Why you love the Canon Hv20 and first NAB 2008 report

I just returned from NAB 2008 (the National Association of Broadcasters convention in Las Vegas - exhaustive coverage to follow) and yanked my Vegas strip footage out from the HDMI port on my HV20 directly to the HDMI port on my Sony Bravia, and God it looks glorious. All uber-techie discussions aside, the fact of the matter is, there is no camera in this price range (especially now that the HV30 has taken over the original price point, so this cam is down in the 5 - $600 range) that can dare compete.

This blog is here to show you how to get your footage to work in the most competitive way in the HD/film-replacement marketplace, and it can be laborious to create deliverables that are required by the film fests etc., but that is a challenge for anyone who wishes to compete - I just wanted to reiterate that this camera looks absolutely beautiful. The colors are full, the 24p looks completely pro, and it just makes whatever you shoot miles beyond SD.

I won't leave you without at least some taste of what I saw at NAB 2008:

• Leader showed Cinelite, an amazing new vectorscope/histogram on its proprietary monitors that superimposes its luma and color information directly on top of the image in real time. No more analyzing blobs and shapes - now you can see directly from the images you are shooting where things are clipping and what your colors are doing.
  
  
• Ikan's new V8000 HD is crisp a new HD hotshoe camera-mountable monitor coming out in Fall 2008. MSRP is $799. Looks sharp as can be and totally rivals similar models from Marshall and other competitors for a significantly lower cost.
  
  
• Iconix, makers of the world's smallest HD cameras showed an HD 2k stereoscopic camera system alongside Digital Ordnance who were demoing their on-set 3D playback system. The entire package can be had for about 300k. 300k gets you into full HD/film-scan level 3D cinematography!
  
  
• Mogulus is a new company offering linear broadband television broadcasting online. If you are a broadcaster who doesn't want to have to deal with the massive overhead of traditional broadcast/carrier models, this company is worth a look. Especially since they have a free model alongside their ad-free pro-model. Ever wanted to run your own TV station? Here is a very real solution.
  
  
• Look into LairdShareHD for an extremely well designed storage/network system for HD. Up to ten editors can work on your HD content at once. At their low price point this is one major contendor for the emerging storage solutions issues arising from the massive data collected by the new gen cameras. Here is the blurb from their site which will explain the system better than I can paraphrase:

"The Fastest Plug & Play Server on the Planet Screaming 8+ Simultaneous & Unique Instances of Professional Hi-Definition (DVCPRO100) or 24 streams of DV25 over your existing Gigabit Ethernet network! No expensive and complicated Fiber Channel networks or special software needed! Utilizes the Latest Green Technology with only 300 watts of Power Consumption at Idle. Built-in redundancy using the latest RAID-6 technology to safeguard storage systems from data loss due to hard disk drive failure. Multi-Year Service Programs available."

• And just for fun, if you have ever wanted to get into the world of digital animation, perhaps my favorite find at this year's show was the latest version of Animation Master. Although it is marketed as a simplified tool for creating your own spline-based 2 and 3D animation, it is a robust and extremely rich software environment with some very unique features that can get you up and going in no time. I will cover Animation Master in greater depth in another article, but it comes with my highest recommendation. The only thing that boggles my mind is that the software is now 21 years old and I have only recently heard about it. Visit their site to see how great the output can be.

Getting into true 24p from Hv20 footage

The most important thing to know about HDV and the Canon HV20 HD camcorder to get your money's worth is that the 24p footage is wrapped in a 60i wrapper. It is possible to get true HD progressive 24 frame per second footage out of your hv20 but the "how" is the focus of this article.

Ultimately you have to ask yourself - what is the final destination for your footage? Sure we would all like to believe that our video of our kids wading in the Mr. Turtle pool will end up at Sundance one day, but is it really something you are going to follow through?

Have you considered that creating a DI or "digital intermediate" may actual increase the size of your captured files by up to 150% +? have you budgeted for disc storage, backup storage and asset management of your captured and ideally, logged material?

Let's assume it is.

Essentially you need to remove the pulldown introduced by the camera - this means you want to get it from 29.97 - which is an interlaced NTSC playback format to true progressive 24 fps. As usual at this site, I will not go into details about what drop vs. non-drop is or why we feel that 24fps looks aesthetically more pleasing than 30fps. There is a way to discover all of that *cough* Googlewikipediahv20forums.cometc. *cough*

There are various methods for removing pulldown, that is, mathematically selecting frames to remove so as to get 24 frames per second from 30 frames per second, with varying results. On the PC there is an absolutely free method for doing this that requires a half hour of downloads and configuration, but once it is set up can reuse the chain without having to repeat all the setup steps. It works wonderfully, creates enormous files, much larger than what you begin with, and of all the methods I have seen, including Cineform's pulldown removal on capture and TMPGEnc 4.0 XPress, it looks the sharpest and is most likely to play with Vegas, Premiere and the other NLE's without difficulty. The output WILL look weird however, if you try to play it back in Windows Media Player because it is an intermediate format, using Lagarith Lossless compression which is essentially a lossless codec into AVI files. I should also mention Blackmagic Design's Intensity Pro card which allows you to capture (and monitor back out) directly through its full-size HDMI port. A beautiful and elegant solution, but it takes up one of your PCI-e card slots and again, I have heard varying reports in terms of happiness with the process. Incidentally, for $25 I bought a DVI to HDMI cable from a reseller on Amazon, connected it to the second port of my Nvidia 8800 GTS and am happy as can be (granted the processing is not done on a third-party card's processors, so you take a small hit there).

The truth is, they are all good solutions and you may have a different experience using any of them with your setup. I recommend trying them all out before deciding what workflow you like best.

TMPGEnc 4.0 XPress is actually a terrific program, though I sometimes found it a little strange to navigate. It is very simple however, very versatile, allows batch processing and spits out very good looking video. A-B'ed on a 42" Sony Bravia 1080P monitor, however, TMPENGC's output of Lagarith AVI using the same settings as the Eugenia/HV20Forums process outlined above tended to be a little less deep in the blacks, and ever so slightly softer at the edges. The resultant files, however were about the same size as the files I fed it, unlike the free process which as I have mentioned ad nauseum spits out much larger files.

Being the quality freak that I am, and also a sucker for (relative) simplicity, I stuck with the Free Eugenia method. I have tried out Cineform HD a few times - this software solution sounds amazing on paper - realtime pulldown removal from your HDV camera during capture through a firewire cable! While I did get it going successfully a pair of times, the program crashed just as often. For the record, I am using it in windows Vista. Not because I am stupid, but because it should damn well work in Vista if its gunna.

So Mr. HD Emanuel Pereira came down to my studio here in Hollywood and took a look at the HV20 cam, its native output spit out of the HDMI port directly into the SOny Bravia's HDMi port. we determined that the grayishness of the dark areas was actually not the fault of the Canon in low-light, but rather the tendency for HD LCD's to suck at true black let alone ambiguous black areas.

With a huge sigh of relief, we proceeded to figure out what might be the best way to capture to the PC and check out some vectorscopes and histograms and what have you. This was not as straightforward as you might think. Vegas, my long-time favorite, actually may have the WORST capture solution of them all. I don't know why. I love the Sonic Foundry-cum-Sony products, but the capture tool in Vegas just has a mind of its own and it blows.

We tried Windows Movie Maker. Fine, but not for making my movie.

Premiere Pro CS3 has the most pro solution of the three (discounting AVID HD which does not play at all with Windows Vista). I don't love Premiere, but it's getting better and the capture tool allows you to log, batch capture and other stuff that would probably seem most familiar to AVID, Final Cut and Mac users in general, as well as pro editors' assistants (who usually do all the capture and logging).

What made Premier really happy for me was that Adobe released some Canon HV20-specific project templates for 24p in the cam's native resolution. This tells me two things:

1. the 1440x1080 30P or 24P templates that were already built into Premiere WERE A PAIN to reconcile with what I was capturing.

2. Adobe respects the HV20 enough to have bothered.

Anyway, this site is about the Canon HV20 and what it can do and the bottom line is, having captured footage in, removed pulldown and previewed the resultant full HD 1920x1080 24p footage, Mr. Pereira was duly impressed and quite certain that the camera could serve to shoot a proper HD film that can safely be transferred to film for theatrical presentation.

I return now to my initial challenge to you, the reader: you can rest assured that the Canon HV20 can provide you with full pro material, but you have to then decide when and why you might want to create it. I read an article in the Hollywood reporter concerning the age of the Tapeless Post Facility, and quite frankly there is a gap between massive storage and archival solutions available and the sheer amount of data that a Thomson Viper or Red camera can spit out. Sure, you can capture it - but can you afford to deal with it?

Here is a another challenge - first try using your HV20 or comparable HDV cam to create a three minute video so you can see what kind of data and overhead you are dealing with, and then post it to YouTube so that it looks just as pristine. It is a lot harder than you think. YouTube has recently raised it upload quote per file from 100mb to 1gig, and they are definitely preparing to unveil their new widescreen aspect ratio for content, but even so, figuring out the very best way to render our your HD material so that it maintains all its beauty is a tough racket. There is, in my experience no sure-fire magic bullet solution for this. There are copious sites and guides that promise them, but I have tried them all with varying results. Things changed based on what you are showcasing, how light or dark it is, how well it is shot and lit, how much movement there is, and very important, how good it SOUNDS. Play around with that experiment first and then you are better prepared to tackle managing a true HD project and deciding whether or not you really want to spend your summer cutting that short of your kids by the pool for the next Sundance submissions deadline.

On a final note, I will be at the NAB conference in Vegas this week and will be checking in with all of the above companies to ask them questions about workflow, optimization, and what is on the horizon for them. I look forward to sharing my discoveries with you.

Thanks for reading, and reddit this article if you found it useful.

HV20 Experiment 1: Film Setup, No Gain, No Cell Phone Trick

Today I ran an experiment to push the HV20 to give me optimal film settings with the narrowest depth of field without a lens adapter. In other words, I wanted to see what I could get using just the camera itself.

After reading an excellent post by the author (handle: Aramis) of the Canon Elura guide (elurauser.com) over at the hv20 boards I decided to forego Barry Green's "cell phone trick" (with all respect intact) and thus CineMode, and instead lock the shutter speed at 1/48th using TVMode instead.

Here is the reasoning Aramis provides:

“I find Barry's article unnecessary complex and convoluted. I believe that there is no reason of pointing to light source. What for? Need to read current aperture? Press the photo button. Need to set aperture? Select Tv mode, choose shutter speed, then lock exposure and adjust to your liking, checking current aperture with photo button. Not enough EV range? Well, in this case you can point to a dark area or, conversely, to a bright light source just to set a different baseline for built-in light meter, then lock exposure. Then you can adjust exposure and the range will be different, but what is the point of shifting the range, say, to smaller apertures if you shoot in low light? You won't see anything.”

I locked the exposure to give me as open an iris as possible without adding electronic gain - in this case - 2.4 (-8 EXP). Anything above that setting showed a redundant 2.4 on the display and thus I assumed I was moving into digital gain territory (ie. -9 gave me 2.6, -8 gave me 2.4, -7 and above also showed 2.4). I based this on a diagram which displays that the largest aperture at full zoom for HV20 is is f/3.0. (Fig. 1.1)

Taking this into consideration, I decided to attempt an optical zoom that was at neither extreme. Most discussions thus far have concerning locking the exposure and shutter involve the camera being zoom all the way in or all the way out. A little restrictive by any definition.

(Fig. 1.1) Demonstrating aperture/gain relationship of the HV20 where the red area is the electronic gain zone
Copyright © 2007 elurauser.com

By playing with the optical zoom to compress the foreground and background I was able to blur the background more while keeping the foreground in sharp focus and vice versa; using nothing more than the fidgety little focus ring, I got some excellent rack focus going between the distant foreground and background. The results are terrific. I got a very narrow depth of field, 1/48th shutter, a nice wide open iris at 2.4 and no electronic gain (ie.as little noise as possible).

The scene is lit with various "practicals"; (an upright halogen light from K-Mart, 40-watt energy saver bulb in a glass brick from IKEA, and, most importantly, a 500W Lowel V Light bouncing off the ceiling. I also used a gold reflector to balance out the dark side of my face. Without enough light this shot would have been impossible.

The experiment proved that I can control my shutter, exposure and focus, achieving a very narrow depth of field with just a few simple steps and nothing more than the Canon HV20 and in this case the Canon wide angle lens attached (and lots of light!)

Shutter 1/48th (TVMode 48)
Exp: 2.4 (-9 gain, exp lock)
Manual Focus
HD 24p

Pics and vi(m)deo coming soon!

Can the HV20 Shoot For (feature) Film?

In considering the HV20 workflow and its viability as a viable platform for shooting for film (by this I mean both film transfers and feature-length films), I spoke with my longtime friend Emanuel Pereira who handles post supervision for Brightlight Pictures based in Vancouver. An early adopter of HDTV, he spent much of the late 1990’s working in Los Angeles in the production of high-definition content for ABC and Digital Intermediate development with Samuel Goldwyn and Technicolor.

I expressed my enthusiasm for the versatility of the handheld Canon HV20 along with my intent to shoot a feature length film, and checked in with him concerning what to look out for to ensure that I could conform to spec for outputting product that could at least compete in the marketplace. Here was his response:

“If you're wanting to mimic the cinematic look of film, beyond the lenses are granular control of shutter speed (for that Saving Private Ryan stop motion look at the beginning also seen in Hard Candy action sequences) and aperture for depth of field, (although those [35mm lens] adapters you were raving about before seemed to afford you crazy depth of field):

“Film has a logarithmic curve from black to white which provides detailed steps in those extremes. I read that this camera has a cine mode for light/color but I wonder if it's mimicking a film stock or what it's really doing, and can you hack the camera to reproduce a film logarithmic curve?

“Do you have the (Blackmagic) Intensity (Pro card) or how are you getting footage into the comp? (In fact I am just using a Firewire cable - ed).

“Doing 3:2 pulldown removal via software on dailies for something feature length is a grueling chore and only necessary if you need to film out or go 24 video somewhere down the line. Otherwise, outside of a vfx comp you can work 59.94 easily if you just want the 24 film look and constrain to North America broadcast.

“The current industry standard on a film release from an HD DI is a bare minimum 4:4:4 color space via HDCam SR format. I'm sure others are attempting to fall short of that, however Film Finances wouldn't endorse without distributors' waiver and Tortilla Soup and Blair Witch are the exception not the norm.

“So I guess the assumption is this camera should work okay for broadcast or a no budget feature if you're careful and time is at leisure, but would become tedious if you have hours of dailies coming in every day on a standard 24 workflow and a schedule to adhere to.
“

I then read the HV20 thread at indieclub.com:

“James:

But isn't it true that all 24p cameras (or at least all pro-sumer models) do a 3:2 pulldown in camera then output an NTSC (or PAL) standard video which is 60i (or 50i)? I am under the impression that if you want to edit 24p then you have to record with a camera that shoots 24pA then use editing software that can extract the original 24p frames.

JDWalley

Posted: 10/11/2007 9:08:21 AM

That's correct -- the HV20, like the DVX100, outputs 60i. The difference is that, with the DVX, you get the option of 24pA which is a lot easier for the NLE's capture module to parse and turn into a pure 24p clip. The Canon has its own variant, which is not as easy to convert, and doesn't have flags in the stream to indicate which are the progressive frames. Therefore, only a few NLEs (the only one I know for sure is FCP5+) will be able to make the conversion in-capture; for everyone else, you have to use one or more utilities to process all your clips after capturing them.

The other difference is that you need to be able to set up the NLE for an HDV 1080/24p project. To this date, only Vegas on the PC side seems to have this capability -- all of Premiere's presets appear to be for interlaced HDV. Now, you can set up these project options manually, but you might find yourself having to use a different codec than HDV's variant of MPEG-2. How that will affect your final product, and outputting it to one device or another, remains to be seen. FWIW, most of those on the HV20 forums seem to use Vegas. Too bad I find it a massive pain in the posterior...”

Mr. Pereira’s reply to the above:

“Avid has been able to edit 24p natively since inception. However the bridge from Hv20 to Avid to do 3:2 pulldown removal during capture is unknown to me, outside of software conversion.”

I have since purchased a copy of Cineform’s Neo HD converter that does reverse 3:2 pulldown while capturing along with Red Giant’s Instant HD (MSRP US$99)for up-scaling my old SD footage, and perhaps even the Hv20’s output (from 1440x1080 to 1920x1080 should the need arise to do a transfer to film.) Both are very effective in their respective ways. I look forward to uploading some samples soon. Incidentally, Red Giant’s Magic Bullet also performs reverse pulldown, and de-artifacting to spit out very nice looking true 24p. (Another option is Digital Anarchy’s Resizer. MSRP US$149)

The above image shows the relative sizes of HD/SD so you can get some perspective on where you may be starting and where you may be going when upscaling.

Production tips with the HV20:

In order for the HV20 to better reproduce the true look of film I ensure that I always use the Barry Green “cell phone trick” to lock the camera’s shutter speed at 1/48 while shooting 24P with Cinemode on. I now know that this almost always produces a very dark image that requires additional lighting, even in daylight! And I will never trust my HV20 to loiter around in that underexposure area because it is simply awful with low light.

Having said all this – the resultant output is pure cinema! Now, short of outputting 1920x1080p HD or even 2K for eventual film transfer as a digital intermediate, I know that I can create cinematic footage that will look fantastic for HD broadcast and conform to spec, which is all I wanted – the confidence that all the hard work I put into shooting isn’t going to invariably land me in a compromise.

Additionally, I am in the process of converting my 45 minute sci-fi pilot shot in SD to 24fps progressive so I can further upscale it with Instant HD to HDTV (1280x720). I will let you know how it goes!

The Cult of HV20

I first learned about the Canon HV20 HDV camcorder while flipping through WIRED magazine's 2007 gear roundup and saw it listed as their top pick for the new breed of hand-held High-Definition camcorders. I am not an impulse buyer - I am the type that deliberates for weeks even months over my purchases, and then, in a big flurry I go out and drop my hard earned cash on the next wave of gear I will use to unleash my creations. Because of this, I have pre-existing budgets for how much each component of my setup can cost. In the department of motion picture cameras, it was a toss up - did I go for the new mid-level priced cameras that afforded me the immediate opportunity of using interchangeable lenses (in the ballpark of three to ten thousand dollars) and go hungry for half a year while I figured out how to make my money back? Or did I go to the low end of the price scale, leave some money for all the auxiliaries (newer, faster computer, tripods, filters, carrying cases, maybe even lighting) and be ready to rock; a one-man videographic monster?

I have learned from experience that it does not behoove one to skimp on the basics - because you will spend a lot more over the long haul upgrading and wishing you could do more - better to get it right the first time and get years of use and learning out of your equipment than get caught on the "if only I could..." trail.

But this new Canon XIVIA series seemed to be covering all the bases - it was shooting at 1080p at 24fps! Critics were lauding the color and sharpness of the resulting images! It had an auxilliary microphone input and HDMI out! It even had a hot-shoe for further expansion - all things I was looking for in my new video camera and yet it cost only US$800???

For that price I knew I could afford to dive in and take my chances. The specs were just too good and it was crossing all the requirements off my list. I decided on the HV20 rather than the solid state or DVD recording models because I already had dozens of crates full of standard def MiniDV tapes and I wanted the backward compatibility. Furthermore, having endured the DAT tape era, I recognized the value and cost-effectiveness of removable storage media. Sure hard drive storage prices are at an all time low, but somehow I find a cassette is still a safer storage medium over the course of time, than a hard drive. Besides, when I am filming active volcanoes in Ecuador, who know when I will be able to offload 200 gigs of video to a computer (should my laptop fail etc) - I would rather just pop in a new tape and keep shooting. That was my reasoning, anyway.

Little did I know that all of these considerations, and the choice I ultimately made to buy the HV20 would land me in the sweet spot of a phenomenon that led to the Canon HV20 becoming what I call the new Pixelvision.

For the uninitiated - the PXL2000, or Pixelvision as it came to be known was a limited run "toy" camera made by Fisher Price in the 1980's that allowed recording of something like video, something like film to ordinary audio cassettes! It followed the exact same rationale that I had for purchasing my HV20 - the storage medium was cheap and easily accessible. When filmmakers got wind of this - they saw that not only had Fisher Price brought video-making to the masses, but they had somehow managed to engineer a completely new art form - Pixelvision film-making. Sure, it looked like grainy security cam footage - but the price couldn't be beat and people have stories to tell. This led to a surge of indie Pixelvision film festivals that persist to this day.

Fisher-Price PXL2000

Why is the HV20 similar? It hardly looks like grainy security cam footage - in fact it looks absolutely gorgeous! It is similar in that it affords all the quality of a much higher end option, but it is limited by its Prosumer point and shoot short-cutting; although it has a great deal of manual control, the control of the camera is not set up like a higher end professional camera. That meant it had to be "hacked" - tricks and workarounds had to be developed to force the camera to serve its master the same way a more versatile pro camera might.

Out of this grew the cult of the HV20. All over the web you can find busy chat forums discussing ways to build home-made focus dials, 35mm lens adapters, light and microphone mounts, and even how to use a cell phone to trick the camera into behaving the way a much higher end camera might and surrender control of the aperture and shutter speed to do its master's bidding. Due to the limitations of the HDV format and the sort o compression that takes place in a smaller cheaper camera such as this, there are also extensive discussions on how to remove the inherent 3:2 pulldown and render out true 1080 24P 4:2:2 colorspace video. Some users have even developed elaborate programming scripts that call upon a wide variety of freely available video applications to create a holistic workflow for automating this entire process. Such is the enthusiasm for making true high definition, film-like product, and at the center of this maelstrom is the HV20.

The Letus35 Mini lens adapter attached to the HV20

Phew. I am so happy that I somehow found my way to the right camera at the right time. I have since purchased the Rode shotgun mic that was designed by one of the foremost developers of high end microphones especially for cameras of this size. With it, I was able to purchase a matching boom pole and audio extension cable - all designed to serve the HV20 format. I have purchased the Wide-Converter WD-H43 from Canon that fits the 43mm thread, and then gone on to discover a world of other 43mm lens filters that will increase my options for shooting under a wide variety of lighting scenarios. I have extensively researched the emerging plethora of 35mm lens adapters that feature very high end anachromatic lenses so that I can shoot with 35mmprime lenses from any of the major manufacturers out there: Nikon, Pentax, Canon, Olympus, Fuji and so on. What's more, the companies building these lens adapters, which ultimately are there to allow more control over the depth of field with which I am shooting, are also shipping rod support systems and tripod mounts that allow me to transform my humble handheld "consumer" camcorder into a viable competitor to a 16mm Arriflex or even better.

And the stuff works. Just take a look at the footage streaming out all over the web.

This site is here for myself - so that I can catalog my research and experiments with this new camera system, and to attract those doing the same - in the hopes we can all learn from one another and start making those films, and telling those stories that we always dreamed of.

Welcome to the HV20 Experiments.

Keram