I remember when I met you at the Brickworks a year ago, you were waxing poetic about the your new HC-1. I'm curious if you still feel the same way and how you feel the HC-3 compares?? I'm especially interested in low light and high contrast situations as I would potenntially use it for live perfomance situations (on stage).

Anyone elase have an opinion to offer? Alternate suggestions??

Many thanks,
Hugh

The HC1 remains a particularly good camera for what we do. The HC3 is a smaller cheaper camera that lacks some of the high end features (notably mic input) of the HC1, so the HC3 is not an option for us.

CS

Chris,

I would be very interested on your (and Michael's) thoughts on the SR1. Not for LLVJ duty, just as placeholder in the marketplace and what it would be suited for. I am guessing this will be a new toy for Michael who has been using the SR100.

I am getting one, but there is no need to validate my choice.

I had a HC1 for a while... even got into putting a dof adaptor on it to give it shallow depth of field with canon fd lens's....

here's my take;

on daylight... the image is remarkable.... near what you'd see on HD channels.... but there were some problems rendering red.... had a purpleness to it.... not really fixable in post without hurting other colors. ( I've heard HC1's with serial numbers past a certain point were better... firmware? and that the hc3 does not suffer the red problem )

in low light..... resolution would drop..... putting the cam on "sun & moon" setting would keep the gain down and look more natural.

I've moved up to the z1.... complete manual control ( I'm a still shooter by trade, and shoot manual .... hassy ) and better low light handeling.

If you just want a cam for fun and family.... the HC1 and HC3 are both incredible..... and the new canon small HD is king I here ( camcorderinfo.com )

here's a part of a project I shot with the HC1.... useing the dof adaptor and nattress plugins in FCP....

http://www.witzke-studio.com/hd/difrenzi-web.mov

just a warning!.... look out! once you get into shooting HD, you'll get hooked and start dreaming of all the possibilities.... shooting product spinning, indie films, documentaries..... and you'll want a bigger tv..... and an hd dvd player..... and a popcorn machine...... and a fluid head tripod.......

Bob - I think tht the SR1 looks like a super camera and will apparently turn the corner very successfully from tape based HDV to hard-drive based H264.

I can only comment from reviews I have read on the camera itself - very positive in general with the higher end features of the H1. Sony have not dumbed it down unacceptably to protect their pro line.

Where I will comment is on the HDV vs. H264 debate. From my recent experience, H264 is _the_ codec to use for output for the next couple of years+. Its encoding requires much more processing power but the results are generally excellent. The size/quality ratio is very exciting and will change the way we look at video.

That being said, I have the advantage of starting with a large size/reasonable quality original in HDV and down rezzing it to H264. However, starting with H264 and going through the post production process with it to final output is as yet untried (by me) and I imagine will show the problems of working with any highly compressed codec. If you start to try and push it around with re-positioning, blow-ups, speed changes and (most importantly for me) colour correction, my guess is that it will show some distress - just as DV & HDV do.

But for shooting original HD-like resolution onto a drive in reasonable conditions, my guess is the SR1 will be a ground-breaker.

CS

Chris - in all honesty, I didn't think too deeply about that because I am not trying to do repeditive deep editing. But your point is well taken. Do you suppose a workaround is to convert the H264 to HDV as feedstock for editing?

This is possibly much akin to converting camera JPEGS (from non-RAW yielding cameras) to TIFF or PSD files before editing to prevent further deterioration. Or is it too late once the initial H264 compression takes place and there is no point to editing a HDV derivative?

At any rate, no commercial editing software (other than the Sony stuff boxed with the camera) can currently handle the files in their native format. I wonder how quick the uptake will be to support this format. Could this format be destined to be another "Betamax-like" standard ignored by the video community until it dies?

Yes, of course I'm prepared for that! I went from film to digital only a few years ago with a 10D and now..... EEEK!!

Thanks for all the comments. Witzke, your footage looks great! I've been looking at the shallow DOF oprions, as well. Beautiful, but expensive. From your experience, would you recommend the HC1 (or HC3) for live perfomance use? High contrast lighting situations?

Cheers,
Hugh

No, my _guess_ is not but if Graham Nattress reads this thread, he will give you a far more informed perspective. Mine is based on a seat-of-the-pants intuition that going from one codec to another will likely introduce some artifacts that will cause trouble later.


Again Graham will give a better perspective, but IMO H264 is the best _highly compressed_ codec currently out there supported as part of MPEG. So, it will have legs. But it may also take NLE developers a while to work up the support since it is so compressed.

Chris

sure.... I guess you could use the "spotlight" setting to compensate for the contrst nd now blow out the faces.... or just ae-lock on what you like.

as far as the dof adaptors goes.... I'd get the redrock m2 if I had it to do over.... or did it again.