Sony Unleashes the 24p HVR-V1U - and a Glimpse at the Future of Image Control

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Sony Unleashes the 24p HVR-V1U - and a Glimpse at the Future of Image Control
 

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For the umpteenth year in a row, Sony remains the top electronics brand in the world. That’s hardly surprising when you consider that no other gadget manufacturer, with the possible exception of Apple computer, backs up their engineering with so much marketing muscle. With a profile like this, it came as no surprise that Sony pulled out the stops at a press event in Manhattan yesterday to unveil their first prosumer camcorder capable of recording true progressive scan video – in 24p and 30p.

In true Sony fashion, the company also rolled out a new HDV VTR unit, the HVR-1500, and an on-camera HDD recording unit, the HVR-DR60 to provide producers with a “complete” production and post-production solution. Sony’s HDV products make a pretty compelling sell, because the devices together will likely provide DV producers with the most seamless HDV workflow to date. Only a handful of producers have used the new camcorder in production and post, including Sony beta testers John Alpert and Douglas Spotted Eagle who spoke at yesterday’s event. However, Sony’s new integrated HDV product suite, now including a progressive scan camcorder looks to be a surprisingly mature HDV system, even though it was only announced yesterday. It’s also notable that the pro-oriented HVR-V1U and the low-end prosumer HDR-FX7 announced earlier this month are the first 3-CMOS HDV camcorders to hit the market.

Last week, I was able to spend a good amount of hands-on time with the HDR-FX7, which shares imaging and lens specs with the HVR-V1U, and after yesterday’s event, I’m impressed with what Sony has done with CMOS technology. Most significantly for indie producers who are working on a budget and need to squeeze as much performance as possible out of their camcorder investments, CMOS sensors have the potential to provide a much higher degree of in-camera image control than CCD chips. This is a function of the fundamental differences between CCD’s and CMOS sensors. While CCDs pass image information to a camcorder’s processor as a matrix – an aggregate of all the information gathered by the chip – CMOS sensors can gather image information on a pixel by pixel basis, and pass that information to the image processor discretely.

In a conversation about the HVR-V1U last week, Bob Ott, Vice President of Optical and Network Systems for Sony Electronics, summed up the new capabilities of the ClearVID CMOS sensor and EIP (enhanced image processor) chip like this: “Say you're shooting through the archway of a building, and the arch is carved from stone with lots of details, but you’re shooting through to daylight. The EIP chip recognizes this. With a backlight function on most cameras, it will bring out the detail in the arch, but lose the detail in the sky. With the ClearVID CMOS sensor and our new EIP chip, you can see the detail in the arch and maintain the detail in the sky as well.” I found this to be an intriguing concept because the implication of Ott’s description are potentially revolutionary. Here’s why.

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	The writer gets up close and personal with the HVR-V1U

Most indie producers have shot in less than optimal environments, and been forced to shoot to their camcorder’s strengths. I described a situation much like the one above in an earlier Indie Dispatch column about the trials and tribulations (as well as the rewards) of shooting in Africa. While co-producing ZuluHoops, we spend many weeks following the progress of a basketball team in rural South Africa, and much of our time was spent on a basketball court in bright sunlight. Shooting in full sunlight is challenging in its own right, but when your subjects are a group of Zulu high school students with very dark skin, the typical exposure latitude problems are multiplied. Working with two decent camcorders, the Canon XL1S and Panasonic AG-DVX100A, we were forced to make difficult tradeoffs all the time. Exposing properly for our subject’s skin tone left the landscape in the background extremely overexposed. Meanwhile, highlights on the player’s skin were nearly as bright as they would have been on a fair-skinned person.

In the end, we did what any producer would in a similar situation working with prosumer camcorders: we split the difference, and prayed that we’d be able to improve our image in post. By manually controlling our camcorder’s settings, we had the ability to tweak the image matrix, essentially performing a backlight adjustment on our image so that we captured a good deal of information in our subjects’ faces as well as some of the brightly lit background. Theoretically, Sony’s ClearVID CMOS will allow a much higher degree of customization than was available to us using traditional 3-CCD camcorders because information from each pixel is passed on to the EIP chip as independent data. Rather than tweaking the image as a whole, CMOS technology should allow a shooter to tweak parts of the image to pull more information out of the frame – especially in compromised shooting environments. Taken to its logical extreme, CMOS sensors paired with a very intelligent EIP chip could practically Photoshop a video image in camera, retaining all the detail in the faces of African basketball players as well as the sere landscape beyond. That potential really is revolutionary.

We’re not there yet, and I don’t see the HVR-V1U as a “revolutionary” camcorder, but the footage played at the Sony event was certainly impressive. Douglas Spotted Eagle, a Utah-based producer, showed footage he had recently shot with the HVR-V1U for a documentary about skydiving. As shoots go, this one was particularly challenging since he was working with a fast-moving subject who was often backlit against the sky. The HVR-V1U handled exposure extremes very well, with an amazingly low degree of flare and aliasing. When shooting his subject against the sky, the image retained a surprising amount of detail and color depth was good. Even so, it’s hard to draw conclusions about the camcorder without seeing footage from similar prosumer units in similar conditions.

The $4800 HVR-V1U has a huge range of image adjustments that should place its capabilities in the same league as Canon’s $4000 XL A1, slated for release in late October, and the JVC GY-HD110U which comes in at a bit over $6000, but adds a switchable lens. The big question in my mind is how much CMOS technology will play into image controls like black stretch and gamma, and to what degree Sony has calibrated those controls to take advantage of pixel-by-pixel image processing. It’s too early to tell whether CMOS sensors and smart EIP chips are about to usher in a paradigm shift from a “fix it in post” mentality to one where you really can fix it on location – or even “Photoshop it in-camera.”

It is certain that Sony’s announcement of the HVR-V1U bodes well for indies, however, because the camcorder packs a tremendous amount of image control – and progressive scan video recording – into a VX2100-sized package. Sony took longer than other manufacturers to bring a true 24p prosumer camcorder to market, but the company has done it in a big way.