Testing out my brand new Canon HF10 in 30p framerate and Spotlight (i.e. no gain) mode:

http://www.vimeo.com/946026

As far as I can tell, the camera modes on the HF10 operate exactly as those on the HV20, with the only difference being the addition of 30p mode. The two cameras operate nearly identically.

Interesting to compare this with the Canon HV20 24p Spotlight mode video I previously posted from the "Night of the Horse" show.

I'm extremely impressed with this tiny camera!

I don't know why this footage plays back so jerky on Vimeo (at least on my system) compared to the HV20 24p file, the original file playback is smooth so please download the original .mp4 file it if you want to properly evaluate the footage.

Going forward, I may have to limit my Vimeo files to only 24p so they'll play smoothly online. If anyone is able to play this file online without it being jerky, please let me know.

It must be something they do while transcoding the files to the Flash format. You may have to ask them directly about that.

__________________
Florin Andrei

http://florin.myip.org/

Eskin, do you think the HF is superior to the HDC-SD1?

The in-site encoding is always a fixed framerate if I remember correctly (30fps perhaps).

Weird thing is that typically spotlight uses a more reddish W/B but in this video it's very neutral. I does do the job of lowering exposure correctly here.

For (low-light) indoors I would also try cinemode 30p. I found it performs really great and has better W/B. Also it shows more detail than default mode. You can combine it with custom modes (unlike the HV20 IIRC). Outdoors is very different but you can't go wrong with cinemode in low-light.

Michael: ..the moths gives me the idea of attempting to capture the night lightning we get around here. I live far out in the country, so there's not much ambient glow.

It's nice to have you guys do some advance work. Thanks.

j i m

It doesn't play back jerky for me but note that this is dependent on your internet connection speed. Try first to pause it and wait for the bar to fill up (that will reduce running out of buffer). Then it should be smooth.

The download link though is better quality anyway since the streaming one is only about 1.4Mbp/s.

To answer the earlier question about the HF10 vs. the SD1, the SD1 is a great camera, with its 3CCD configuration giving excellent color, but the AVCHD compression is definitely better on the HF10. It has a higher bitrate available for capture, its actually smaller than the SD1 (I was very surprised!), and since everything I do is for web delivery, the addition of 30p mode is a huge plus. The nightmode on the SD1 I think is cleaner than the HF10 if you don't care about frame rate, and it also has 5.1 sound recording.

The more I look at the original h.264 file, the more I'm convinced that I must have mixed up some 24p and 30p footage or done some other bad thing when I edited or transcoded the file. There's just too much odd judder going on for me to feel good about keeping it online, since it doesn't really represent the quality I'm getting on the HF10, so I've deleted the file from Vimeo.

I'll be shooting some Gran Prix jumping this coming weekend, will use the Spotlight mode and make sure to get my frame rates sorted out!

Sorry for the distraction!

Michael