The "Official" Canon Vixia HF10 / HF100 Owner's Thread - Page 46

I plan on using the VoltaicHD settings to create a WMV file at 1920x1080 at 30fps within Win Movie Maker.

Then I'll use Super DVD Creator to author the final DVD at 16:9 wide mode and burn-it in the same app.

At least, this is my plan anyway.

I just bought a 3rd party battery from eBay. Although it charges in its own standalone charger, it wouldn't charge on my HF-100. Also although it powers up the HF-100, there is communication error (battery logo with a question mark) so I don't know how many minutes left I have on the battery.

Anybody have this problem? Also if I keep using the battery, will it at least let me know minutes before the battery completely run out that it's about to expire (via voltage detection as opposed to the chip communication)?

Do you, like, read other threads in this subforum? http://www.avsforum.com/avs-vb/showthread.php?t=1038505

No I don't, because I thought ALL HF-10 and HF-100 related questions are supposed to be on this thread.

PS: that thread doesn't answer my question either:

Where did you ended up purchasing the HF100 and how much? I'm close on pulling the trigger.

I'm still puzzled by the significant price drop of this camera. Anyone knows the reason behind this?

Generally true, but it pays to look at other threads in the "area".


People have only started getting these in their hands now, so nobody can say for sure... but I seriously doubt it. HF100 expect the battery to provide proper info as far as the amount of charge, and I doubt that it's going to be probing for some minor voltage drops "just in case".

That battery is what it is... an extremely cheap back-up with its own charger. Very nice to have, but don't use it as your primary one.

Check page 112 of the manual. under the section "Regarding the use of non-Canon battery packs". It tells you everything you need to know about using non "Intelligent Li-ion batteries.

basically, you need to use the charger that comes with the battery you bought as the camera or the Canon Charger will not charge them. And you will never get info on how much battery life is left.

Russell

Anyone?

What did you expect at 12x zoom?

Playing-

That may just be a limitation of how much the image stabilization can accomplish. For comparison, turn the stabilization off and see how steady your "as steady as possible" video looks at maximum zoom. Oh, another thing... when you say "fully zoomed", do you mean only the 12x actual optical zoom, or do you also have the digital zoom turned on? (There is no way anything but a tripod could keep the video still when using the digital zoom.)

I went with the professional pack from Digiemporio. It was about, uhmm, lots of money, but it came with just about everything I decided I wanted (16Gb card, spare battery (not sure what type - Canon or not), UV filters etc), along with pretty much nothing that I didn't (unlike the other one on ebay I had looked at) and it had no sales tax.

It should be mine tonight. Then the gardening can wait for a week or two...

Seggers

Thanks Chris, yes optical zoom only.
If I switch OIS off, the picture twitches a bit with my heartbeat, as can be expected. On a tripod, with OIS on, it moves around just little bit, which is why, I assume, the manual recommends to switch OIS off when using a tripod.
All I want (Edit: please), is for someone to zoom all the way (Optical only) and look at the LCD to see if the picture moves around quite wildly, as if you were on a small boat.

Thanks

I tested this on mine and it does move around a little bit, like on a boat, but only for aprox 3 seconds, then it settles. If I move the camera at all, it "floats" again for 3 seconds or so, then steady.
Oh, and I did this with tripod. If I hold it in hand, it never stops floating because I can't hold my hand completely steady.

Thanks Johnny, now I know mine is not faulty.

Just got my Patriot 16GB SDHC, thanks russellm i was able to get in on that deal u link to & mailed off that MIB. It reads out to 16.4 GB's! What kind of reads are u guys getting off of your SDHC's?

Yeah, not all cards are created equally. I've read somewhere that the 16GB SDHC by A-data (or is it Transcend?) which is listed as a "Class 6" card (20MB/sec read and write) was actually slower than a 16GB SanDisk Ultra II (a "Class 4" card at 15MB/sec read and write).

Another interesting note, is that the A-data or Transcend card was almost half the price of the "inferior" speed SanDisk card. Go figure. The phrase, "you get what you pay for" comes to mind.

Great news..the newest tmpgenc xpress 4.0 have native AVCHD and BD support now.

http://tmpgenc.pegasys-inc.com/en/do...l#tabSelector2

About one year ago, I bought an HV20. A couple months ago, an HF100.

While both cameras are very impressive and blow away my last SD camcorder (Sony TRV-950), there are 3 signficant areas of quality difference between the two Canons that I thought were worth mentioning. Two favor the HV20 and one the HF100. I'll post shortly along with some post-editing observations I have made.

I'm a techy type who first and foremost is looking for video quality...but I use these mostly to capture family memories (and trips) so convenience and easue of use - in filiming, editing and distribution, are also important.



Hans

I recently purchased the HF10. The video quality is great. I have experienced one bothersome problem that I wonder if others are experiencing.

When using the internal 16gb to take stills at 2048x1536, there is a HUGE delay while the "Access/CHG" light blinks red. I shot 3 stills in fairly rapid succession with a flash and the "Access/CHG" light blinked red for 1min and 2 seconds. Just taking a single still causes the "Access/CHG" light to blink for 26 seconds. Is this the kind of delay that everyone else is experiencing?? Granted, I did not buy the camera for still photography but isn't this way too long of a processing time?

Mine flashes for about half a second. Transcend Class 6, 16GB.
Edit: Sorry only realized now that you are talking internal memory.
Can't help with that.

I have a one year old HV20 and a 2 month old HF100. First and foremost, I care about video quality, but convenience is also important.

Each year, we go to the Fraser Valley in Colorado - an area surrounded by pine-forest covered peaks. Last year, we took a ton of footage with the HV20. Did the same this year with the HF-100. Three fundamental things about the video quality strike me in comparing similair footage.

1 - the HV20, given any movement at all, still has a slightly better ability to resolve fine detail. In bright indoor shots and in in reasonably but not overly detailed outdoor shots, not sure I can tell the difference. However, the moment I have a backdrop with lots of pine trees on distant hills, there is a very noticable difference. The HV20 simply seems to resolve a lot more of the distant pine detail. The HV20 did (and does) create a "wow" factor with those kind of shots. The HF100 does not. The 100 is not bad, but I lose the ability to marvel at the distant detail. Of course, thousands of pines mean millions of needles. That's a lot of detail. And my camera is never completely still in real life - even if only slowly zooming or panning (or if there is some movement in the subject/s). This is not a small quality difference. (I should note I have a 65" 1080p projector - smaller screens may not reveal such a big difference).

2 - Movement is more fluid with the HV20. With the HF100, I noticed that I found even reasonably slow pans bothersome - there was blur and greater "blockiness" to the scenery. The HV20, on the other hand, seems both more fluid and to present more of a solid image as I pan - really allowing my eyes to track the scenery during a pan.

3 - Medium to low light shots are dramatically better on the HF100. With the HV20, I tried to do all kinds of things to compensate any time it was evening in doors (even with a few hundred lux of light) or nearing twilight outdoors. The colors seemed overly reddish on the full auto settings, the image got noisy, etc. I used cineamode to try and offset both to some reasonable effect. By comparison, I have found I never need to take the HF100 out of the "Easy mode" and the quality is far better than what I got with all my fiddling on the HV20. (I should note I do all my filming in 60i - so bear that in mind). This is no small quality difference. It's huge.


In the end, for video quality, I'm faced with having to let go of the occasional "wow" factor in higly detailed (and real world - with movement) shots for the much greater quality consistancy under varying lighting conditions. That's not an easy trade-off, but probably tips the scales for me to the HF-100.

If you are a hobbyist or such who can always assure ample lighting - the HV20 probably still reigns for best quality.


EDITING AND CONVENIENCE - another matter entirely. If you want to do a lot of post work, there's still no comparing the tools available. I do not do a lot of post work. I was pleasantly suprised by the packaged (Pixela) software. It's not great, but for scene deletions, trims and rearrangements, it works while doing smart-rendering, which is a big deal for time and quality. So that suggests the HF100 for me.

For distribution, the jury is still out, but it looks like AVCHD will win out. There is some suggestion that Hi-Rez MPEG2 (HDV) can be natively encoded to Blu-Ray disks. I haven't tried that. But I can say that that the AVCHD disks created on DVD from the HF100 play very well on the Play station 3 and several other Blu-ray players I've tried them on. All my connections are via HDMI - and there is no perceptible quality loss to me vs. hooking up the camcorder straight. That's promising.

INTERESTING NOTE
I took my Colorado HV20 footage and encoded to AVCHD (17Mb/s). I used Pinnacle Studio 11 - probably not the best encoder. But the important point is that, even though TWICE compressed with the re-encoding, the resulting footage was, in general, better than the AVCHD from the HF-100 for the highly detailed nature scenes described in point 1. That's really surprising and is good news for the standard. It suggests any quality trade-offs I'm seeing today may be more a function of processor limitations (doing it all in real time) vs. the protocol(s).

I'm still struggling, but in the end, I think the more consistant quality with low light and the distribution convenience probably will make me shift to the HF-100 and AVCHD.

For what it's worth.

Is this why I'm not finding any short films being posted by people who use the HF100? (Anyone have any links?)

The motion trails are what's still bothering me about the HF100.

Do you think the look from the video produced by the HF100 is going to become quickly dated/next year’s model might be closer to the HV20’s 25mbps bitrate?

This is a compelling reason for the HV20/30; the bitrate is already there. But I do like the flash memory/not a fan of tapes...

Have a rookie problem with HF100. I have no audio on playback of a saved video on my computer. It plays fine in the Pixela Image Mixer Player, both recorded audio and added tracks, but does not play any audio in Quicktime, WMP. I've re-named file as MPG, WMV, still nothing. Any help is appreciated.

I'm thinking it is not so much (inherently) a bit-rate issue right now as processor limitations. The AVC encoding is much more demanding and in a camcorder has to be done in real time. The re-encode of the of HDV footage, offline, into AVCHD was really surprising in how good it looked - but the computer had the luxury of taking all the time it wanted. That bodes well, longer term, for the standard. Silicon will get faster. (I saw the differences in both detail and movement).

But it does make a decision today difficult.

I found some info on the forum regarding editing programs with avchd, I'll try that for now. thanks.

Question: If I transfer a video file shot on my 'HF100, and then edited with Pixela Image Mixer, from my computer to a regular (SD) DVD recorder using a DIV 1394 connection, will the file remain in AVCHD format and be playable on a BluRay player in its original AVCHD format?

I'm shying away from this method. What I've learned is that there is a significant video and audio out of sync issue with the resulting DVD. In addition, the conversion time from MTS to WMV is quite long.

I'm now using a trial version of Ulead VisualStudio 11.5. This tool allows you to import AVCHD directly from the camcorder and then edit the raw MTS files. My 1st SD DVD was pretty good for learning on the fly.

If anyone has any experience using Ulead VisualStudio 11.5, I'd appreciate their viewpoint on this particular tool.

Curious if anyone is working with pinnacle 12 (and has tried Sony vegas) and ran into this...

Well i tried working with my 30p (720p) mov files (my panasonic shoots mpeg mov files) tonight with pinnacle 12 (same process as the mts files with the canon)..

i tried exporting to AVCHD as usual.. but i cant seem to get the resulting video to be as smooth as i can with Sony Vegas 8.0a.

There is a bit of herky jerky going on as the video pans with Pinnacle 12's resulting movie.. whereas the one with Sony is smooth as nails..

I've tried setting the project to HD 30p in Pinnacle, but this didnt seem to make a difference..

Anyone have any thoughts? I hate to have to use Vegas, as there is no ability to add menus.

Can you describe the "motion trails" in more detail? I'm running into frame blending issues when trying to speed up some footage shot with my new HF100, and I'm curious if it's somehow related?

Thanks,

Anthony