The Official Panasonic HDC-SD/TM90 Owners Thread

I searched a few different ways for an "owners" type threads for these two sister models of camcorders but did not find one . Given the recent popularity of this camera on the forum, I thought it would make sense to make a single place for owners to congregate when talking about this camera and to exchange info with potential buyers. If there is an officlal thread for these specific models, let me know and I'll ask a moderator to nuke this post.

As a new owner myself, I know that I am particularly interested in hearing from more seasoned owners of these cameras and what they have found to work out best for various settings/techniques in different situations. There are a variety of good threads I've fund that taggle some of the topics on settings for the camera, and I will try and go through that info and congregate it into this threads, perhaps yielding an FAQ.

Reserved

Reserved 2

iFrame defeats the purpose of having an HD video camera IMO. iFrame is 960x540@30p. Compare that to 1920x1080@60p and that's a substantial difference.

From Apple, who created iFrame: "The iFrame Video format is designed by Apple to speed up importing and editing by keeping the content in its native recorded format while editing. Based on industry standard technologies such as H.264 and AAC audio, iFrame produces small file sizes and simplifies the process of working with Video recorded with your camera."

IMO, the format was created to appeal to the world of iPhones and iPad's and devices with lower resolutions, not for computers and HDTV's.

I'm a believer in capturing the best quality you can, and then down converting. If you always record in iFrame, you can never gain back that lost quality. Sure, you can up convert the iFrame to 1920x1080, but that's not the same as recording it natively.

Check out this link: http://www.avsforum.com/avs-vb/showthread.php?t=1375913 and the Clipwrap application.

I've not used Clipwrap, but based on why i read and see on the forum, the guys who create it seem to provide some pretty good support and listen to user feedback. It's also a really easy program to use, so it may simply your process of converting the 1080/60p footage to something you can use easily in iMovie.

Downside to the recording in 1080/60p and transcoding to a format iMovie can use is extra disc space consumed and time elapsed during this process. I'm not sure how long transcoding takes in general for every hour of footage, but it will also depend on your processing power.

Decided to see what Clipwrap is all about. I am a Mac (MBAir) and PC users (desktop), so I use my desktop for video work due to more power and external monitor.

I had a 38 seconds 1080/60p file recorded in iA mode on my TM90. The .m2ts file was 117 MB.

ClipWrap only converts the first minute of a video in unlicensed mode, so in the case of this sample video, it covered all of it.

I told ClipWrap to transcode the file to Apple Intermediate Codec (AIC), which is recommended to use for importing into iMovie (at least from what I read in ClipWrap forum). The conversion process took 1 min 53 seconds on my MBAir, which has 2.13ghz Core 2 Duo process, 4 GB RAM, and GeForce 320M Graphics. The .MOV file created was 691 MB

The file import into iMovie just fine.

Based on those test #'s, it appears that the transcoded file will be an average of 5.5-6x larger than the original .m2ts. 1080/60p records at 28Mbps, which is 3.5MB/sec. So that's about 210MB/minute or 12.6GB/hour. That would yield a transcoded .MOV of around 1.26GB/min or 75.6GB/hour. That's a lot of space. I did not out the file from iMovie to see what the final output video size was. (would take more time than I care to commit for my experiment)

Conversion times will be heavily hardware dependent. On something more powerful, you might get to a time factor that equates to 1 1/2 minutes for every minute of source material, maybe a 1:1 ratio.

An alternative to the above is to tell ClipWrap to "re-wrap" the file, and let iMovie transcode it. The rewrap took 4 seconds and the output file was only 139MB. That's more enjoyable. However, when I did the import into iMovie, it was estimating 15-20 minutes to bring the file is, as iMovie was now doing some form of transcoding. No clue what the file size would be on iMovie's transcode, but in theory, it should be of a similar size to what ClipWrap's transcoded file size was.

So, it's certainly doable to stick with recording in 1080/60p and use something like ClipWrap to convert to an intermediate file that can be mastered in iMovie, but it will require a good amount of "scratch disk" space for longer recordings, and it will require setting aside extra time to get that initial conversion so you can use iMovie.

From reading a little further in the ClipWrap forums, one of the ClipWrap supper people from ClipWrap says Final Cut Pro X ($299 in the app store) with a fast enough computer can handle using the "rewrap" files, and not need the transcoded files. I suspect this means that your only actual re-encoding would occur on final project output (assuming your edits required re-encoding). If you just wanted to chop a big recording into smaller ones, no re-encoding should be necessary. However, this same person does not that on slower computers or if you need to do a lot of heavy effects, you would want to use a transcoded file, and not a rewrapped file. One poster says that ProRes is the transcoding output of choice if using FCPX.

Pretty much summed it up with those first three words IMO

iMovie has extremely limited capabilities and is designed for the lowest common denominator user (nothing wrong with that), but it has has no regard for a user who wants a little more control over their world. As an example, when it comes to setting up a project, you have options for Aspect Ratio of 4:3 and 16:9, and Frame Rate of "30 fps NTSC", "25fps PAL" and "24fps Cinema". Nothing else to choose from for these settings.

It will natively handle 1080/60i without needing to transcode on import, but since there is no project settings to retain 60i footage (should you wish to do so), iMovie will not let you.

But, from what I've read, there are ways to trick iMovie into doing things it was not designed to do, and giving you more control. This guys book is supposed to be 'the bible" for using iMovie with modern HD camcorders: http://www.mindspring.com/~d-v-c/page1/page1.html. It appears that it can natively work with anything except 720/1080p50/p60, but due to limited project settings, it will force you into certain containers without workarounds.

I got a kick out of the first statement on the page from the link above... "The Ins and Outs of iMovie — Edition 4 for version 11 — is the perfect guide for those who want to use Apple's revolutionary iMovie". Revolutionary, snicker.

I took a few real world clips last night, indoors, low light (in my living room), full auto. i uploaded one of the short clips to Vimeo as-is (1080/60p) but it doesn't seem to want to play back. I thought Vimeo can take 1080/60p natively? Do I need to convert it to something else? If someone can give me a little info, I will get a file up so you can see.

Here is that real world low light TM90 video I was talking about.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cSuBZi5QCnk&hd=1

This was shot in iA mode. That room is about 14' across from couch to TV and about 18' wide. The only lights on are two 60w equivalent end-table lights, plus the light from the TV. It was night time outside.

iA pushed the gain up to 18dB. I played around a few times with manual and putting it down to 12dB but it was pretty dark that low, although it did look a lot less noisy. I will have to do some more tests, as this kind of indoor environment is very common in my house. I don't like turning on all the lights because it makes rooms hot :/