I bought an HF S11 today. I'm a complete noob with camcorders, and found this site and samples from the S10 on Youtube, the most useful in making my buying decision thing. I'm still testing things out, but the video image quality varies a lot in different situations. Close-ups out to 2m are really good, sharp and vibrant, images past this seem soft and not focused sometimes - maybe I'm accidently hitting the focus wheel or something.

I bought the camcorder to make a short film and didn't feel like spending more for a prosumer model, as I'm hoping that the image quality will be acceptable. Stills quality I found surprisingly good; comparable to a 8mp compact digicam. Body construction a bit plasticky, but it's already had a 12 inch drop and seems fine. Battery life seems very short when I compare it to a stills camera, but perhaps that's a bit naive.

Do you change the cameras settings for various situatins or you keep it all at auto?

I've been playing around with all the modes, trying to get the flattest, most noise free image, but fiddling with the modes seems not to do very much in comparison with the scenario I'm filming; vegetation looks natural, but skies always seem to be too cyan - this is to do with dynamic range I think.

Can be seen here:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gaLudvpA6hc

and here

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fj9kscPAGH0

The first video was shot in cinemode so no surprise there. Cinemode has very low contrast/saturation. Actually you get better results to do the opposite with these 2 video's: 30p+cinemode in low-light to get low noise and 60i in daylight for best motion/contrast levels.

The 2nd video is blurred which is strange unless you manually adjusted the shutter time. Or you deinterlaced this not well. What are the exact settings you used for this video? Again with 30p+cinemode you should not see the blurring anymore.

See explanation of cinemode and other settings in my HD faq (most of it still applies to the HF S11 as well):

http://lucienk.spaces.live.com/blog...6635!1108.entry

I love the stabilization. Is it possible for you to test the new nightscene mode? Does it work better than cinemode+30p?

Thanks,
Luc

Thanks for the info. I'm coming from a still photography background - so still trying to get my head round progressive and interlaced. I assumed the low-light function gives blurred images as a kind of noise-reduction feature, but will give your suggestion to shoot in 60i a go. Framerate was 30p, 24Mbps low-light scene mode.

By the way the Pixela OEM software is really terrible. Way too basic, and unintuitive.

Night Scene mode test here:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8g7-IAZ1F14

Thanks!

Little bit difficult to compare cinemode with nightscene here since you shot slightly different scenes but as far as I can tell cinemode retains better colors. For instance I can clearly see blue and green lights on the bridge only in cinemode.

Shooting progressive will give you 1 and 1.5 stop advantage with 30p and 24p compared to 60i. Whether to use 60i for daylight depends on your preference. 60i will give better motion but will be slightly less sharp.

Regarding the cat video with nightscene it seems in indoor light the nightscene mode is too aggressive and reduces framerate too much. Although it's potentially also a deinterlace issue. Not sure. Probably cinemode+30p would have been better in that case.

I reshot a low-light clip indoors at 30p (I think I may have originally shot the cat video at 24p not 30p as I said) and it was much crisper - as you suggested. Thanks.

To be clear, the S11 has "low-light" mode and "night scene mode". The low-light mode basically brightens everything (boosts gain? I'm not sure what the process is) and the downside is clipping in the highlight aeas. I'm glad to see Night Scene seems to aim at giving properly dark skies. Cine mode looks fine to me as well though.

At some point I'll be editing with Adobe Premier and have more control with exporting and formatting options.

Ah ok I see now the 'night' scene always existed and the low-light is a new scene. Doesn't sound like the low-light is a big improvement over cinemode 30p.

Besides cinemode 30p you can also try spotlight in low-light to get pretty black skies (but it also will have more contrast and saturation and therefore little bit less detail).

On the HF-S11 you also can manually adjust the gain. It's a trade-off between noise and brightness same as ISO setting on a camera.

I haven't tried Adobe yet but Vegas is also a great video editing tool and TmpGenc Xpress is one of the best for rendering.

It looks like low-light mode is for the times when you want some kind of footage in dark situations but aren't too fussed about quality.

Will definitely have a look at TmpGenc Xpress, I've heard too many horror stories from people waiting hours for an edit to be rendered only to have the programme crash in the end.

Thanks for the tips!

I don't use Tmpgenc Xpress for larger AVCHD projects. More than 100 AVCHD clips and it will take forever before it even starts rendering. It also misses transition effects. And indeed it can crash or give errors.

Vegas 9 on 64bit Windows is pretty stable for me now. But rendering options are more limited. I typically use Vegas 9 for editing and output to uncompressed Sony YUV avi, then use Tmpgenc Xpress to do the final render (which is very stable with these files).

PS regarding battery life you should buy the larger capacity batteries. Then you get more usable battery life. Also wide-angle I would recommend since it starts at about 42mm I believe (which is kind of zoomed in).

The wide angle lens and large battery are definitely on my to buy list, just have to wait until my wife gets over her strop at me buying the camcorder in the first place...

Full HD test

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=urwArmA4CVw

After using decent conversion software the detail and colours look really great. This sample is .WMV, but a test with MPEG-4 looked even better.

The problem with youtube is that they reencode it to flash and there's no way to get original video. Youtube seems to prefer MP4/AAC.
I'd also checkout vimeo.com which is a bit better in that regard and also will give 1 week link to original video (longer if you have subscription).

Make sure you use 2 pass VBR if you haven't already (max typically +50%). That will give you best quality for a compact video.

24p? Some motion stutter unless that's caused by slow motion filter. 24p is tough to get even motion.