Panasonic DVX100 vs Canon HV20 vs Joanna Angel

New blog, first post. Here we go.

Halo-8 started production on a documentary project last week. Its a typically low budget production, so we used the Panasonic DVX-100A as the main camera for shooting interviews. We’ve been using the DVX100A for almost all of our low budget productions for the last several years. I have a consumer HDV camera that I use to take video of my kids, so I decided to bring it along as a hand held “B” camera. Its a Canon HV20, and it has some cool prosumer features like 24p mode. I didn’t buy it for professional use, but I thought I’d bring it along and get some extra b-roll, and use this scenario to produce a real world test between HDV and DV. To get to the point, the images from the Canon HV20 were vastly superior. I guess it shouldn’t be so surprising that the HD images looked better than the SD images, but I assumed that the superior lens on the DVX100 would count for something. The only problem with the test was that the DVX100 wasn’t setup very well, so the picture came out about one stop too dark, and very flat. I didn’t pay enough attention to the other camera operator because I was dorking around with my HV20, but I think it’ll work out because the footage from the HV20 looks great, and the footage from the DVX100 is salvageable. Even if the DVX100 had been setup correctly, the HDV still would have produced a superior result. The fact is that neither camera produced a picture that was usable right off the tape. I usually do extensive color correction or color style work to my footage. For this test, I digitized the DV footage and the HDV footage through firewire. I used Magic Bullet Looks and Colorista to whip up a couple of color styles for both sets of footage. This is where HDV really proved invaluable. The HDV footage had substantially more latitude for color manipulation, meaning that I could make severe style adjustments to the whites, blacks and saturation values without noticeable distortion in the image. I tried that same kind of manipulation on the DV footage, and it became noisy very quickly. I’ve never edited in HDV before, so I’m not sure what the pitfalls may be, but in this basic test it was more or less like working with Apple Pro Res 422. The HV20 isn’t perfect, but we were very impressed that we got such image quality out of a $700 consumer camera, and we’ll be using it as the “A” camera on some of the interviews for the documentary.

Here’s a couple of loosely edited clips from the shoot with a variety of color styles applied through out the clip. The first few seconds of each clip shows the untreated footage. The interview subject is adult film star and punk porn director Joanna Angel. The documentary series is tentatively called “Unsimulated: Sex in Cinema.”

Footage from the DVX100. In this clip, Joanna talks about directing comedy porn.

Footage from the Canon HV20. In this clip, Joanna describes the social implications of starting her porn site Burning Angel.com.

As a television and video production professional, I’m a very late adopter of HD technology. I waited until it really didn’t cost any more to do HD than it did to do standard def, then I jumped in. That meant waiting for compression schemes to improve so that I didn’t need an expensive storage system, and for the price of deck rentals to fall. Its nice to let everyone else work out the kinks, then take advantage of that knowledge base. Its not a very forward thinking strategy, but I’ve been the early adopter on too many other occasions, and that’s a suckers game. The bottom line is that as producers, we all have to meet the demands of the project at hand. The cable TV work I’ve been doing in recent years didn’t have an HD delivery requirement, so there wasn’t any point in producing HD until we could do it without incurring additional costs. At Halo-8, where I make movies and lifestyle videos, the main delivery method is DVD, which is standard def. Yes, there is Blu-Ray, but I’m betting that Blu-Ray will be replaced by any number of video on demand services before I ever have the occasion to release a Halo-8 movie in HD. I’m also betting that affordable software for scaling standard def video into HD will improve imeasureably over the next couple years. I’m happy to be working in HD, but I’m glad I waited for the streamlining of the workflow and the drop in price.