Tape is fading away

[tom hardwick]

I'm pretty sure my next camera won't be tape fed simply because they're fading away pretty fast and because computers are arriving with enough grunt to handle AVCHD.

The one issue which is proving most contentious is the quality versus editablity of AVCHD. I have already had one club member with editing problems and of course asking 'why did you not check with me/anyone else first' is not helpful except to make him feel bad.

This is shameful on the manufacturers' part in my view. AVCHD was introduced at the end of 2007 on a lot of diddy picnic-cams and must have been so easy to sell. I can hear the salesman: 'No tapes, no noise, no moving parts, no crinkle, no dropouts, no hassle', that sort of thing. You want to edit the footage? Whoooh!

And till the 151 arrived the 'better encoding quality of MPEG4' was a purely theoretical thing. If you couldn't effectively edit it, you might just as well be shooting VHS. And diddy-cams never had front ends capable of pushing AVCHD - they simply wanted to get away from tape. Poor public.

A swimmer friend of mine has just had her first baby and what camcorder should she buy? I told her straight - an HC9 or an HV30. Tape driven, and her old Windows XP machine could edit it and make DVDs in moments (Prem Elements for £60). What did she do? Got an SD card diddy-cam because the man in the shop told her tape was dead.

It's certainly dying, but that's more a marketing strategy than a fimmaking one.

tom.

[billyfromConsett]

I've just hummed and harred with choosing which HD format to go with. I went with HDV - and miniDV tapes - because the quality looks good enough for me but also the spec of the camera - Sony Z5 - is about as professional as a chap with my level of hands on could hopefully cope with. It also plays my old tapes (and also has a bolt-on CF media recorder).

Our club have just bought a Canon HV30 for members to use - so people could test for themselves whether hi def is something for them. I don't know any film-makers who have opted for AVCHD yet. I think blu-ray is the only medium they could use for movie distribution if they want to theoretically keep the quality (waiting for upscaling kickback )

Guys with Panny 151's seem to play down the fact that you need computer of real power to edit with full on AVCHD. I'm obviously pleased my computer can edit HDV. I also built a base unit for a friend to edit HDV for about £350.

I can understand Tom how your friend ended up with her choice. If you look at the array of cams that the likes of Currys have, well in their eyes HDV miniDV has already waved goodbye. Infact I wonder if it ever introduced itself.

[Michael Slowe]

Tom is probably right (isn't he always, well nearly always!) but it certainly shouldn't stop any on from buying a tape camera. I have recently gone over to a tapeless workflow and it hasn't been trouble free. I now shoot in full 1920 X 1080i codec and since I have a big Mac G5 and TB's of external storage the editing is easy but there have been problems with my SD DVD's. I experienced a lot of 'edge twitter" on the DVD's (the tape masters were brilliant) and it seems other professional users found the same. They reckon that in top quality mode the Sony EX 1 is too good! They are all going to the menu and turning the 'detail' setting down to -20, the BBC in their internal paper on the camera also suggest this in certain circumstances.

I have yet to experiment with this but with this camera you can also shoot in HDV and for my latest film this is what I did and furthermore went out from the camera to HDV tape! So tape can still play a huge part and will for years yet, if only as an archive because I always do a tape master of any production, even if it is in the DV codec. Upscaling players, both for tape (through an amplifier) or DVD's mean that the final codec is not all that important for us as we will get improved picture quality anyway. It is the broadcasters who are leading the call for HD, don't forget they need it, their compression rates for broadcast material mean that they need a high quality to start with to even match the quality we get on tape!

[ned c]

Members of AMPS who have received their March/April newsletter will have read part 1 of a review of an AVCHD to SDHC card camera to be followed by Part 2 in May/June which addresses editing and finishing. The camera is a Panasonic HDC SD100. a consumer camera sold for $550 here but with a full set of manual features for both image and sound, mic/headphones, 3 x 1/6 CMOS, 10:1 "Leica" lens. An amazingly capable camera. I have shot 1920 x 1080i and get an hour at 17mbps on an 8GB SDHC card that costs around $25, the camera can be set up to shoot at various bit rates including a setting for HDV 1440 x 1080. Although the low light performance leaves something to be desired, hardly surprising given the size and type of chips, Tom, you could shoot a wedding with this camera and deliver stunning results. The huge negative is that it is so small it will fit easily into a jacket pocket with room for a microphone, not good for impressing clients

I have FCP 5 which will not handle AVCHD but also have Final Cut Express 4.01 on an intel iMac and have no problems editing. Let me repeat that; no problems. There is what may be an issue for some editors and that is the AVCHD is converted to Apple Intermediate Codec which increases the file size between 10 and 14 times, but storage is cheap nowadays so this is not really a problem. Loading into the system is a pleasure, SDHC card into a card reader, card reader into a USB port, open FCE Log and Transfer, clips immediately appear for preview and trimming. Select and convert to AIC, edit in the normal way. I can create AVCHD DVDs in Toast and they play in my Blu Ray player to a 52 inch Sony Bravia LCD, results, stunning!!! !

Tape will be with us for while yet but its days are numbered. In my opinion the future is SDHC card recording for n-c film makers who cannot afford P2 or SxS. HDDs and DVD cameras have lots of moving parts so will also vanish fairly soon in my opinion.

But these are just tools, very good tools and capable of stunning results in the right hands, we still need ideas, creativity, story telling.

ned c

ps is it me or has the forum interface shrunk?

[billyfromConsett]

The font and appearence settings seem to have changed a couple of times. The site looked to have bigger things a few weeks ago Ned.

From your experience it would seem that Apple have some marketing to do to clarify their editing pluses to us PC masses...

[tom hardwick]

[quote="ned c"] 3 x 1/6 CMOS, Tom, you could shoot a wedding with this camera and deliver stunning results. The huge negative is that it is so small it will fit easily into a jacket pocket with room for a microphone, not good for impressing clients[/quote]

I beg to differ Ned (Gentleman-speak for 'you're wrong' ) Well ok, not wrong - I could indeed shoot a wedding with this little camera, but think on this. Most people you meet at a wedding have been filmed with a domestic camcorder at some stage in their lives. Of course the clips in all probability have been wobbly, have poor sound, have fluctuating exposure and are 4:3. They will however (in good light) have good colours and be sharp from here to infinity.

I'd use a proper mic on the SD100 you mention, fix it to a lovely Manfrotto fluid head, make sure the OIS was turned on, lock the exposure, shoot in 16:9 and do a proper white balance. So far so good. Now here comes the difficulty - getting differential focus with such very tiny 1"/6 chips is nigh on impossible, and it's this one fact alone that differentiates my wedding footage from all the domesticam footage that these people have seen.

OK, you can get blurry backgrounds with the SD100, but only if you film tiny bits of faces - I want the couple side-by-side with a soft background, and that's difficult with 1"/4 chips, and impossible with 1"/5 or 1"/6th. It's this small dof that changes normal people into film stars, makes them stand out from the background, makes them look pin-sharp and gives them celebrity status. The wedding film is all about making them look special and beautiful in the paparazzi spotlight.

The SD100 has in-built ND filtration yet I want to use maximum aperture - how do I overcome that? And I contend that films have very little to do with pixel count, whether it be 720, 1080 or 576. It's all about content, feel, mood, shape, structure and pace.

And your last point - impressing the clients. It's a good point. Even with a fully loaded Z1, fired up and ready to go I've had guests say how small it is; they expect to see a shoulder mount I suppose.

tom.

[ned c]

Hi Tom, the implication of my statement was that in skilled hands this little consumer camera could deliver stunning reults, not that it is the tool of choice, it may certainly be useful as a discrete second camera for those brave people who shoot weddings. The highest risk documentary producers in the business in my opinion.

Some more info on AVCHD; there is a utility available that converts AVCHD to .wmv files details at www.shedworx.com this suggests that you can edit on windows movie maker using this converter software. My long time co-worker uses Vegas Pro 8 and he has made some tests on his lap top with AVCHD shots I provided with some very interesting results. I really must not preempt the articles in the AMPS Newsletter. join us its inexpensive and you get the Newsletter by e-mail in full color!! www.ampsvideo.com

ned c

[PeterVideo]

Ned is it possible to pay AMPS online to join - PayPal for example.
Best wishes
Peter
Finchley Film Makers
www.finchleycinevideo.co.uk