Hi all-
I recently shot a little demo piece using a prototype of the just announced Sony HDV cameras. This footage is being used as part of our presentation at IBC in Amsterdam but I thought some of you might want to check it out too.
Camera: I can't respond in any sort of depth about the camera details other than to say it really rocks- excellent quality all around, very much in the PD-170 class of fit and finish, image quality and ergonomics. There will be tons of official info released in the next couple of months so I won't go into this any further here.
What I shot: Using a Sony HDV PAL prototype (very low #), I shot flowers and various nature scenes here in Madsion on a bright summer day. All shots are statics (I had only a cheap tripod available at that time so I didn't do any slick crane shots or anything). All footage shot in 1080i PAL, factory settings, no add-on filters. Manual exposure, manual focus at all times. I tried to show off color, contrast, DOF and detail etc.
How I edited: I used an (unreleased*) capture app to pull the footage off the camera. Footage was loaded on the Vegas timeline (shipping version, Vegas 5.0b), project settings 1440x1080, upper field first, PAR 1.333, 25fps, audio 16/48. A few dissolves, an ACID-created music bed, and Vegas' text generator were used. No color correction was used- footage is straight off the camera.
* Capture- right now this camera isn't shipping and even if you got your hands on one, Vegas 5.0b cannot capture HDV natively. This will of course be addressed in a future version of Vegas, details TBA. Cineform will also be updating their capture applet to work with Sony HDV in the future, some other capture alternatives may also possibly surface soon.
Delivery: It'll be awhile before everybody has an HDTV set and it'll also take awhile for disc-based HD players to proliferate but probably everybody reading this has a high rez display sitting a foot from their face right now- your computer screen. HDV is great for computer delivery! So I rendered the project in Vegas 5.0b to Windows Media using the following settings:
Audio: CBR, WMA9, 192/48
Video: CBR, WMV9, 1280x720, 25fps, 5 kfps, smoothness=90, 5Mbs
On my barebones 2.4 Dell this project took ~7 minutes to render (crossfades, title overlay throughout, mask on the very last shot under the title, "best" quality).
How you should play it: Download the file to your computer. Open in Windows Media Player. When the video starts, hit alt-enter and WMP should go to full screen.
This file plays back fine on Sony laptops so it should playback fine on any decent desktop. If you can't play it back in WMP without hiccups, surf on over to Microsoft - there's quite a bit of info on how to test and tweak your system for HD playback.
File location:
The URL: ftp://md-ftp.sonypictures.com
Username/Password (case-sensitive):
dude
Sweetn3ss
------------------------
We can't answer a mountain of further questions about all this right now (and sorry, I can't provide native HDV footage from the Sony cameras) but we look forward to reading your reponses. Have fun-
-Sony Vegas engineering team
I recently shot a little demo piece using a prototype of the just announced Sony HDV cameras. This footage is being used as part of our presentation at IBC in Amsterdam but I thought some of you might want to check it out too.
Camera: I can't respond in any sort of depth about the camera details other than to say it really rocks- excellent quality all around, very much in the PD-170 class of fit and finish, image quality and ergonomics. There will be tons of official info released in the next couple of months so I won't go into this any further here.
What I shot: Using a Sony HDV PAL prototype (very low #), I shot flowers and various nature scenes here in Madsion on a bright summer day. All shots are statics (I had only a cheap tripod available at that time so I didn't do any slick crane shots or anything). All footage shot in 1080i PAL, factory settings, no add-on filters. Manual exposure, manual focus at all times. I tried to show off color, contrast, DOF and detail etc.
How I edited: I used an (unreleased*) capture app to pull the footage off the camera. Footage was loaded on the Vegas timeline (shipping version, Vegas 5.0b), project settings 1440x1080, upper field first, PAR 1.333, 25fps, audio 16/48. A few dissolves, an ACID-created music bed, and Vegas' text generator were used. No color correction was used- footage is straight off the camera.
* Capture- right now this camera isn't shipping and even if you got your hands on one, Vegas 5.0b cannot capture HDV natively. This will of course be addressed in a future version of Vegas, details TBA. Cineform will also be updating their capture applet to work with Sony HDV in the future, some other capture alternatives may also possibly surface soon.
Delivery: It'll be awhile before everybody has an HDTV set and it'll also take awhile for disc-based HD players to proliferate but probably everybody reading this has a high rez display sitting a foot from their face right now- your computer screen. HDV is great for computer delivery! So I rendered the project in Vegas 5.0b to Windows Media using the following settings:
Audio: CBR, WMA9, 192/48
Video: CBR, WMV9, 1280x720, 25fps, 5 kfps, smoothness=90, 5Mbs
On my barebones 2.4 Dell this project took ~7 minutes to render (crossfades, title overlay throughout, mask on the very last shot under the title, "best" quality).
How you should play it: Download the file to your computer. Open in Windows Media Player. When the video starts, hit alt-enter and WMP should go to full screen.
This file plays back fine on Sony laptops so it should playback fine on any decent desktop. If you can't play it back in WMP without hiccups, surf on over to Microsoft - there's quite a bit of info on how to test and tweak your system for HD playback.
File location:
The URL: ftp://md-ftp.sonypictures.com
Username/Password (case-sensitive):
dude
Sweetn3ss
------------------------
We can't answer a mountain of further questions about all this right now (and sorry, I can't provide native HDV footage from the Sony cameras) but we look forward to reading your reponses. Have fun-
-Sony Vegas engineering team