Lots of recent dicussion on this subject here: HD camera recommendations?

...Jerry

I upgraded from an HV20 to the HF-G10 and plan on retiring my HV40 to one as well. There were some accessories that had to be replaced: battery, remote control, LCD sun shield. I have been running without a W/A adapter so a bit of savings there. AVCHD format puts more of a burden on the editing system so that may require an upgrade or complete replacement.

Since I need smooth pans and zooms, I also upgraded the tripod and got a zoom controller. Next I want to add a LCD monitor. Then multiply X2 because I need two stations.

I have had a couple of paid gigs and while my hf20 has served me very well it appears customers are slightly dissapointed when I pull it out of my bag.

And what do clients say about the final/delivered piece/video?

I shoot with a Panasonic HDC-750, so it too has that 'Amateur/Camcorder' look straight out of the bag. Once I set it up my Professional looking Tripod or Camera Stabilizer, HDMI connect it to a 22" monitor, run my Beachtek out to Lapel/Boom/Stereo mics or mixer, along with my 17" Teleprompter, and Sennheiser Headphones - it looks pretty official.

Since the HD image displayed and captured is superb and the Full Raster 1080 (30p or 60p) final delivery quality rivals anything they've seen... I tend to get repeat business from clients that know the value of ROI.

A Lens Hood & nice looking External Mic may be all you need to make your setup look professional. Mix in a Tripod, Teleprompter, External Monitor, or whatever your flow calls for.

Of course, if you deliver professional results & quality, people usually don't care what you shoot on same as they really don't care what you edit on. So, learn your equipment and deliver professional results no matter what and you'll be known for that. Or, you can be known as one of those forum guys that recite model numbers and specs yet deliver amateur results. Don't flame me, I may be one of those amateur guys.

Your budget's your business though. Don't buy a new camera or spend money to boost your own ego because a customer's main concern is the deliverables. I suggest you stay humble and buy what will truly give you the best ROI whether that be a new camera, accessory, how-to video,or etc. For me, in my current position, there are other things I would personally spend 1.5K on. Naturally, most all of our needs are different.

What do you smart folks recommend on a $1.5K budget. Something that will blow my hf20 away,, not just look cooler.

To give an accurate answer we need to know more than that.

What is important? Different things rate higher on the scale with some folks vs others. There is no one, universal "best" camera for $1500

amendeqw,

I did a little research on the TM900 and am very impressed by it. It seems as though it's major competition is the Canon HF G10, which has better low light performance but less sharpness. But, and this is a huge but, the TM900 is about half the price of the HF G10.

But I am hoping you can provide me with a little more information on the MPEG4 format that the TM900 uses for the 1080/60p recording mode.
Is the "Parrots" source footage you linked in the other thread straight out of the camera or has it been converted using the Panasonic software?
The reason I ask is because Vegas 10 seems to be able to deal with this format no problem. I would rather be able to edit the native files that come out of the camera rather than having to transcode them.

- Mark

Mark,

Glad you asked those questions as I had the same concerns. The footage was beautiful. The source footage, however, played just fine on my 10e/Win7. In the 'preview' window, it would choke on Best-Full but would play just fine on Preview-Full.

Bob

Bob,

A few more observations. I can preview on my 2500k at 4.2GH (no GPU) VP10 at Best/Full full 59.94 frame rate with 30% peak CPU usage.
Nero Showtime 8 and PowerDVD9 both play back the source footage fine showing 59.94fps playback rate.
Rendering in VP10 to MCAVC at 1080p/14Mbps, 29.97fps results in a beautiful image.
I suppose Vegas is just dropping every other frame on the render?

I realize that AVCHD does not support 1080/60p. That is really not an issue if the video which was uploaded is straight from the camera and Vegas can handle it.

What is really confusing is that the Canon cameras record 60i and you can't recover the native progressive stream without jumping through 500 hoops. From what I know they record 30p and then convert the stream to 60i to fit the AVCHD wrapper.

It is SO nice to look at that TM700 video frame-by-frame in Vegas and see no jaggies. It only adds to the TM700's sharper looking video.

- Mark

"Is the "Parrots" source footage you linked in the other thread straight out of the camera or has it been converted using the Panasonic software?"Mark,

It's directly from the camera. My procedure is to record everything to a 32GB SD card, remove it from the TM700. place the SD card in my computer's card reader & merely click-and-drag the clips to my Vegas Captures folder.

btw: I normally edit on my Dell Studio 15 i7 laptop (no GPU acceleration). While I'd like to have more preview speed, I don't see the playability as a major problem (however, most of my projects are 10 minutes or less).


Of course, once you start applying FX, the playback rate will slow down.

"I realize that AVCHD does not support 1080/60p"

Well, AVCHD 2.0 supports1080/60p.

...Jerry

Jerry,

Thanks for the info. I wasn't up to speed on AVCHD 2.0.

I've been a Canon guy forever but I think I'm going to have to move to this camera. It's just too good for the price.

Jeez, I can't help but be blown away by the video quality you can buy for $599 today.
1080p resolution, 60fps, three 1/4" sensors... I don't think we would have been here so quickly.

Jerry,

Two more questions. From what I've been reading some reviewers have some issues with the auto white balance and the auto focus? What is your experience? I am ready to pull the trigger on the TM900...

- Mark

"From what I've been reading some reviewers have some issues with the auto white balance and the auto focus? What is your experience?"Mark,

First the good news - auto focus has not been a problem. As a matter of fact, I think it works rather well.

Next the bad news - my biggest complaint with the TM700 is the slow response of auto white balance & exposure. As a matter of fact, some time ago I made a YouTube video to illustrate this:



There's also the bondi blue problem, where the sky turns an odd color of turquoise. I've seen it show up occasionally, but I can usually fix it in post.

...Jerry

Thanks for posting that example Jerry. Looks like it's a few seconds behind the Canon in a pretty extreme example. It's not so bad. I can definitely live with that.

One final question (I promise). Do you have any problem with macroblocking when you video the ocean or waves in a large body of water? My HF100 with it's 17Mbps max bitrate simply can't handle the ocean. If I free the playback you can clearly see the macroblocking in the water. I'm hoping the 28Mbps bitrate of the TM900 would help there.

- Mark

"One final question (I promise). Do you have any problem with macroblocking when you video the ocean or waves in a large body of water?"Mark,

First, go ahead and ask questions, I'll try to be as objective as I can.

Second, I've never noticed any blocking on water shots. Just went back and looked at the few I've taken and could see any.

...Jerry

Edit: One more thing, here's some good reading Panasonic TM900 Users Thread

I'm curious about how you render 60p to 30p?
If you simply set the framerate to 29.97 in the "Render As" dialog box will Vegas skip every other frame or will it blend two frames into one?
Or if you right-click and use media properties you could set the undersample rate at 0.5 which I would think would definitely instruct Vegas to use every other frame, thus eliminating blurriness that would result from motion when joining two adjacent frames into one.

I'm curious as to what your workflow is? Of course you could also just output to 60p but the bandwidth (compression bit rate) would have to be a little high to get the same picture quality. It wouldn't have to be double since the temporal nature of the AVCHD compression would come into play but I would think the bit rate would have to be somewhere between 25% and 50% higher than if outputting to 30p.

- Mark

"I'm curious about how you render 60p to 30p?Hmmm... you as a good question here.

First, my "normal" workflow is to render to DNxHD 1920x1080 60p and let HandBrake convert the framerate to 30p.

However, when I do render from Vegas, I normally use the Vegas defaults, "Smart Resample" and have noticed no quality issues. The only times I Disable Resample is when I'm going from lower framerate footage to a higher framerate render, or using Velocity Envelopes. However, I've never thought about the reverse.

I'd be interested in hearing others comment.

...Jerry

Is DNxHD the *.mxf format in the "render as" dialog? I've never used it and after doing a quick search learned that it is similar to mjpeg, which if the bit rate is high enough is a good intermediary as you suggest.

Also, a few years ago I wrote a tutorial on how to frameserve from Vegas to Nero Recode. That was back when Vegas had no H.264 codec. I hadn't thought about it might you might be able to frameserve directly to Handbrake. I think it would depend on how much "inspection" of the source file Handbrake needs to do though. http://www.sundancemediagroup.com/articles/frameserve.htm

- Mark

Mark,

First, watch the following Tutorial produced by forum participant, musicvid (with VO by Alistair Lock). Essentially this describes my workflow except that I start with 1080 60p, rather than 1080i.



Next, DNxHD is an Avid Codec which needs to be downloaded separately and appears in the Quicktime encoder templates. Configuration information can be found here: DNxHD Configuration

HandBrake configuration is referenced here: HandBrake Configuration (play the slideshow to get all the configuration parms). btw: You cannot frameserve to HandBrake (bummer).

If this doesn't answer all your questions, fire back!

...Jerry

And here:

Jerry,

You say that you fix the bondi blue problem in post, how would you fix the example you show? Do you just cut it out or do something else in vegas to correct the scene?

TomG

Tom,

First, I rarely see the problem. As a matter of fact, I just did a search of my source footage and couldn't find a really good example.

That said, what I normally do is to use Frédéric Baumann's excellent White Balance FX. Then, if needed, I'll add Sony Levels to fine tune - possibly just adjusting the blue or green channel. In any case, here's an example (the original footage doesn't have as much green/turquoise as I've seen documented).



Now that I've said that, there is a solution that can be used to avoid the problem in the first place. See: Panasonic xx600\700 bondi blue (turquoise) bias issue

"1) Switch to a manual White Balance

...Jerry