Posted by Ty Ford on 06/27/07 11:59

On Wed, 27 Jun 2007 03:59:42 -0400, Mark & Mary Ann Weiss wrote
(in article <ONogi.4210$M92.1067@fe02.news.easynews.com>):

> I've started a small site with example footage and stills taken from an HDV
> camera, the Sony HVR-V1U. Aside from it's terrible audio, the camera
> produces decent images in sunlit environments, but there are a number of
> artifacts which are changing in a distracting temporal manner, as the camera
> pans across scenes.
>
> I put some examples up here:
>
> http://www.basspig.com/hvrv1u_HDV_artifacts.htm
>
> HDV is really severely compressed and breaks down badly with imager noise,
> so in low light situations, the CODEC is overstressed and picture quality
> nosedives. This is also true with busy images, like a pan across a grassy
> field (the grass shimmers because the imager resolves individual blades of
> grass, and the HDV CODEC can't handle all that high frequency detail without
> generating spurious color information that shows up temporaly as a
> shimmering effect.
> I suspect that the color palette of HDV is less than 24 bit, because at
> times, the picture shows striated bands of color, like a GIF image when too
> many diverse colors are present. Ironically, the noisy imagers in this
> camera should 'dither' the image and eliminate the banding, but it does not.
>
>

Where were you last year when rabid HDV supporters were beating their chests
and wailing about how wonderful the picture was?

I was just out with a crew with 4 Sony HDV cameras shooting a documentary at
a sporting event. I asked them about panned moves and compression artifacts.
I took their "no problem" answer at face value.

As with audio, apparently, some people are pickier than others.

Regards,

Ty Ford


--Audio Equipment Reviews Audio Production Services
Acting and Voiceover Demos http://www.tyford.com
Guitar player?:http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4RZJ9MptZmU

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