As I have said many times in the past, the HV20/30 are the best consumer cameras in terms of picture quality. Various high-end AVCHD models (HF100, SR11/SR12, SD9) tried to compete this year with the HV series, but they were still lacking that bit of extra quality that you can squeeze out of the HV20/30.

Well, that’s all the past now.

Canon has just announced in Japan two new models, the HF11 and the HG11, which can record in 24mbps AVC, which is the highest bitrate that the AVCHD standard is asking for (higher bitrate is used by some prosumer camcorders, but that’s not part of the official standard).

With the HF11 and HG11 recording at full 1920×1080@24mbps MPEG4-AVC, the HV20/30 with its 1440×1080@25mbps MPEG-2 has no chance in hell to keep the reigns any longer.

Today the tape died, as far as I am concerned, with this fall of the HV20/30.

The HF11 is largely the same camera model as the HF10, but the HG11 was completely reworked compared to the HG10. It has a brand new body, better lens, better usability, 120 GB drive with ability to also record in SD card, 12x zoom instead of 10x. I would have considered the HG11 if it wasn’t for the stupidity of Canon of going down to 37mm filter thread, and not staying with HG10’s 43mm. I have a gazillion accessories for the HV20 that would have work with any 43mm camera. Step-down rings are not good in my case as large and heavy lenses and adapters would break the step-down ring and the camera’s filter thread if I was to mount them in the HG11. It sucks to be stuck in something as trivial as a filter thread.

Update 1: Vimeo has server problems.
Update 2: Video is back up.

A new series on my blog, an extreme color grading example each week.

Original picture by M_Eriksson, licensed under the CC-BY.


After extreme color grading

I wrote in a hurry two months ago about how I shot my first music video, but having already shot my second one, I have done some adjustments into my workflow, which I will share with you below. As I have explained in the past, nearly all the professional music videos are slowed-down, even when they don’t look like they are. And of course you don’t need lots of money to shoot a music video, you can do it on a budget.

1. Acquire the audio CD of the song you want to shoot a video for. Compressed audio formats like MP3, OGG, and AAC won’t work correctly, you will end up with an A/V sync issue eventually, so get the original audio CD. Load the CD into iTunes. Go to “preferences”, “advanced”, and “importing” and change the importing format to WAVE like this:

Then, rip the CD with these settings via iTunes. The ripping will create a .wav file on your iTunes library folder, usually somewhere around here: C:\Documents and Settings\USERNAME\My Documents\My Music\iTunes\iTunes Music\ for Windows, or somewhere on your ~/Music/ folder if you are on a Mac.

2. Install Audacity 1.3x from here. Load Audacity, and then open into that audio editor the .wav file that was ripped earlier via iTunes. Click “Effects” and select “Change speed”. Make the audio’s speed 25% faster like this:

Then, save the audio back as wave (.wav) with a different file name via Audacity.

3. Go back to iTunes. Load the sped up version of the song created by Audacity above to iTunes by adding it to the iTunes music library. Place an empty writable CD-R on your optical drive. Place the sped up song on the “Burn” playlist of iTunes. Burn the song as an audio CD twice. Keep one copy, and give one copy to the band to rehearse the speed up version a few days before the actual shooting.

4. When the shooting day arrives, use a portable audio CD player to get the singer to lipsync, or if you are shooting in the band’s rehearsal space, use their audio CD player which is possibly hooked into big speakers. Shoot your video with that sped up audio. If you are using a Canon camera, use “Cinemode” and “neutral color” to make the video look as desaturated as possible (the duller it looks, the better it color grades in post processing). Do a lot of takes. Shoot in 1080/50i if you use a PAL camera, or in 1080/60i or PF30 if you use an NTSC camera. I suggest that you don’t shoot in 24p, because by the moment you slow-down the video on step #6, you will need all the frames you can get to make it look smooth. Don’t worry, it won’t look like home video because of the slow-down involved. 1080/60i or PF30 are the best ways to shoot (compared to PAL modes or 24p) because the kind of slow down we do here is perfect mathematically: 60i/2=30/25%=24p. What this formula means is this: “After you de-interlace a 60i stream, you get 30p. Because we make that 30p stream 25% slower on step #6, we get a true 24p frame rate across time”. And that’s the frame rate we export at the end of step #8. If you are concerned about 60i having too high of a shutter speed, consider using PF30 (found on all new Canon HD cameras), which is as good as 60i in terms of the “mathematics” involved, but it uses lower shutter speeds. I would be using PF30 for my music video projects if my HV20 supported that. In fact, I hereby declare the Canon HV30 the best consumer HD camera right now to shoot music videos, because of its PF30 shooting mode and overall quality.

5. When the shooting is all done and you are ready to start editing, load the footage on your video editor. I will use Sony Vegas for my tutorial here, but Premiere and FCE/FCP are equally capable. Copy away to the video’s project folder, and place in the audio track, the originally ripped .wav file (not the sped up one, but the normal one you ripped on step #1). On Vegas, it’s very important to have the right project settings before you start editing. Click “File”, then “Project Properties”, and a new dialog will pop up. In there, click the right outmost icon called “Match Media”, the one that looks like a yellow folder. From there, select one of the files you will be editing with, and click “open”. Make sure “none/progressive” is always selected in the “field order” option, and for quality select “Best”. If you shot interlaced (e.g. in 50i or 60i), make sure that for the “de-interlacing method” you select “interpolate”. For NTSC 60i HDV for example, it would look like this (you can safely ignore additional settings not shown in my screenshot but found on Vegas Pro instead of Platinum).

6. Then, place a take of your footage (hint: dragging a clip from the project media tab to the timeline with the right mouse click rather than the left, allows you to place in the track the video across the timeline without its accompanied audio). Right click on the clip event in the timeline, click “properties”, check “disable resample”, and change the “playback rate” to 0.800. This change has effectively made the video slower now, which will sync perfectly to the non-sped up song. Now, left-click on the right side of the video take and drag it to the right to make the video longer. Stop when a little arrow appears, as in the picture below. We need to do that extra step because when we changed the playback speed to the slower 0.800x, Vegas doesn’t automatically resize the video in the timeline to fit the whole take.

7. Add more of your takes on different video tracks and adjust them as in step #6. Then, try to sync up the audio and video on each of these takes. It will take some practice, but it’s possible. On Vegas, if you select a clip in the timeline and then you keep the ALT key pressed while also pressing the numbers 1 or 3 in the enabled numerical keypad, it will move that clip frame by frame left or right in the timeline, so that can help you be more accurate with the audio syncing. You can even “lock” a clip in the timeline so you don’t move it accidentally while editing. Then, edit away. Be aggressive with cutting scenes, as rock videos require quick change of shots. Slow-down even more some shots that don’t require syncing. Color grade aggressively too at the very end.

8. Export in 24p (that is, 23.976 frame rate), progressive field order. I suggest h.264 at 4 mbps for video codec, and AAC 128kbps for audio, with the MP4 container at 1280×720 resolution for HD, or at 874×480 if you shot in widescreen miniDV SD. This exporting also makes the video compatible with AppleTV, Vimeo, XBoX360 and PS3, so it would be easier to enjoy it in on an HDTV.

[9. OPTIONAL, for PAL users only]. If you need to export in 25p for PAL countries instead, you export your 24p video in step 8 using an intermediate lossless codec (e.g. Lagarith, Huffyuv, Cineform etc), and then you re-time it to 25p this way. Yes, this means that even if you leave in a PAL country, you need an NTSC camera to follow this way of shooting music videos.

Now, go help your favorite local rock band!

My friend Dominique arrived with a present (thanks!) for me tonight: the Sony DVP-FX820 portable DVD player. Which of course I will be using as an external video monitor for my HV20 camcorder through its video-in port, rather than as a DVD player.

The screen is vibrant and high-res enough that even through the lowly RCA cable it delivers a very good image quality. This device is a must have for amateur but serious filmmakers, especially if there is a 35mm adapter in the mix, because not only the large 8″ screen helps with focusing, but also because you can rotate it effortlessly (don’t forget that most 35mm adapters record with the image upside down).

However, the most interesting point for me was something else. It was the fact that the Sony monitor has a wider display zone than the HV20’s LCD screen (less overscan). Many times I fell into the trap: I would frame a shot that looks great on screen, but when I see it on my PC’s LCD, there are crap objects outside the safe zone that were not visible in the camera’s LCD, and that ruin my framing! Having a safe zone on the LCD of the camera might have been a useful thing back in the day, but today’s videos that end up only online, or on TVs that have a “dot by dot” mode (like mine), doesn’t make sense to design camera LCDs with these limitations anymore. So I was happy to see that this Sony player can see “more” of the actual shot and helps you frame more accurately (especially horizontally).

You will need a “Triple Phono Plug Coupler” (aka a female-to-female 3-way RCA adapter) to connect your camera to this device. The only other problem this setup has is that it’s bulky, as you will have to dangle along a full DVD drive all the time, so you might need something like this. Battery life is pretty good for what it is (reportedly over 5 hours, I haven’t tested it as of this writing), and the device comes with a car charger.

More discussion and info about it over at HV20.com.

UPDATE 2: The video is done (haven’t slept all night, I was working on it). I am now waiting for final confirmation from the band.

UPDATE: Here’s a really small video sample. Work in progress! It’s 3:40 AM here.

For those who also read my husband’s blog, will already know that yesterday we had a great time shooting a music video clip for the all-female rock band Dolorata. We shot their song “You’ve Gotta Want It“. When we arrived at the band’s rehearsal space I was delighted to see that its exterior was all green! And so I used that fact to color grade it to the extreme and possibly add some chroma key elements too. Here are some ideas I got so far for post-processing:

And this is the first property video I shot. I hope you like it. I had a blast.

There are a lot of new HV users who get information overload on their brains about basic knowledge regarding these cameras. Greek fellow Socrates asked me for a basic tutorial, so here it is. Here’s a non-scientific, as simply-written as possible, explanation article:

HDV 1080i: The HV series are using the HDV mpeg2 format to record (rather than the competing AVCHD mpeg4 format). HDV does not record in full 1080p, it records in 1440×1080 with aspect ratio 1.333 (yes, that’s still widescreen HD, and the HV picture quality makes up for the loss of pixels).

HDMI capture: There is a way to hack around the 1440×1080 recording limitation and record at higher quality at full 1920×1080 (and without mpeg2 visual artifacts), by using the HDMI output port instead of firewire to capture. You basically use a PCI card with an HDMI input port to capture. It costs a few hundred dollars, but it’s simply impractical for normal users to do capture like this as it requires a full PC to be in the shooting site at all times, so please stop dreaming about it.

Aspect ratios: As I said above, the HV series record in aspect ratio 16:9, and pixel aspect ratio 1.3333. This means that the horizontal resolution, which is 1440, when multiplied with 1.3333, it gives us 1920 pixels wide, which is the right HD resolution (and that’s why it still looks widescreen even if M2T format reports a 4:3 pixel count resolution at 1440×1080). More info on aspect ratios here. Aspect ratios are an advanced topic that confuse most users.

M2T: the file extension that the HV series use when capturing from tape when using a non-Apple editor (Apple’s editors tend to re-encode during importing on another format and not edit natively in M2T). M2T is an mpeg2 type format, at 25mbps bitrate. When viewing the video in 1:1 size on a large monitor, some mpeg2 artifacts are visible if looked carefully.

NTSC: The Japan, US and Canada (and a few other countries) TV format. NTSC uses 60 frames per second. The NTSC version of the HV cameras record by default in 60i, meaning 60 interlaced frames per second.

PAL: The rest of the world’s TV format. PAL has quite a few iterations and versions depending on the country, but most of them use 50 frames per second. The PAL version of the HV cameras record by default in 50i, meaning 50 interlaced frames per second. Explanation of what a frame is in the first place, here.

Recording formats: The NTSC HV20 cameras records in 60i (default), PF24 and the HV30 adds also the ability to record in PF30. The PAL HV cameras do 50i (default) and PF25. The PF24 mode (also known as 24p), only available on NTSC HV cameras, is not true 24p, because of compatibility problems with the HDV standard that didn’t have provisions for 24p support. So Canon created a hack to go around the HDV limitation: record in 24p but with pulldown addition (extra frames in a stream that “fools” the camera and the video editor that the video is really 60i and not 24p). To get the true 24p out of this mess and edit as true 24p (otherwise you will get ghosting artifacts), you need to perform a pulldown removal. PF30 and PF25 users should not need to do anything extra other than telling their video editor that these are progressive formats (so on Sony Vegas for example, you use the supplied 1080i HDV template for your region, but you change the field order to read “none/progressive”, and deinterlacing to “none”). As for the default 50i and 60i recording modes these are the most common kinds and all HD-enabled video editors support them. And to make it clear: PAL HV users do NOT need to remove pulldown, only NTSC users who have switched their cameras to record in PF24 need to do that (and only in a few cases, read the link I provided about it).

Interlacing: The HV series record in an interlaced format by default, meaning, that it has some ugly horizontal lines by default. Unless you are burning a DVD or you are writing back to the camera or you are re-saving for archiving purposes back to the same M2T format, you need to de-interlace your video (in other words, to make it progressive). TV-viewed footage doesn’t require to be de-interlaced/progressive, as TVs can actually do de-interlacing on their own, during playback. Check this picture to see how the first image which is interlaced with ugly lines looks like, while the rest two pictures using two de-interlacing methods to make the footage “progressive”. Remember: there is no perfect de-interlacing algorithm (that’s why we have so many of them, each one thinking they can do better than the other one — long story). That’s why in the future always strive for a camera that can also record in true progressive mode, like the HV30 can with its PF30 mode. The PAL HV cameras also record in true progressive at 25p, but the NTSC HV20 does not record in true progressive, as the PF24 (24p) mode has some of its frames in interlaced format (only 18 out of the 24 frames are progressive).

In which mode should you record: Generally speaking, use the defaults: 50i and 60i. These modes while interlaced, they offer the best frame rate, which means smoother movements. So it’s ideal for sports and casual life events that end up on a DVD. But if you are going to export for the web/PC only and not DVDs, or you are doing artistic videos or real movies, then you can start considering 24p, 25p or 30p, which are frame rates that real movies use. However, these modes are not very smooth in motion, so you must be very careful how fast you move your camera.

Firewire: To read the video from the tape and transfer it to your computer, you need to have a “firewire” port (also known as IEEE1394). Most PCs don’t have a Firewire port, so you must make sure that you either have one, or that you can buy a cheap PCI firewire card to add such a port. All Macs have a firewire port. You must also buy a cable, as the HV box doesn’t come with a firewire cable. You can use your video editor to capture the M2T video from the tape, or the freeware HDVSplit, or if you are also need to remove pulldown in case you recorded in PF24, you can use Cineform’s HDLink tool which does both jobs in one step (costs $200 and up, there’s a special offer for HV users in particular as the company is HV-friendly because they recognize the huge hobbyist filmmaking community around these cameras).

Editing speed: You need a minimum of a Pentium 4 class CPU at 2.8 Ghz for PCs, or a dual 1.2 Ghz G4 or above for Macs. 2 GBs of RAM or more (users with 1 GB of RAM will find their operating system swapping sooner or later and things will get really slow). Get a big hard drive (for best performance get two hard drives, one holds the OS, editor and temp files while the other one holds all the captured footage). XP is usually recommended over Vista as many of the utilties used for the freeware pulldown removal method work best with XP. One last thing: don’t confuse a “pentium 4 CPU at 2.8 Ghz” with a “Core2Duo 2.8 Ghz”. You see, even a CoreDuo at 1.6 Ghz will be faster than a Pentium 4 at 3.2 Ghz! So it’s not the Ghz you should be looking at, but the generation of your CPU. Generally speaking, any PC sold 2006 onwards is good enough for HDV editing speed-wise. Just make sure you got enough RAM and a high resolution monitor (over 1280×1024).

Cinemode: When switching the camera to manual mode, you have the ability to use the “cinemode”. Cinemode is a collection of settings that Canon put together (shutter speed, color, gamma, sharpness, aperture etc), to make the look of your video to look more like the expensive film cinema cameras. This mode, especially when used with the “neutral” color setting, is not meant to simply be used as is. It’s meant to be color-graded during editing. The color grading behaves better with the Cinemode/neutral settings ON.

35mm adapters: One interesting way to extend your HV camera (apart from the Canon offered add-on microphones, telephoto and wide-angle lenses), you can also get a 35mm adapter. When using this adapter with photography lenses, you can get a “shallower depth of field” than the HV cameras can provide out of the box. Shallow depth of field means that you can focus to a person or object, and have the background being all blurred out in order to look more “cinematic” or “artistic”. That’s the main difference in the “look” between big Hollywood movies and cheap home video or cheap TV series. Visual example with a stock HV20 here, and with a 35mm adapter and lens here. A 35mm adapter with a lens costs anywhere from $200 (non-vibrating version) to $1300 (vibrating version with achromat addon).

Exporting formats: If you are exporting back to tape, export in the same M2T format that the HV cameras capture (1440×1080, interlaced). If you are exporting for DVD, export with the supplied templates your video editor supplies for DVD. If you are exporting for archiving reasons or to exchange footage with another person, export in a lossless codec that doesn’t lose quality when encoding (also known as “intermediate codecs”). If you are exporting for Vimeo, youtube, 720p, 1080p or other “casual viewing” reason (also known as lossy “delivery codecs”), export in one of these ways (it must be de-interlaced, usually at resolutions 1280×720 or 1920×1080 with pixel aspect ratio 1.000). The difference between intermediate and delivery codecs is explained here. Remember, when using a delivery codec, each time you re-encode the resulted file, you lose quality. So always have as few “jumps” from format to format to ensure best quality as possible. For best results edit directly the M2T format (or Cineform AVI if you removed pulldown for PF24), and after editing export once in a lossless intermediate codec for your archiving reasons, and once in a lossy delivery codec for casual future viewing.

Finally: General advices on how to shoot for best results, here.

Email me directly or IM me if you need more information or explanation.

A few more, nothing better to do this evening. I like the painted look a lot…

Original picture by Darren Hester, licensed under the CC-BY.


After extreme color grading

Original picture by shioshvili, licensed under the CC-BY-SA.


After extreme color grading

Original picture by waterwin, licensed under the CC-BY-SA.


After extreme color grading

Original picture by Petteri Sulonen, licensed under the CC-BY.


After extreme color grading