Canon HV20 on car mount

[Jack Kelly]

Hi there,

 

We're doing a documentary destined for broadcast here in the UK. This doc will include a lot of footage of cars and of people in cars - the doc is partly about cars. As always, there's very little money. We're thinking of purchasing a small car mount and a Canon HV20 to go on the car mount (we shoot most stuff on a Z1 or DSR-500). The kit has to be easy to travel with - it will be flown around the world quite a bit while we're shooting the doc.

 

We're probably going to buy the car mount listed at the top of this page.

 

Are there any issues we should be wary of? For example, will the vibration of the car cause lots of tape drop-outs and/or cause that nasty "jelly" effect you sometimes get when you expose a CMOS-camcorder (with nasty rolling shutter) to high-frequency vibration (as discussed at length here)?

 

Some example shot ideas:

 

1) Camera mounted on car bonnet, looking towards the windscreen for a two-shot of the driver and passenger.

 

2) Camera mounted on side of car, pointing forwards to get low-angle footage of the car driving along

 

3) Camera mounted on inside of the windscreen, pointing towards the driver with the driver's window in the background of the shot.

 

Any thoughts would be most welcome!

 

Many thanks,

Jack Kelly

London

Camera/Producer

[Phil Rhodes]

Yes it's a rolling shutter, and yes it is visible under some circumstances. In my experience, rolling shutter artifacts are particularly visible when the camera is subjected to vibration, exactly such as that produced by a car mount. I'd be careful to mount the camera in such a way as to minimise vibration, and I'd take that concern very seriously.

 

It's also quite hard to make an HV20 sit in manual exposure, but it can be done.

 

I'm pondering making a very small, portable uncompressed HDMI recorder for this sort of thing - give me a shout if you want.

 

Phil

[Jack Kelly]

Hi Phil - thanks loads for the reply. I'm a keen reader of your articles in Showreel. Great stuff.

 

Yes, the more digging I do, the more worried I'm getting about the HV20's rolling shutter in conjunction with a car mount. I'm starting to think it'd be quite daft to buy an HV20 for use on a car mount.

 

Instead of getting a cheap car mount and an HV20, we might instead get a more expensive car mount and use our FX1 / Z1. I am right in believing that both the Z1 and FX1s use CCDs instead of CMOS sensors, aren't I?

 

Many thanks,

Jack

[Phil Rhodes]

I'm not sure, but rolling shutter is not - as far as I know - an artifact intrinsic to any particular type of chip.

 

Phil

[Tom Lowe]

Make sure "image stabilizer" is OFF.

 

It just makes the image worse.