Posted by Mike Kujbida on 09/18/05 19:00

doc wrote:
> snip <
>
> the two cam's we've been considering are the panasonic dvx100a and the
> panasonic dvc60 both of which say 410,000 pixels 4:3 and 500 lines of
> resolution. thus, shouldn't the picture be better than the betacams?
> or am i missing something? like a major ingredant in the comparison?



Doc, are you talking BetaCam or BetaCamSP? This might account of the lower
lines of res that you're quoting.

I have a friend at a local post house who shoots with both the DVX100a and a
BetaCamSP rig. His opinion, along with everyone else at his shop (as well
as a majority of their clients), is that BetaCamSP just looks better.
All footage is dumped into either their Avid or FCP suites in component mode
so there is no quality loss in the editing process.
He's also told me that the BetaCamSP unit holds colour balance much better
than the DVX100a. He can do a white balance on both cameras and, after
panning the shot slightly, the backgrounds on the Panasonic will shift
enough to be noticeable.

Also, the only complaints I've heard about the sound quality on the Sony HDV
cameras are over on the pro audio groups. Then again, these guys have mic
kits that cost far more than a Sony HDV camcorder :-)

As far as the quality of the downsampled image (1080i HDV to 480i SD), I
have yet to read any complaints on the various Sony Vegas forums. To the
contrary, everyone has commented about how good it looks in comparison to a
standard miniDV camcorder.
http://www.vasst.com/?v=HDV/hdvportalnew.htm is a decent site for more HDV
info. You may need to register to get access to some of the info but it's
free.

Finally, there's a great multicam tool for Vegas called Excalibur ($100)
from http://www.jetdv.com/excalibur/multicam.php
There's an excellent article on how it was used to offline a 10 camera shoot
at http://tinyurl.com/6a74a


Mike

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