[Phil Hinton]

With plans to produce more reports, news, reviews and interviews from the world of home cinema and consumer electronics, AVForums needs serious equipment for recording on-location video.

For some time now we have been using Sennheiser radio microphones to produce professional quality audio in our videos. And now, in time for the Cedia Expo starting next week, we plan to further improve our production quality with the addition of the Panasonic AG-HVX201AE professional camcorder.

Using the broadcast DVCPRO HD standard and capturing video to P2 memory cards, we can now produce higher quality final video productions for our viewers.

You can view the latest videos by heading over to www.avforums.tv and watch out for the first part of our CEDIA Expo coverage coming soon.

[Shockabuku]

Somebody's got a new toy to play with . Does this mean we'll get higher resolution download versions of future Avforums.tv productions?

[David Mackenzie]

Fun stuff, I'm surprised you've invested in an HD standard for online video though. Can't hurt of course! What have you been using up until now?

[Flimber]

Originally Posted by Lyris

Fun stuff, I'm surprised you've invested in an HD standard for online video though. Can't hurt of course! What have you been using up until now?

1. Who says it's always going be 'just' online ?

2. Howabout some AVForums-produced HD-DVD/Blu-Rays for members to buy ?

[David Mackenzie]

1. Who says it's always goiong be 'just' online ?

Oooh? Do tell!

[Stuart Wright]

Originally Posted by Shockabuku

Does this mean we'll get higher resolution download versions of future Avforums.tv productions?

Yes.

Originally Posted by Lyris

What have you been using up until now?

An HD consumer camcorder. Nice and light and served it's purpose to prove that a) we can make videos and b) people want to see them

Originally Posted by Flimber

2. Howabout some AVForums-produced HD-DVD/Blu-Rays for members to buy ?

If the content justifies a release on Blu-ray we will certainly do that. It's something we have already discussed.

I'm very pleased with the way the videos have come together and we're committed to producing more quality independent editorial on video and this camcorder will bring the picture element up to the existing high quality of the audio element provided by our Sennheiser kit.

There is a lot of peripheral equipment to add such as a tripod, spare batteries and a decent bag.
We decided on this Petrol PCBP-3N Cocoon back pack from TV Cases which will carry the laptop and tripod as well.

Phil is going to get super fit lugging all this kit round the shows!

[Phil Hinton]

Originally Posted by Lyris

Fun stuff, I'm surprised you've invested in an HD standard for online video though. Can't hurt of course! What have you been using up until now?

David, online video is changing fast with HD now being introduced by quite a few sites. We have to keep up and plan for the future, so it made sense from that point of view, as well as an improved work flow for me in post. Our last camera was the multi award winning Canon HV20 HDV camcorder, good for what it does and to get us up and running, but a few things were a pain. Interviews were conducted with the camera 5 feet back just because it had a poor lens, and workflow only started once you had played back hours of HDV tape to be captured. Sound was also a challenge with only one input and no means to monitor live.

In terms of HD online video we have done a couple of recent experiments and you can see the results Here.
That site is like youtube, but it allows HD uploads and playback. Before long others will follow, we just have to find the solution to suit us.
The camera does all the formats, from 576i/p right up to 1080/25, allows for various frame rates, has an improved lens system (which is great for getting people being interviewed close), and the work flow is completely digital.

The downside to using all this great kit to produce our content and future programs like Grand AV Designs, it that it all weighs a ton! Fit, I will be!
Cheers!

[David Mackenzie]

Glad to hear it'll be presented in HD. I'm familiar with Vimeo actually because I've been looking at a ton of sample clips shot with the Canon HV20 on that very site. Incidentally, I just got a ridiculously good deal on the HV30 from America.

It looks like you did a great job working around any sound issues. After seeing a whole bunch of other student films recently, I'm reminded of how lethal that can be!

[ROne]

We've been using the HVX200 for two years with P2 editing based around Edius Broadcast - in our production company.

Absolutely superb camera and edit facility. We've done mobile edits straight from the cards for very fast turnaround. Extremely reliable - have got 8xP2 cards.

If you want any advice or information I am a dab hand with the HVX and matters relating to it.

You just need to be extra careful on that focusing and need a tad more light - Good luck, great purchase.

[Phil Hinton]

Originally Posted by ROne

We've been using the HVX200 for two years with P2 editing based around Edius Broadcast - in our production company.

Absolutely superb camera and edit facility. We've done mobile edits straight from the cards for very fast turnaround. Extremely reliable - have got 8xP2 cards.

If you want any advice or information I am a dab hand with the HVX and matters relating to it.

You just need to be extra careful on that focusing and need a tad more light - Good luck, great purchase.

Thanks for the comments, I may very well call on that offer of help at some point. We have two 32gb cards and I will be taking a Sony Vaio laptop and an external 750gb HDD with me on shoots. I am just trying to get my head around what the workload and workflow will be like with this approach. When filming at something like CEDIA, I will probably get about 13 hours of footage, so I need to be able to dumb the cards contents on the fly, formatting and then re-using the cards.
I also use Sony Vegas Pro 8 as our NLE and have installed Raylight which seems to be working well converting the MXF files to the timeline.
I'm glad I didn't get that used to our old system otherwise the pain I am feeling at the moment in learning a brand new platform may have been too much.
I am very happy with the new camera and everyone I have spoken to who has used one, or uses it, all have nothing but praise so that must be a good sign that we have the best tools available.

[kopchoir]

wow,seems like this is taking off even more lets hope you dont get head hunted anytime soon phil, the gadget show may be calling for you

Must of cost a fair few quid that piece of kit as well, im sure the members here are appreciative of all the videos you are producing at the moment maybe we as members could of helped in some sort of way with regards to the cost of it as it is for all our benefit.
I like flimber`s idea of purchasing content on disk i for one would be happy to purchase these

[ROne]

Originally Posted by Phil Hinton

Thanks for the comments, I may very well call on that offer of help at some point. We have two 32gb cards and I will be taking a Sony Vaio laptop and an external 750gb HDD with me on shoots. I am just trying to get my head around what the workload and workflow will be like with this approach. When filming at something like CEDIA, I will probably get about 13 hours of footage, so I need to be able to dumb the cards contents on the fly, formatting and then re-using the cards.
I also use Sony Vegas Pro 8 as our NLE and have installed Raylight which seems to be working well converting the MXF files to the timeline.
I'm glad I didn't get that used to our old system otherwise the pain I am feeling at the moment in learning a brand new platform may have been too much.
I am very happy with the new camera and everyone I have spoken to who has used one, or uses it, all have nothing but praise so that must be a good sign that we have the best tools available.

Raylight integration is good. We used raylight originally then moved to Edius.

Workflow: we tend to delete stuff on the fly, as it saves space and creates a tidier edit. Just be sure you don't want the shot!

When we shoot hidef we generally go for 720p/25 - 1080p only buys you a bit of extra (real-world) resolution, and is probably the best choice for a film blow up.

The menus appear daunting at first with all those settings, but keep it simple to start with and the usual teccy learning curves apply.

Barry Green's book on the HVX is fantastic and essential purchase.

The camera's standard shooting mode even in DV based P2 is fantastic, and makes up 70% of our ouput (the rest being 720p and progressive.)

My last job was in Ukraine - and flying back I edited a 5 minute programme on the flight and put it to DVD before we touched down!

DVXuser.com is the best place for info but you've probably seen it already.

Have fun!

[Phil Hinton]

ROne,

I have decided to shoot CEDIA footage in the 720/25pn mode as a tester, I did some test footage in 1080 and you are right, for online 720HD is more than enough.
Menus are confusing and the fact the manual is PDF based is annoying as I will have to print off what I might need and take with me for the first few weeks.

I look forward to having some fun!

[kingfats]

Originally Posted by Phil Hinton

With plans to produce more reports, news, reviews and interviews from the world of home cinema and consumer electronics, AVForums needs serious equipment for recording on-location video.

For some time now we have been using Sennheiser radio microphones to produce professional quality audio in our videos. And now, in time for the Cedia Expo starting next week, we plan to further improve our production quality with the addition of the Panasonic AG-HVX201AE professional camcorder.

Using the broadcast DVCPRO HD standard and capturing video to P2 memory cards, we can now produce higher quality final video productions for our viewers.

You can view the latest videos by heading over to www.avforums.tv and watch out for the first part of our CEDIA Expo coverage coming soon.

Great.
Love the video's adds a nice touch to the forum.

[David Mackenzie]

I also use Sony Vegas Pro 8 as our NLE and have installed Raylight which seems to be working well converting the MXF files to the timeline.

I'm a recent Vegas Pro 8 convert and love it after years of Adobe Premiere... it's stupidly good value for money. DVD Architect's interface is genius, too.

[irascian]

I don't want to turn this into any kind of religious war but just wondered if the Sony PMW-EX1 with its SxS cards had been considered?

I should state upfront I own a PMW-EX1 which is why I'm curious!

Anyway, I hope your experiences with Vimeo for HD are better than mine! Hours and hours stuck with rendering, uploading, sitting in a queue and then compressing - only to have their server-side compression decide for no apparent reason to "fail" a render that plays fine locally, requeue it for retry, do the same again until giving up with "failed" a day or two later. It's a great way of having whole days and weeks pass you by while trying to get basic video up onto the web! The folks there are trying their best but it's a very frustrating experience (for them and the users) and their "compression guidelines" are so basic as to have no real relevance to specific software. You can meet the requirements and still fail to get an upload.

You might also want to look at other HD sites like ExposureRoom which apparently let you embed HD video in your own pages which Vimeo doesn't (Vimeo will only let you embed SD - at least until they launch Vimeo Pro - which won't be free and which has been talked about for the best part of a year so don't hold your breath) I'm about to start seeing if ExposureRoom choke as frequently as Vimeo do on my wmv files, or can improve turnaround times (which are considerable when you have "news" items, no matter how short your video, when you add on their slooooooow upload, in queue, sloooow server-side compress and conver to Flash, in queue to publish times) but would be interested to hear the experience of others.

I'm using Vegas Pro 8.0 too but recently invested in Sorenson Squeeze 5 Compression to try and meet Vimeo's 500MB/week upload limit as with longer videos Vegas produces large files for HD. Squeeze seemed to be the package of choice amongst professionals (although, as I'm rapidly learning Mac professionals more than PC professionals!) but I'm beginning to wish I'd just upgraded my copy of Microsoft Expression Encoder at a cheaper cost instead. At the moment I feel like I'm in "Ask me a question?" "No you ask me a question?" mode with Sorenson support that isn't moving me forward on getting video's posted weeks after first trying. After a manual uninstall and reinstall just to get basic functionality working I still can't get any H.264 footage out of the software that includes video, although this may be a "Vista only" issue. Quietness on forums that deal with these topics shows how "bleeding edge" all this stuff appears to be, despite the number of players seemingly rushing to jump on the "YouTube bandwagon". Don't under-estimate the frustration and time needed to publish this stuff on the web!

That being said, I think HD is definitely the way to go if you can battle your way through the gigantic "bleeding edge" learning curve. If you want a good example of why, aside from "for possible broadcasting use, future-proofing etc" check out neofight-tv.com and guess how many camera's they use (NOT their latest "away on vacation" episode - try http://www.neo-fight.tv/2008/04/epis...ed_lighti.html and you'll get an added bonus of information on a Zylight that I'm sure you're going to want to purchase - they're amazing!)

(By the way the answer to the how many camera's question is one: the camerman is also the presenter - and he shoots the show with a Sony PMW-EX1 by the way)

P.S. I have nothing to do with the show, and find it rather too "Shopping channel" cheesy for my tastes, but it's a great demo for the big advantage of going HD for that "multi-camera" effect and you're going to want to buy that Zylight (avoid the extra's - the hoods just roll around on the front - hopeless design!)

[Phil Hinton]

Originally Posted by irascian

I don't want to turn this into any kind of religious war but just wondered if the Sony PMW-EX1 with its SxS cards had been considered?

I should state upfront I own a PMW-EX1 which is why I'm curious!

Anyway, I hope your experiences with Vimeo for HD are better than mine! Hours and hours stuck with rendering, uploading, sitting in a queue and then compressing - only to have their server-side compression decide for no apparent reason to "fail" a render that plays fine locally, requeue it for retry, do the same again until giving up with "failed" a day or two later. It's a great way of having whole days and weeks pass you by while trying to get basic video up onto the web! The folks there are trying their best but it's a very frustrating experience (for them and the users) and their "compression guidelines" are so basic as to have no real relevance to specific software. You can meet the requirements and still fail to get an upload.

You might also want to look at other HD sites like ExposureRoom which apparently let you embed HD video in your own pages which Vimeo doesn't (Vimeo will only let you embed SD - at least until they launch Vimeo Pro - which won't be free and which has been talked about for the best part of a year so don't hold your breath) I'm about to start seeing if ExposureRoom choke as frequently as Vimeo do on my wmv files, or can improve turnaround times (which are considerable when you have "news" items, no matter how short your video, when you add on their slooooooow upload, in queue, sloooow server-side compress and conver to Flash, in queue to publish times) but would be interested to hear the experience of others.

I'm using Vegas Pro 8.0 too but recently invested in Sorenson Squeeze 5 Compression to try and meet Vimeo's 500MB/week upload limit as with longer videos Vegas produces large files for HD. Squeeze seemed to be the package of choice amongst professionals (although, as I'm rapidly learning Mac professionals more than PC professionals!) but I'm beginning to wish I'd just upgraded my copy of Microsoft Expression Encoder at a cheaper cost instead. At the moment I feel like I'm in "Ask me a question?" "No you ask me a question?" mode with Sorenson support that isn't moving me forward on getting video's posted weeks after first trying. After a manual uninstall and reinstall just to get basic functionality working I still can't get any H.264 footage out of the software that includes video, although this may be a "Vista only" issue. Quietness on forums that deal with these topics shows how "bleeding edge" all this stuff appears to be, despite the number of players seemingly rushing to jump on the "YouTube bandwagon". Don't under-estimate the frustration and time needed to publish this stuff on the web!

That being said, I think HD is definitely the way to go if you can battle your way through the gigantic "bleeding edge" learning curve. If you want a good example of why, aside from "for possible broadcasting use, future-proofing etc" check out neofight-tv.com and guess how many camera's they use (NOT their latest "away on vacation" episode - try http://www.neo-fight.tv/2008/04/epis...ed_lighti.html and you'll get an added bonus of information on a Zylight that I'm sure you're going to want to purchase - they're amazing!)

(By the way the answer to the how many camera's question is one: the camerman is also the presenter - and he shoots the show with a Sony PMW-EX1 by the way)

P.S. I have nothing to do with the show, and find it rather too "Shopping channel" cheesy for my tastes, but it's a great demo for the big advantage of going HD for that "multi-camera" effect and you're going to want to buy that Zylight (avoid the extra's - the hoods just roll around on the front - hopeless design!)

No need for any religious wars, we have chosen our tools to take us forward and I'm sure the Sony is a good product as well.

We are still looking at stable options of offering HD content, vimeo has worked ok for me, but not for others, so that means it is not stable enough.

I do like the look of the Zylights, something I think we will need soon.

Thanks for taking an interest.

[booth1976]

In my opinion the Sony EX1 would have been the better camera, we're upgrading from the HVX200 (not the 201) to the EX1. HVX201 is much better in low light I must say however, but you can get 23-25 minutes of full raster 1920x1080 per 8gb SxS card on the EX1. HVX201 you get 8 minutes of 'pixel shifted' 1440x1080 per P2 card.

We're in the process of upgrading, but we're still shooting our little movie on the HVX with a 35mm lens adapter, still a very capable little camera

http://www.pleasedsheep.com/bar_stewards_the_movie

Vimeo is great by the way, it's a thumbs up from me. You may also want to try out exposureroom.com

[meansizzler]

Flash is being used more and more for online vidoestreaming of high quality content, I think itis now rpelacing WMV as the preffered choice, but H264 has some good results to as seen in .mac gallery uploads..

http://gallery.mac.com/emily_parker#100479

[David Mackenzie]

Flash Video is my favourite. All of the annoying plugins you need for WMV just never seem to behave in the same way (having to click Play constantly and wait ages for "Buffering..." to get anything other than a black screen in the Windows Media Player plugin, for example).

[Andris L]

Hi Phil,

Saw you at CEDIA with your new toy . How you getting on with it?

[Phil Hinton]

It's heavy and not very portable, however the quality and features it offers have proven their worth so far. I am stuck at Kings Cross at the moment as all the trains were cancelled, so who knows when I will get home and started on producting those videos, there should be plenty to keep everyone busy over the next few weeks!