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Slugline. Simple, elegant screenwriting.
Red Giant Color Suite, with Magic Bullet Looks 2.5 and Colorista II
Wednesday, May 2, 2007 at 11:47AM 
Amazon has lowered their price on the Canon HV20 to $950, and if you sign up for a trial of Amazon Prime you get free 2-day shipping. Damn.
Reader Comments (15)
Hey Stu,
What are the specs of the other equipment seen in that picture with the HV20?
Hi Craig,
That's the http://www.redrockmicro.com/micro35.html" REL="nofollow">Redrock Micro M2 adapter, which comes with the rails and baseplate (Indie bundle, $995). They used some kind of spacer to make the camera sit on the baseplate correctly. BYO lenses. The http://www.cinevate.com/catalog/product_info.php?products_id=32" REL="nofollow">Brevis is another popular choice.
With this rig, the image will be upside-down and backwards. You can fix half that problem with http://www.cinevate.com/phpBB2/viewtopic.php?t=518" REL="nofollow">this trick or fix it completely with an external LCD display.
The HV20 has an amazing picture besides doing 24p. Also, Blackmagic has one and and trying to get it working with their HDMI capture card which would rock.
Word WesV,
There's a thread on the status of Blackmagic support for HV20 on the Rebel Café:
http://rebelsguide.com/forum/viewtopic.php?t=294
Also, if you want to see some amazing HV20 footage shot with the Brevis adapter, check out:
http://www.cinevate.com/phpBB2/viewtopic.php?t=559
Stu,
Have you read the comment in the original HV20 thread about the 'rolling shutter' issue? I'd imagine that with your affinity for creating coolness in post that would worry you a little...
Exactly - according to russ anderson who writes syntheyes eyes he bought it as a cheap way of getting really nice footage and it broke his heart - it is indeed a rolling shutter which apparently means that the pixels are being continuously sampled and stored from top to bottom on the shutter rather than having the entire sensor and then the full image stored. What ends up happening is that if you were to do a pan across some vertical lines, the top of the lines get sampled and stored before the bottom of the lines and as you pan, the lines will appear to bend or drag behind towards the bottom. Totally fine for home movies but if you're trying to feed it through a 3d camera tracker then it's never going to get a solid result - exact same if you do a zoom and so on.
It's a real shame, I'm doing a test ad with a photographer who wants to direct and we could have bought one of these for the green screen element shoot and have a camera to use after rather than renting a hdcam for the day :/
Sander de Regt, would you mind to provide a link to said thread?
I wonder what that rolling shutter problem means.
Daniel,
joconnell.ie pretty much explains it, but the original threas can be found here:
http://cybermessageboard.fatcow.com/ssonte/viewtopic.php?t=478
Nicely put joconnell.ie. Scarily, the Red One footage available for download at red.com exhibits the same artifacting.
I definitely plan on doing some tests with 3D tracking on some HV20 footage. I'll keep you all posted on the results!
Hi Stu,
I'm just getting into indie flic-making and have held off buying the Canon XL2 because of the price. I know the XL2 has more features but the HV20 has Hi-def. What are the chances of getting a movie on the big-screen using the HV20? Do you recommend it to shoot a serious flic?
Apparently the red cmos is a bit differet according to the syntheyes discussion so hopefully it won't have the same issues. This is the link - join it together in your address bar, the comments seem to be truncating it.
http://cybermessageboard.fatcow.com/
ssonte/viewtopic.php?t=478
http://cybermessageboard.fatcow.com/ssonte/viewtopic.php?p=1880#1880
The post has been updated with some footage - ouch! is all I can think of.
i was just about to link to russ' warning (was reading this post in rss form, didn't see the comments yet) when i saw that you guys were all over it. totally unbelievable that such a massive flaw would be designed into a camera. *rolling shudder*
I'm wondering what your thoughts are on this Stu? Does this in your mind eliminate the hv20 as a viable rebel cam for someone that would intergrate cg elements into live action or incorporate fast moving cam motion?
-George
I'm not that worried guys—stay tuned, I'll blog about it soon.