New Camera (HMC-150) new problems

[mark-mvs]

Hi gang, so I'm at my wit's end here. Previously I had a canon hd camera with 1 chip. I would edit in prores 422 using final cut pro, then I'd use compressor to convert/compress the video for burning onto blu-ray. Worked fine. (I use Toast to burn the blu-rays.)

Now I'm using the HMC-150, shooting in Cine D mode, everything is the same except now I'm editing in prores LT (because I heard regular prores 422 is overkill for HDV.) The picture looks great when I'm editing. But now when I use compressor (with the exact same settings) to prepare the video for blu-ray and I burn the disc, It looks terrible. Lot's of pixelation as if the resolution is really low. It's that square blocky noise you see with low res video on line. It's not everywhere, it seems to be around the outlines of things and really noticeable in the brighter areas. I have no idea what the problem is.

Does anyone have any idea about what the problem is. I've played around with some of the Blu-ray settings in compressor with no luck at all. I suppose it could be that I need to go back to editing in prores 422 but everything I've read on the subject says that if you're shooting in HDV you're not shooting at a data rate fast enough to need prores and 422 and furthermore that prores LT was designed for HDV cameras.

The strange thing is, it really does look good on the monitor when I'm editing.

Any ideas?

Thanks
Mark

Thanks,
Marka

[DavidPartington]

Hi Mark,  I feel your pain.  We didn't shoot in Cine D mode because we felt it produced too much noise.  As I recall we shot with coring turned up a little and v-detail and knee turned down a little but otherwise it wasn't far of the standard F1 settings.   There was another setting we played with, maybe F3 or F4 and I can't remember the name, but it looked awesome in some scenes.  Maybe called something like "Spark" ?

Like you, we started using ProRes 422 LT because there was no visible difference on my monitor when playing video.  However, we were shooting most of the time in 720p and for 1080p I kept using regular 422.  BTW, the HMC is AVCHD (1920x1080 or 1280x720) with square pixels and has nothing to do with HDV which is a completely different standard (1440x1080) with non square pixels.

When using the HMC, I regularly found that I needed to use noise reduction software, such as Neat Video when ever I increased gain on the camera, and especially if the footage had been underexposed and pulled up in post. I'd end up with 30% to 40% of my video with Neat Video applied.  This added masses of time for rendering but actually made things look reasonable again.  We also ended up shooting almost everything at 720p and if the customer wanted blu-ray I'd drop the final 720p sequence on to a 1080p sequence (nested sequences), apply a global Neat Video filter and exported it.  This smoothed out the noise nicely most of the time, and I found it hard to tell the difference between a 720p source and 1080p source once done.  Remember, the HMC is not a native 1920x1080 chipset, and the native resolution barely exceeds 720p, so shooting in 720p saves you a ton of HDD space and makes rendering a LOT faster, especially if you are delivering on DVD. In the end you don't lose very much (if any visible) quality by shooting 720p all the time.  Something to think about.

If you happen to be in Premiere Pro then adding the unsharp mask after noise reduction brings things out nicely, but I'm not so impressed by the unsharp mask in FCP, even after turning it down to rational numbers.  It can help, but it's just not quite as good an algorithm.  We tried Premiere Pro CS5 after going all DSLR because it claimed to use DSLR footage natively.  Hmmm.....almost..... but not quite good enough to edit checkerboard style like we do, so we're back to FCP (and looking forward to FCP-X coming!).  The last nail in the coffin for CS5 was that we found it randomly deleted some source clips from the HDD and we were unable to recover them (good job we had backups). 

I'm sad to say that it was the increasing need to deliver on Blu-ray that caused me to sell the HMC and go all DSLR because it was so much work to make the HMC footage look 'good', let alone 'great' for HD delivery. I rarely need to use Neat Video any more with the DSLRs, and when I do it's because I managed to grab footage in locations that I wouldn't even have tried with regular video cameras (without lights), e.g. f1.4 @ ISO 3200, which would work out something like 36db on the HMC (which is not even available). 

If it wasn't for trying to shoot in dark places without lights (we're supposed to be discreet right?) and then needing to deliver on Blu-ray, I'd probably still be using the HMCs today.

Good luck with your quest.  If you haven't yet tried Neat Video I whole heatedly recommend downloading the free trial......!

[mark-mvs]

Thank David, your input is very helpful as you have worked with this camera extensively and thanks for getting back to me so quickly! There are so many possible things to try so I think I'll try the process of elimination to figure out what is causing this. Here's what I'll try:
1. Using Neat Video (in case it's simply that Cine D is just making too much noise)
2. Re-rendering the whole thing in prores 422 instead prores LT (in case prores LT just doesn't work well with 1080p footage)
3. I may try the fcp unsharp mask, but like you I think I experimented with it before and didn't like it so much.
Hopefully one (or all of these things) will make the video watchable on Blu-ray

In the future I'll try shooting in Cine V (which creates less noise right off the bat.)
-turn the coring up
-turn the detail and V-detail down
-turn the knee down
... and see what this yields.

I'll keep you posted... I'm stressed because the video is all done but I can't deliver it to the client until this blu-ray look issue is fixed. It looks great on the monitor in FCP. But that doesn't help my client much does it?

Thanks again, David,
Mark

[DavidPartington]

We tried Cine V too

Be careful about turning the knee too far down for wedding videos because in low light situations it can easily crush the blacks.  Better to shoot a little more 'flat' and create your colour profiles in post production instead.   

I don't know what you are using for colour correction / grading (they are different but often seem synonymous on the web), but I love Colorista II because everything is included within the FCP project and the colour correction and vignetting options are so much nicer than the standard 3 way in most NLEs.