I have some interesting news regarding my perception about the video quality and compression artifacts on the Sony V1U, since capturing footage on my new editing system.



It is also my first time working in Premiere Pro CS3, as opposed to Vegas 7e.



I shot a wedding on August 4th and notified the client that we were getting a new NLE up online in about a week and if they would object to being the first project to be edited on the new system. The client was enthusiastic about this prospect, because I conveyed the possibility of better quality end product. So over the weekend, I began working on the wedding, capturing and editing it in HDV.



I was able to configure my GeForce 8800 to send 1080P out the second DVI port (my editing monitor is running at 2560x1600 on a 30” LCD) which allowed me to get a good look at the picture quality on my 47” Vizio GV47LF at 1080P. I noted very early in the view an absense of distracting banding and block artifacts that I was plagued with on the AMD Athlon-based system I had been using since June 2001, with Vegas 7e.



The wedding looks like a high quality digital photograph in motion.

Blue skies look like a continuous gradient, instead of concentric rings of purplish-blue and greenish blue.

People’s faces, particularly in shadow from the sun, no longer look like they have a major complexion problem.

The images are incredibly sharp! Colors accurate and vivid, as if shot on Fuji Velvia film.



In contrast, my Canon HV20, used for a locked off closeup of the B&G, looked dark, desaturated and limited in color gamut. I was able to apply correction in Premiere, but to get the color really close, I had to accept some noise in the HV20 picture.



As this was an African-American wedding, the additional challenges of more contrast of skin tone against white dress/suits produced an image with a few more f-stops of dynamic range than one would encounter with caucasian weddings. This was outdoors in a garden at one of these all-in-one ceremony/reception halls. Despite all this, the V1U produced a picture that rivaled my Olympus D-SLR, but with even more dynamic range.



I could see considerable amounts of chromatic aberration, however, as sunlit white suit shoulders against almost black shady areas of the background produced incredibly-challenging shooting conditions.

The other thing I noticed was a prominent ‘stair stepping’ effect on edges that were almost horizontal. I recall reading about this issue being related to the diagonal placement of the CMOS imagers. It’s very evident on a 47” screen with images this sharp.



My setting was Portrait picture profile. Sharpness was set to 5, which is below mid-point. Picture was sharp enough to see every crinkle on the bride’s lips, every bit of sweat beginning to break out of her pores (it was 95ºF that afternoon) and every strand of hair clearly delineated from the the next. I kept looking for the usual artifacts, but darned if I could find them!



My conclusion is that either Vegas or the slower Athlon PC was not properly decoding the video, or perhaps using some “quick” approximation decompression mode to maintain some sort of framerate at the cost of quality. Or maybe it’s the video card. The GeForce TI4600 vs. the GeForce 8800 GTS 640MB that I’m using now.



Adobe is great! It seems all of the applications make some use of all four cores, speeding it along very nicely. It makes unrendered titles, transitions, color corrections, etc, all play in realtime at high quality, with only 30-40% CPU utilization.



I’ve got Premiere configured to send video playback to the 2nd DVI port, which I’ve configured for my Vizio 47” 1080P display. The Adobe applications run solid and reliably, and without any sign of strain.



I used the Multi-Camera feature to cut the 3-camera shoot of the ceremony, and it has made the process a whirlwind pace! It’s like working a realtime live switcher, and I edited the entire ceremony in 20 minutes—a process that normally takes me about 12 hours of manually cutting pieces out of the top two layers on the timeline and guestimating what’s going on in the lower two tracks. Multi-Cam not only speeded up the process by eliminating the drudgery and tedious work, but it also enabled me to cut to cameras at my whim, enabling me to be far more creative because there’s no work penalty for making those extra switches between views. And if the timing of a switch was a little off, I just use the Rolling Edit tool and move the switching point in time until it’s perfect. The client will love this and this makes this particular wedding the very best I’ve shot so far.

I’ve exported a low-bitrate 6-minute excerpt of the core event (it’s at 256kbps and the audio is too low a bitrate to handle the sound of the water fountain, so you can hear the compression filters) to my server for the client to download. It is linked here:

http://www.mwcomms.com/WindowsMedia...y_Multi-Cam.wmv

Copy and paste into browser, if it produces an error when clicking on it to play.



The bottom line is, the Sony picture is not half bad, when it’s HDV stream is decoded properly. I think half of the problem was a poor-quality decode from the graphics card. However, it does not fix the sound quality. That’s a hardware/firmware problem with the camera’s design.



My system, as of August 18, 2007:

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Take care,

Mark & Mary Ann Weiss


www.basspig.com The Bass Pig's Lair - 15,000 Watts of Driving Stereo!

www.mwhdvideo.com
www.candlewoodvideography.com
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