The "Official" Canon HFS10 / HFS100 Owner's Thread - Page 5

Not really... it's doing the 2:4:4 cadence (or whatever it is). So the Canon is actually inserting the duplicate frames to make it real 60i. It's not real 24p no matter how you slice it.

The end result is like viewing a 24p BluRay at 60i - At least to me (in my HT), the difference is very clear.

There's really no purpose in recording in 24p on this camera, since the video file being recording is truly 60i, with inserted frames. You're not really getting 24p, you're getting 24p with inserted frames, and the only way to get back to real 24p is with a video processor that does a good, consistent job at reverse telecine. Or a video program that will do the same thing.

30p is different, as even though the Canon is doubling the frames and interlacing them to get 60i, you'll likely get slightly better deinterlacing at playback than recording at 60i natively because the frames will deinterlace cleanly (e.g. no stairstepping).

Anyway, 30p recording makes sense on this camera, 24p is pretty useless.

is there anybody able to upload uncut files in the the 24p, 25p and 30p mode to rapidshare.com?
i want to compare the smothness of the modes.
i´m looking for an camcorder that provide a smooth playback.

now i have a sony HDR-SR1E and this camcorder doesn´t bring the optimum to me.

thanks for your attention.....benny

Again, they're all 60i. So the "smoothness" will depend entirely on what kind of deinterlacing capability you have. If you play on your computer, it will probably all look the same. If you play through a HT setup with a good video processor, the 30p will likely look the best.

my target is to make movies those are very smooth.

i can create WMV HD 720p with 30 frames per second in vegas 9 pro. it is the best for me? there will be the greatest smoothness?

thanks, benny

i found something on youtube that is encoded in WMV HD 720p and 30 frames per second. i think that the clip is very smooth......just take a look

How do you guys choose SDHC card?
Most of the Class 6 up to 15mb/s, so if S10/100 write 24mbps, how slower card work in this camcorder? Does it have huge buffer? I guess I miss something here.
Only card with 30 mbps is SanDisk Extreme III 16GB , but it's only 16gb.
Please advise, Tnx

You don't have to use class 6 cards. Class 4 cards are fast enough. You are missing the difference between Mbps (mega-BITS per second) and MBps (mega-BYTES per second). 24Mbps is equal to 3MBps. Class 4 cards can do 4MBps.

so, now that really makes me wonder:

I use 24p for most of my indoor (low to moderate lighting condition), in the belief that I get less blur (better video) than the 30p/60i setting. I switch to 30p for most daylight (well lit) conditions.

I still have not figured out the storage / post-processing flow; for now I watch it by playing the mts files directly on the computer or through the camcorder connected to my HDTV...and I dont find any notable artifacts (but then again, for many of these shots, I would be just as happy with an inexpensive camcorder...)

I would really welcome your expert comments:

1. Doesnt 24P give better low-light capability? So, if I am not that picky about the "cinema effect" of 24p versus the "stark-reality" of 60i, wouldnt it make sense to choose 24p for indoor/low-light conditions??
2. A broader question - how do you guys choose between 30p -vs- 60i (and -vs- 24p). I keep wondering about the 60i mode, but I dont feel compelled to use that mode just because the storage bucket is 60i.

thanks!

Good questions. It's possible 24p gives slightly better low-light conditions because each frame is "exposed" a little longer? That would be the only reason, so if it's not the case, I'm not sure. For digital CMOS, exposure time might be irrelevent (outside of my yard here).

For the "cinema effect", with the Canon, this is not so much 24p and more one of the effect modes. There's a specific Cinema effect that basically adds a film grain.

Other than that, what you're watching on your computer or TV is a 60i movie from this camera. 24p will likely look the worst, as the cadence frame inserts will add some jerkiness without good reverse telecine video processing. 30p should look great, and likely slightly better than 60i as the deinterlacing should be perfect even with lousy deinterlacing capabilities of a TV/video processor. However 60i will look even better with a good video processor capable of good deinterlacing, as you'll be capturing the most information.

I've done some preliminary daylight tests and I've seen absolutely no difference on 30p versus 60i going through my D2v (with very good deinterlacing capability). 24p looks a little off to me, typical of watching 24p upconverted to 60i (although my D2v again masks most of this).

On my regular TV, I see only slight differences on 30p to 60i, mainly on side-to-side motion. 24p looks noticably jerky, although it's still slight (I'm just particularly sensitive to this).

Bottom line - I'm recording everything in 60i as that's what the camera ends up playing no matter what, and deinterlacing isn't an issue for me, and I think I'm capturing the most information using 60i.

I'll do some low-light tests to see if there's any real difference between the modes. Does anyone know if the exposure time is a real variable, or if I'm making that up?

Hi everyone,
I am a new owner of a HF S100 (super quality)
but I cannot install Pixela Software on my computer (Vista SP 2 !!). I get the error "5009 : 0x8002802b", just after the language choice.
There is no information on Canon or Pixela forums.
I left a message on Canon Custumer Service, and I don't get answers.
Does anybody have a solution ?
Many thanks in advance.

Now this is more like it. Those butchered 'vimeo' snips can only tell so much about the video quality of a 1080 camcorder.

Does the OP or another AVS member know where so see other camcorders in like fashion? Here on AVS?

Sanyo inparticular has my attention with their 1080p offerings. Thanks, CMRA

I think most don't use the software, as it's pretty lousy. I know I haven't installed it in over a year (HF10 and now HFS10).

I've been looking for a video editing solution that will edit and output the 24Mb/s video this camera is capable of recording.

I read this:


I'm not familiar with TME, and Nero hasn't impressed me previously. Are there any other products to add to this (too short) list?

The problem is that the AVCHD file produced by this camera *is not 24p*, it's 60i. Anything you open it in will see 60i, every player will see it as 60i, because it's really 60i.

If you want real 24p, you need to convert it to 24p first (removing all the inserted frames), and I'm still looking for a good, inexpensive way to accomplish this.

Right, but it is 24 megabits per second, which seems to be the problem for video editing software.

Oops! Misread post... "Nevermind..."!

Thanks for your response back - AbMagFab! I should perhaps try 30P (or 60i) in somewhat low light conditions to see if it really all that bad (perhaps consider increasing gain limit - agc - need to check the manual for more info on this)... just curious about your low-light test results - please share when you have them.

You guys are making a good point, I think, and perhaps I should step away from 24p!

Are there any other potential downsides to 60i? (fast motion and interlacing artifacts -vs- 30p and blur?)

Right but what I'm saying is the majority of television viewers watch 24p content at 60i. This is how we've always watched movies until Blu Ray and 24P HDTVs came out. Like I said Canon records true 24 progressive frames, but it adds a pulldown not for recording but for playback. So using the reverse telecine methods you would be able to get true 24P for those viewing devices (24P and Blu Ray). If it was never shot in true 24P you wouldn't be able to get true 24P no matter what, but you can because it was shot that way.

The majority of users seem to be shooting 24P and using After Effects or NeoScene Cineform to remove the pulldown and you arrive at the same destination as a camera that records and plays back at 24P.

It's not like any information was lost. If it was recording at 60i like you say the progressive frames wouldn't be able to be extracted and information would be missing.

Again I beg the question. If you watched a movie that was shot 24 frames and converted to 60i, are you saying the 24P is useless? To me that looks much better than 60i. I'd only use 60i for news footgage or talks shows or 30p for sports. But any movies deserve to be recorded 24P... even if it's played back at 60i, it's still better than recording at 60i and playing back at 60i.

Also, I can notice a major difference between 30P and 60i, noticeable with motion of course.

It *is* recording 60i. Adding the additional frames results in a 60i recording. If you happen to have a good reverse telecine display, and one that deinterlaces really well, you'll get something close to 24p again, but most TV's are pretty bad at this combination.

And (one of) the whole points of BluRay is that 24p upconverted to 60i looks crappy on most TV's, and looks little like the original 24p (once you get used to real 24p). Same with this camera, of course, as adding the new frames and interlacing them produces something visually that looks very different than the original 24p, when viewed on a set that can display 24p natively.


Who knows what the "majority" of folks are doing with a camera that's been out only a few months. But yes, if you spend more money on a software product to convert it to real 24p, then by all means, shoot at 24p. I don't have the patience or time to bother with that, and the point is Canon really should produce a true 24p file to begin with.


Again, it *is* recording the file at 60i. It's *shooting* it at 24p, but recording (and playing back) at 60i. The file you copy off the camera is 60i. No information is lost, correct, but frames are being added, and that jerkiness is visible when played back natively (to me and many others who care about this sort of thing).



I don't think you mean what you're saying here. Absolutely - a video shot at 60i and played at 60i looks *way* better than a video shot at 24p and played at 60i, on an average display device. Absolutely positively, and nearly everyone would agree when viewing it.

I don't know how you say things "deserve" to be recorded at 24p. That's a standard that was picked for no real reason other than mechanical/technical. It makes just as much sense to do 25p, or 30p, or 60p. And frankly, the higher the frame rate, the more data being recorded, which is always better.

And if I have to spend time and use software to convert to 24p from a file directly pulled off the camera, then yes, recording at 24p is (almost) useless, IMO.

Now you're not making sense - if you see 30p to 60i, the difference is *much* more severe at 24p to 60i! So you seem to be contradicting yourself. If your display device can't properly deinterlace a perfectly interlaced 60i video, then there's no way it's doing reverse telecine *and* framerate conversion *and* deinterlacing better.

So if you're saying 30p in 60i has "major" differences, then 24p in 60i must look awful to you! To me, the differences are all minor and subtle, but enough.

Okay, well we're basically saying the same thing using different terminology. Using your terminology hat I meant was it's shot on 24P and the original 24 progressive frames are recorded. The original 24 progressive frames are on the hard drive and the progressive images are not lost. It was my understanding that the pulldown is added for output and playback as indicated on the Canon website, but it doesn't matter as long as you're not saying that the original 24 progressive frames cannot be extracted as if it were shot on 60i.


I thought you were trying to say that it wasn't shooting at 24P because if you shot footage at 60i you wouldnt' be able to extract originally 24p footage from it obviously (24 is not divisable by 60) and it would look horrible (ever see someone who shot something on 60i trying to convert it to 24P to make it look like film? Looks horrible). In my mind shooting and recording are the part of the same process, recording captures what was shot.

My point is if you shot footage at 60i you would not be able to convert it to 24P making it look like it was originally shot on 24P. By doing the pulldown you can get it to look 100% like it was shot on a 24P camera though right?


Straight from Canon website:

In the USA as well as many other countries the Canon VIXIA HF series camcorders offer a selectable shooting mode which uses "true 24 Frame progressive shooting" to give your video a more cinematic look. These (referring to 24 progressive frames not 60 interlaced frames) frames of video are recorded by the camcorder and then output via the HDMI, USB 2.0 or composite terminals by adding a "2:3 pull-down" to convert the 24 Frames in 30 Frames to be compatible with Televisions and monitors. This is the same industry standard system used to show "Hollywood" movies on Television.

Most consumer software packages that support editing AVCHD video are capable of editing this video in the same way as any other high definition video. However some high end customers have requested the ability to import the video into professional video editing suites and applying a 2:3 pulldown to the footage which allows the individual 24 Frames to be extracted. (If you recorded 60i footage you wouldn't be able to extract individual progresive frames, 24 is not divisable by 60)

Since the Canon VIXIA HF series are consumer class camcorders they do not include a feature to record 24 Frame video directly. By not including this feature, frame extraction is somewhat more difficult, requiring that the editor manually identify the 2:3 pulldown, then the editing program can extract the 24 Frame video. This process varies from one editing program to the other and may not be available on all programs. Please check with your editing software provider to see if this capability is supported.


I don't think you mean what you're saying here. Absolutely - a video shot at 60i and played at 60i looks *way* better than a video shot at 24p and played at 60i, on an average display device. Absolutely positively, and nearly everyone would agree when viewing it.

I don't know how you say things "deserve" to be recorded at 24p. That's a standard that was picked for no real reason other than mechanical/technical. It makes just as much sense to do 25p, or 30p, or 60p. And frankly, the higher the frame rate, the more data being recorded, which is always better.

And if I have to spend time and use software to convert to 24p from a file directly pulled off the camera, then yes, recording at 24p is (almost) useless, IMO.


> So you're basically saying that watching the news (was shot at 60i and is played back at 60i) looks better than the most common movie setup (Watching a 60i movie shot at 24P?) There's no way! It's like saying black and white is better than color. Granted, there are different methods of shooting for certain events, but a Hollywood movie would be laughable if it were shot at 60i. And my experience has been the complete opposite. Anyone whom I've shown the 24P mode preferred that over 60i.

don't know how you say things "deserve" to be recorded at 24p. That's a standard that was picked for no real reason other than mechanical/technical. It makes just as much sense to do 25p, or 30p, or 60p. And frankly, the higher the frame rate, the more data being recorded, which is always better.

> Movies would not work at 60i. They would look ridiculous and not sell a story. While having more data may produce a more realistic image it does not necessarily mean better on a subjective level. If that were the case everything would be shot on 100p.

Now you're not making sense - if you see 30p to 60i, the difference is *much* more severe at 24p to 60i! So you seem to be contradicting yourself. If your display device can't properly deinterlace a perfectly interlaced 60i video, then there's no way it's doing reverse telecine *and* framerate conversion *and* deinterlacing better.

So if you're saying 30p in 60i has "major" differences, then 24p in 60i must look awful to you! To me, the differences are all minor and subtle, but enough.

> I am not saying that there's no difference between 24p and 60i nor was I comparing the two (24p and 60i to 30p and 60i), sorry I should have used a seperate thread I was just replying to something I read on another post you had written. However my friend has a Samsung 24P television and he's a film school graduate with experience in in the industry. When he bought his television he was all excited about the 24P but he says that he doesn't notice a huge difference. I don't have an HDTV yet so I have yet to see it, yes I can tell the difference betweeen a movie played back in the theaters or when played back on my computer in a true 24 frame. But it's not like a completely different movie and still looks more like 24P than 60i and for a movie, obviously looks WAY better than anything that was shot on 60i.

Regarding knowing what the majority of users are doing I'm just going by some other forums that are around for this camcorder and Vimeo posts, a good number of them are using 24P reverse telecine.

Thinking about getting either of these cameras Canon HF S10 or the HG21, I want to know how bad is the HF S10 in full sunlight without the viewfinder.

Copying the files directly off the SD card, they are 60i AVC HD files.

So, the Canon site is misleading at best, and really it's wrong.

The files are recorded with the 3:2 (2:3?) pulldown added before committing to disk/memory. In order to get a 24p file, you need to convert it using some software. Good luck finding software to do that and keep it as AVCHD. The only software I'm aware of produces a much larger, proprietary format file.

IMO, Canon keeps blowing it with the 24p thing. It's useless until I can easily extract a real 24p file from the camera.

Well I still think that they are recorded at 24P and then the 3:2 pulldown is added. If it was recording at 60i then there would be no difference from it shooting 24P and would look the same as if it were shot in 60i. Why does 24P mode look different than 60i if it's really recorded at 60i and played back at 60i?

Like I said the original 24 progressive frames couldn't be extracted if that information wasn't recorded on there to begin with.


You stated: "It's useless until I can easily extract a real 24p file from the camera."

Alot of professionals who use this as a backup camcorder for certain shots or as a home movie camera are going to use professional editing software anyways to remove the pulldown, so it's not that big of a deal. I'm assuming that the majority of people who complain about 24P with pulldown are at least semi professionals. It's like complaining about the colors that the camera shoots in when you can adjust that doing color correction editing, something that professionals would do anyway. Or complaining about the sound when most professionals would use another MIC. Sure it might be helpful and easier for you if it had that in there, but aren't we expecting too much from a consumer camcorder? The decision to impliment the 60i playback was to make it compatible with most users, if it played back 24P it wouldn't be compatible with most devices and the majority of people would be complaining.

I don't think it was Canon's job to output it as progressive frames just like I don't believe it's Canon's job to offer color correction or editing of footgage on the camera. You have other things that handle that.

The only thing I do wish is that Canon actually flagged the frames so that the cadence could be more accurately attained when doing a reverse telecine because it can be somewhat complicated.

I think we're saying the same thing. But yes, the recording on disk is 60i. So the image is being captured 24 times a second in a progressive frame, but then being interlaced and pulldown'd and then recorded to disk.

At a minimum, I don't think it's too much to ask to have an option to record to the native format. They have to do a lot more work in the camera to turn the 24p (and 30p) into 60i then if they just recorded it properly to begin with.

And tweaking colors in the camera is *way* different then buying professional software to convert the 60i AVCHD into a 24p proprietary file. The latter is a real issue for a camera that claims to record in 30p and 24p.

So - 60i it is!

I want to look at some baseball video frame by frame. I can do it on the camera. But when I try to do it with files uploaded to the computer, using the Imagemixer Player, the frame advance button is grayed out.

I can use the slider, but it jumps more than one frame at a time, and the moving objects are blurred.

When played back frame by frame through the camera moving objects are not blurred.

Anyway to getting freeze frame working on the computer?

Thanks for any help.

If you have Vista read this:
http://www.avsforum.com/avs-vb/showt...9#post16429049

An inelegant workaround is to import the .m2ts file into
Windows Movie Maker 6.0.

You can then use frame advance in the small editing window.

I don't think Windows Media Player has a frame advance for .m2ts either.

I suppose those with XP or Macs could use other editors in a similar way ?

---------------

If you had a PS3 or Blu-ray player you can do frame-by-frame advance on that.

Hi there,
I realize that Mac can sometimes be a bit behind on these things. Here's my conundrum. I need some software that will recognize my Canon files on my desktop, and convert them to mxf.
I have something called VideoPier, but it just seems to recognize one .MTS file out of three, so I'm stuck.
This morning I had to visit a guy with a PC and Sony Vegas. He was able to grab the (for me) problem file (which, by the way, plays perfectly in the camera... it's only when VideoPier tries to see it that it's a no go), and convert it to mxf.
My question is... what are my options for software that will convert to mxf?
I have a Mac, as mentioned, but this latest crisis has cause me to pull out my copy of Windows XP and dust off VMWare Fusion, so I can essentially run Windows on my Mac.
I know that Sony Vegas works... but it's expensive. Do you know any other options on the Mac or Windows side?
thanks,
malch

I've been playing with my new Canon HF S10 for just over a couple of weeks now. I'm still pretty new at it. The videos are a good quality, but I don't have the experience of many users in this forum to compare it against other video cameras.

One thing I noted (and expected in advance) is that it is a light camcorder, and I find it difficult to hold it perfectly still when taking a video. This is especially noticeable when zooming in.

I am a die hard Linux user (ie I absolutely refuse to use MS-Windows operating system and hence refuse to use MS-Windows software products) and to my knowledge there is no stabilization software (yet) for Linux. Hence I need to pay EXTRA careful attention to getting the most stable raw video files I can get.

I ended up purchasing an Induro MC25 Carbon 8X Monopod (which scales down to about 16.4" and scales up to around 57.4"). I put a Manfrotto 234RC swivel head on the monopod, which provides a quick release, two more inches of extra height, and superior vertical panning. The monopod (while no tripod) makes a massive difference in increased video stability. I like the swivel head, the only downside being it weighs as much as this light weight carbon fibre Monopod ! A tripod is of course better, but a tripod is significantly bulkier and significantly heavier, and I will NOT carry a tripod with me. The monopod fits in my backpack, although I do have to remove the swivel head to be able to comfortably do up the backpack zipper.

I'm off to South East Asia in 4 days, and I hope to take some good videos while I am there.

For linux users, while there have been improvements in kdenlive software and its dependency software such as mlt and ffmpeg (where kdenlive is my Linux video editing software of choice) it still struggles a bit in editing the raw top 1920x1080 and highest bit rate Canon HF S10 video .mts video clips. kdenlive will render them with no problem, but to try and move back and forth in the project editor will sometimes lead to corruption and one can not easily select the precise next frame with the editor. There is active developement going on with kdenlive, but its not quite there yet for the very highest HF 10 video resolution/bit-rate. Note this is on an Intel Core i7 920 PC with 6GB of RAM, so hardware is not the limitation.

I am currently downsizing the 1920x1080 high-bit rate videos with this simple command, to a lower 1280x1080 @ 8MBit/sec bit rate (as an interim, until kdenlive is updated to handle the top Canon bit rate/resolution). I am using this linux ffmpeg command:
where "00017.mts" is the example input file and "17.avi" is the sample output file.

I find most my friends can't even display the 1280x720 videos with their PCs.