I am struggling with either buying the HV30 or HF100. My concern isn't about editing AVCHD video or tape vs. memory cards. We are leaving on vacation in July and I simply want to capture the best quality video that I can afford.

Thanks to this fantastic site, I have read a lot about AVCHD artifacts, megabytes per second, and ghosts. However, I haven't heard much about watching 1440x1080 video "stretched" on a 1920x1808 screen. (Or, do you leave black bands on either side of your television when watching?)

Which is worse, artifacts/motion ghosts or stretching?

-Steve

You haven't heard about stretching and black bands because there aren't any. 1440x1080 video fills up full 16:9 screen of an HDTV. There is no motion ghosting either, these are tales spread by people who cannot properly deinterlace. You will see ghosting if you deinterlace with "blend fields" method.

Both are fantastic cameras. All you need to decide whether you want tape, viewfinder and a focus wheel; or memory cards, LCD only, and no fine focus control. If you are casual shooter, then the HF100 is an obvious choice. I own one, I owned the HV30 before (for about a week).

Both are really good camcorders. HF100 is the only consumer AVCHD camcorder in the market so far that can produce comparable results to an HDV camcorder. Jockey is right there is no stretching in 1440 x 1080. I like hv20/30 better than HF100 because it is still slightly better, tapes are very convenient for archiving. Also a failing hard drive may ruin your vacation and cause you hours of video whereas there are no such problems using a tape. Also editing AVCHD video is more processor demanding than HDV since you are dealing with more compression. You will need a powerful PC.

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I want a red cam

I already have Premiere CS3 and a quad-core multimedia PC with plenty of memory and storage.

Since I don't expect to buy a Blue-Ray burner and Plasma TV until the start of next year, I'm not terribly worried about the editing technology curve.

As a part-time photographer, I like the idea of sharing SD cards with my camera equipment. Plus, I always travel with a laptop so I can burn backup copies of each day's photos anyway...so the HF100 felt like a natural fit.

What worries me is the CCinfo review notes the lower bit rate, higher noise and artifacts in AVCHD video. Noise and artifacts aren't acceptable in still photography, I wouldn't want them in my video!

-Steve

They exist in all video at some point or another.

Well, it is real difficult to compare bit rates between DV AVI, HDV and AVCHD. It appears to now be replacing the pixel counting fad which replaced digital zoom...

For me HDV is easier to edit than AVCHD.

Go to vimeo.com and look at what can be done.

Here are some good videos made with the HV20:http://vimeo.com/videos/search:hv20...ormat:thumbnail

here are some goodvideos for the HF10 http://vimeo.com/videos/search:hf10...ormat:thumbnail

the HG10: http://vimeo.com/videos/search:HG10...ormat:thumbnail

and the SR12: http://vimeo.com/videos/search:sr12...ormat:thumbnail

Rich

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As a part-time photographer, you should be more worried by the screwed up white balance of the HF, not by artifacts. The HF produces the cleanest (aside of color balance) and most detailed AVCHD image available today for a consumer camcorder. If you read the review and look at framegrabs you will see that it is even cleaner and sharper than image produced by the HV30, and has no chroma error that the HV30 seems to exhibit, look closely at short horizontal streaks.

I think that HF100 vs HV30 is really a hot topic right now. It's wonderful that AVCHD has come this far. I'm also torn between the two. Jockey (and sorry if this is already posted) what do you use for editing your avchd material? (Software, transcoding and actual computer specs?)

I'm having trouble deciding because I'm tired of tape (EG my last camera had tape jamming problems within the first 7 months) but I think I would really miss the view finder. Any comments jockey on not having a viewfinder ?

Also some basic things (I'm new to learning about AVCHD, but posting these questions as I think it's relevant to this topic):

1) AVCHD transfers to a computer's hard drive quickly?
2) AVCHD then has to be transcoded for editing, which takes at least as much as real time?
3) AVCHD can be burned as files to a regular DVD and then these files will play on Sony Playstation 3?

1 means fast back up. 2 means no advantage when editing (as well as the obvious avchd potential hassles we hear about). 3 means very fast back up AND viewing on your HDTV if you have PS3. Extremely appealing. (Don't really want to use the camera hooked up to the tv everytime we'd like to quickly watch some raw undedited footage).

Thanks for any help with these questions. It's a very interesting time with these choices.

(And Poncho those are fantastic links to really great footage with all the cams).

AMD Phenom 9500 Quad-core but at measly 2.4GHz with 4GB of RAM on Vista. I edit native AVCHD clips in Vegas 8 Pro. I don't do much editing in regards to effects, but even one effect brings preview to a crawl. The video card is a sucky Nvidia 8400, had to upgrade for 8500GT when was ordering the machine.
The LCD has wide angle of view and is bright enough to use it in bright sun, but because of jacked up brightness and contrast you cannot really trust LCD for your picture settings. What's worse, there is no zebra.
A file is a file, all depends on your computer and the cards you use. On my system it takes about one minute per 1 GB.
I don't transcode it, I am not a purist, I don't do this for TV.
Yep. And on most blu-ray players. I use 4GB cards and back them up onto DVDs, this is unmodified footage and I can watch it on my Blu-ray player if I want to. I have to change file names a bit though, because my player requires Blu-ray filenames, it does not understand shortened 8.3 AVCHD names.

Thanks for the info. My only experience has been with tapes. From reading posts I thought AVCHD had to be transcoded (or something!) before it could be used in an editor. Sounds like I got that wrong and you can start editing with the files without further processing?

The PS3 info makes this even more attractive. A lot of times I don't get around to editing (home video) and simply watching the DVD back up of the files would be great. I have PS3 and Pioneer Kuro Elite TV. I think the lack of viewfinder on HF10 might be the biggest thing holding me back at this point. But also when I do edit, I like it to be snappy, and I also assume HF10 doesn't have the option to output as SD for creating projects sharing to "the masses" (non blu ray owners etc).

That brings up a question: Lets say you like to edit HD for yourself and a few friends that have capability to play it back. But you also want to provide copies of the edited project to others as SD (DVD). Do you just simply choose a different option outputting from Vegas / the editor?

How are folks sharing HD content (edited projects)? (Best Buy sells Blu Ray blanks for over $20 each, let alone I don't know what the cost of a Blu Ray Burner is).

There is no "output" per se, all you do is downloading files. Files are recorded in HD only. The Sony SR10/11/12 is capable of recording in HD and SD.
Yep. As long as you are able to get source footage to an editor, generating DVD-video out of it takes pretty much the same time whether the source is HD or SD, because most time is taken for encoding.
As I said above, I back up my HD footage to regular DVDs. Have you followed the link I posted? One 4GB card neatly fits one single-layer DVD, I don't need to create a new compilation, I just back up the whole card. Ok, I rename the files because my older Blu-ray player requires proper Blu-ray file structure. Newer players accept AVCHD file structure and names. The media is standard DVD, but video is HD.