booth was playing back HVD recordings that were transferred to DVHS for some reason. That was compression on compression I was seeing. Next was how was I going to work with the footage.

Final Cut is my system of choice and Apple was making it clear that HDV was going to supported very soon. Keeping an eye on the forums (a link to one is on the side) I took advantage of some intrepid individuals who did a lot of testing with all the cameras and I felt that my inclinations were right. After waiting for a client to finally pay up, I got the camera and after 9 months I don't regret the decision.

Has it been problem free? Nope. The HD-100 was afflicted with a problem with the processing chips that caused a split screen effect to appear in some models. It happened to me twice (not during any shoot!) and never returned. The camera also needed to be sent back for a free firmware upgrade by JVC. And (I'm writing while I think) a couple of CCD pixels died but the camera has a menu that knocks those pixels out and duplicates the pixels next to it in it's place.

The final quality of the camera? DuArt here in New York City graciously projected some of my test footage for a short film project and it looks great. If a film analogy is needed I'd say the camera has a Super16mm feel to it. The producer of the film said the same thing. And my biggest fear of MPEG artifacts were unfounded as they were mostly invisible even in a hand-held shot of a freighter a half-mile away from overhead on a sun speckled river (I was on a bridge).

That's enough for now, next... Support equipment and then shooting situations I've encountered with the camera including how it fared.

The first step I took before getting into the HD world was to investigate the available options. Now I could never personally afford any of the high quality HD recording formats so the options were limited to HDV tape and DVCProHD via P2 solid state cards. Here are the plusses and minuses as I see them:

HDV:
Plus: Full HDTV resolution. Compact, economic recording format. uses less bandwidth then DV therefore saves drive space modestly and can use existing comptuer configurations. Several camera manufacturers utilize the format.
Minus: MPEG2 compression can create artifacts in complex visual scenes. Tape dropout a problem. Rendering effects will create image degradation.

DVCProHD via P2 cards:
Plus: Robust codec can stand the rigors of rendering during edits. Accepted professional format.
Minus: Really expensive recording medium. Requires alternate storage device to transfer full cards to during long shoots. Only one budget camera to choose from. Comptuer edit system needs to be upgraded to deal with the wide bandwidth of DVCProHD.

Let's see....One option requires the purchase of a new camera of some minor supprt equipment, the other requires the purchase of a new camera, a computer upgrade and expensive P2 cards and major support equipment (not counting additional crew).

I'm cheap, HDV it is.

Next... cameras and recording styles.

Well, I thought I would have gotten to this sooner but time isn't always on my side. And if I could actually write I wouldn't be working in video. The next post is something approximating what I said I would do... ah, is anyone reading this?

A few notes on who I am or have deluded myself into being. I own a video production company that specializes in duplication and editing for clients with modest needs. I also shoot and edit various self-initiated works as well as for clients. I recently completed a very unusual documentary tht is in the final stages of sound work. In the near future I will complete an exercise and health video with Taimak Guarriello and start pre-production of a low budget action film co-starring him. I just shot the first footage of a scientific documentary about the martial arts and am in pre-production of a short dramatic film which I will be the videographer for.

That's the present, over the course of this blog I may or may not talk about other projects from the past 25 years. Right now I have finished the purchase of all the tools needed to shoot in HDV. That's the next entry.

Next up: What I purchased and the flimsy reasoning behind it.

Coming Soon: The Twitch Factor in modern entertainment. A topic sure to ruin any chance for me to get work again.

Varoius musing about video production and related topics.

Soon to come: various, disjointed ramblings from 25 years of video production experience and assorted side topics of no particular relevance.