HDV production in Ghana etc.
- From: Moving Vision <mv@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- Date: Mon, 12 Dec 2005 11:10:30 +0000
Hello everyone, I'm back from a month in the Northern Region of Ghana, shooting a documentary about water and other issues in remote villages. We took two HDV cameras, a Z1 and an A1. Shot some twenty hours of HDV video, all but three on the Z1. Conditions were harsh, blistering heat, and humidity, fine red dust everywhere and carrying equipment over miles of bone shaking earth roads in a tonka toy of a crew cab pick up whose leaf spring suspension barely mitigated the pot holes.
Before I left, some of us were discussing the reliability of the Z1 and anticipating the outcome of the shoot. The Z1 performed faultlessly throughout with the exception of three recording glitches of a few frames each towards the last hours, mostly due to me not cleaning the heads once. I can't emphasis enough how important it is in these conditions to take every care to prevent the environment from getting into the camera. I always use white half inch cloth backed camera tape with its non destructive adhesive to seal completely around the tape loading door. I never change tape or open the tape compartment out doors or any place where the air is not clean and still. So no breakdowns at all and the pictures are lovely. No perceptible compression issues, motion is as smooth as any DV/DVCAM type. We've already produced some SD sequences for the news, down converting to DVCAM via the squeeze mode. In SD mode it's not as good as what I get out of a 790 Digi Beta, especially because of the relatively limited range of the fixed lens, but only the pedagogical would make a federal case of it. The HDV material though is something altogether different. I'm still happy to assert that in most respects it blows any SD format out of the water. Sound was recorded mostly through a Sennheiser K3/ME80 short shotgun mic fitted to an offset Bayer Suspension mount (I don't use the Z1's mic holder). The sound is excellent and even the music and singing has been recorded with a fidelity that sounds as good as any. The edited sequences have been dubbed to both DVCAM and DVD. The audio on both appears to be entirely undiminished despite the many protestations of sound geeks that HDV's MPEG 1 layer 2 audio is useless for broadcast work since compounded compression artefacts would make second or third generations unusable. I can only emphasise that we don't stay in the MPEG domain during post accept for play out to DVD.
Only used the little A1 for low key shoots. It shoots pictures that cut seamlessly with the Z1 except for it's even more limited lens range and weak lux 7 low light rating, though the very low noise auto gain does mitigate this quite well. The A1's single CMOS chip is an intriguing bit of technology. I understand the new Arriflex-Lockheed Martin 'Super' HD format and camera (allegedly equivalent to 5000 lines) uses three of them.
-- John Lubran .
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