Here's some 30p video I shot of friends playing yesterday at the Auld Dubliner pub in Long Beach, CA. After doing several tests in Spotlight mode, I ended up using primarily the footage shot in 1/30 shutter priority (Tv) mode:

http://www.vimeo.com/950398

Seems to me that the HF10 has slightly lower noise than the HV20 at equivalent gain-up. Hard to quantify but I really expected some of these shots to be noisier than they are given the lighting conditions so that's a very pleasant surprise!

I'm really pleased with the HF10, was concerned about it possibly being a moderate step down from the HV20, but it is working exactly as I had hoped.

The most recent updates to Cineform HDV that are optimized for use with CoreAVC really have made it very simple and predictable for me to use the HF10 with my workflow.



Cheers,

Michael

Thats very nice footage mate. Just a question, was there any gain in that video on any of the scenes? Or did u use spotlight which uses 0 gain.

Anyways, the 30p 1/30s video looks very natural, almost as good as professional 24p.

I did shoot a lot of footage on Sunday using Spotlight mode, as I would on the HV20, but when I looked at the resulting video, I found it a bit dark and the color balance a bit wrong for the subject. I ended up not using any of the Spotlight video, and only the video using shutter priority at 1/30th, and no gain adjustments (I probably should have used the exposure lock, but this is all on auto), and auto white balance. I'm really liking having 30p as an option, its now my default setting. I think Spotlight mode will be more useful in more brightly lit environments.

I don't have any hard evidence, but it seems to me that the HF10 is able to crank in a couple of db more gain with less resulting noise than the HV20, that combined with the 30p mode and it just crosses the "good enough for my needs" line. I'm quite happy, because I'm shooting video in these sorts of conditions all the time.

Here's another from last night, just turned the camera on in Tv mode at 1/30 and started playing...

http://www.vimeo.com/954408

Amazing to me from a camera smaller than a can of Red Bull. :-)

Michael, this might be slightly off topic but i think u r the right person to ask this question. Its about a HDC-SD1. Now im not sure if it was u, but a long time ago (say at least 6 months) there was a person posting sample videos of a SD1 at that same Irish bar (i think it was the same) to show the capabilities of the SD1, some good footage also. Im assuming this person might have been u, and u might be a owner of a SD1 also.

Anyways, my question is about the Spotlight mode on the SD1. I have also posted this on the Panasonic board. Basically, im just wondering if the Spotlight mode on the HDC-SD1 is supposed to work similar to that on the Canon HF10, that is by limiting the gain to 0 db and auto adjusting the rest. From my tests, i think the SD1 (SD3 in my case) is auto increasing the gain past 0 db as needed due to lower light. Would u be able to confirm if thats supposed to be case?

Thx again, btw the above video link didnt seem to work, i'll try again bit later.

It so happened that I am using the SD1 as well, today is the last day I can return it, and I really like it despite some known flaws, thinking of keeping it... Anyway, there is no spotlight mode, there is backlight mode and MagicPix. The latter drops shutter speed up to 1/15 and adjusts gain accordingly, backlight mode does not drop shutter speed, so if you already had gain, this mode will just add more gain. This makes sense, after all you want your image brighter.

The link appears to be working now...

Yes, I posted the previous pub videos.

There is a Spotlight scene mode on the SD1, but since I'm selling mine, its already packed in a box ready to ship, so hopefully someone else on the board can try the test... sorry about that...

Michael

Indeed, I was wrong. There is a whole bunch of modes in Menu->Basic->Scene Mode, I just tried spotlight and sure thing, it does NOT restrict gain level. On the other hand, one can use full manual mode and control gain manually.

Thx for that guys. Yeah the gain can be adjusted manually, however during manual operation there are 2 little things which i try to avoid when im shooting. 1) When u try to adjust the gain/aperture on the fly, it can be slow and cause some shake on the footage as u push on the knob, even if a tripod is used. 2) It has a step by step effect as u wind it up for down manually.

Incase u r wondering when this would actually matter:

Well this one time i was videoing a concert, lighting was decent, but sometimes different lights would come on and make things darker/lighter. Anyways, i wanted to shoot what i actually saw with my own eyes, so i didnt wanna add gain when it was dark. The problem came when there was a solo and i had to zoom in into a person's face as they were singing and at this point, 0db, there was too much light and adjusting on the fly w/o any shake or step effects and fast, was out of my reach. However if the camera would close the aperture for me , which it can do really fast and accurate w/o any step effects, that would have hit the spot. Instead i had to zoom out more and try not to saturate the face with too much light. Another option was to use a 2nd camera and keep it on auto mode when i zoomed it into your face in the solo.

So if i had an option to lock the gain at 0db, that would have been sweet. Anyways, its all good

Oh and Michael, one more question please :P

With the 1/30 priority mode on the HF100, i assume the camera auto adjusts the aperture. Now, if there is too much light, what would happen? The reason i ask this is because on my SD3, i had also locked the shutter speed to 1/60s and the aperture was auto. I ran into a problem where the camera captured too much light during a sunny day outside, even on the most closed aperture setting (on auto anyways). My only option was to unlock the 1/60s shutter in order to control the amount of light being captured. Have u had this problem yet with the HF100?

The link works now, really nice footage mate. Im really starting to dig the 30p / 1/30s mode. Any chance of u posting a 10 second raw clip of a 30p - 1/30s footage? On my SD3 60i is my only option and the lowest shutter which is manually selectable is 1/60s. So every now and then i get the urge to shoot some slow shutter 24p or 30p clips which i cant hehe. Im just really tempted on a HF100 with its $700 price tag! But im just being greedy, cos my SD3 is doing a damn good job.

Thx again.

Hello Michael,

Can you elaborate on Cineform HDV? Does it convert from AVCHD to HDV first and what's the quality at which HDV bit rate?

30p is better obviously because you have a slower shutter time and therefore gain more light. W/B I still found by far best with cinemode in low-light. The spotlight adds often a red tint but can make it look very warm/pleasant so it depends what you shoot for.
I also think that spotlight uses spot metering instead of evaluative metering (well it's in the name so that's my guess).

I wouldn't think that you hit the aperture limit with 30p on a bright sunny day but I haven't tested this. I did do earlier comparison between several apertures and 30p but it wasn't sunny enough to see if you'd hit aperture limit:

http://www.vimeo.com/894698

Framegrabs are included. I did this to see if the lens has a sweet spot at certain aperture but strangely enough larger apertures (=lower valueS) resulted in best quality (provided my test was correct).

PS Controlling gain/exposure with aperture seems to be difficult (since it will try to adjust shutter speed/gain). Why not use cinemode (low-light) and adjust exposure on the fly instead? Cinemode may not be zero gain but very close and didn't overexpose in low-light.

Cineform is a wavelet based I-frame only intermediate codec, so its not really comparable directly to MPEG-2 based HDV. The Cineform conversion program uses CoreAVC to decompress the AVCHD frames and then re-encodes the file to a Cineform .avi file. In my case I'm taking the original 1920x1080 17 Mbit files and transcoding them to Cineform at 1280x720 in medium quality, the file size goes up by a factor of 4, so you're trading space for speed of edit and preview.

I find the HF10's Cinemode a bit flat-looking for my purposes, but it is useful, particularly in low light.

For zero-gain, I've generally used the Spotlight mode with very good results on my HV20, seems nearly identical on the HF10.

Agree. I only use now cinemode for low-light but otherwise I switch back.

I did do a test between 30p cinemode and default and found the cinemode outperformed the default mode easily. I could re-test with spotlight but I love the good W/B you get with cinemode.

Thanks for the info:-).