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XL2 or XL-H1


George Ebersole

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Heck, a good friend of mine still has a Canon XL1 that works great - he just doesn't use it for obvious reasons.

 

Heh, my Canon L-1 keeled over in the late 90s sometime. :rolleyes:

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They've been on dozens of flights, they've been thrown around in a little backpack the whole time. I've had them on boats, being splashed by salt water accidentally. I've been in the pool with water up to my shoulders, with the shoulder rig getting shots and being splashed of course. I've had them covered in dirt from my motocross video's. I've had them setup in the desert for long periods of time in 115 degree heat. I've been in the snow with both of them, shooting a friends snowboarding video. Both my cameras have been dropped as well, numerous times though most of the time I was there to dampen the fall.

 

It takes a licking and keeps on ticking ;) Very cool to hear about it's ruggedness.

 

Okay, here's my actual final question; can anyone recommend a sound-card? Should I go real high end for post? Or something that's kind of in the mid range, that'll deliver decent sound, but won't skimp on quality too much?

 

thanks all! :)

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It takes a licking and keeps on ticking ;) Very cool to hear about it's ruggedness.

 

Okay, here's my actual final question; can anyone recommend a sound-card? Should I go real high end for post? Or something that's kind of in the mid range, that'll deliver decent sound, but won't skimp on quality too much?

 

thanks all! :)

 

If you mean a sound card for your computer, there is really no need unless you're running special hardware. For example, if you need to plug an XLR into your PC. All motherboards have sound cards on them that are 5.1/7.1 and usually very good. If you really want an extra sound card, you can purchase a Sound blasters anything in the $30+ range that will be more than sufficient. If you need XLR and things like that into your computer, you might well need to go for the studio grade audio cards, which runs between $100 and $300.

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It takes a licking and keeps on ticking ;) Very cool to hear about it's ruggedness.

It doesn't have any dials, no knobs sticking out, nothing to catch. The display is recessed from the back, so if you place it flat on it's back, nothing sticks out. It's those little details which rock about the camera, other manufacturers have buttons/knobs and all sorts of things sticking out of the camera body.

 

 

Okay, here's my actual final question; can anyone recommend a sound-card?

What do you need a sound card for? You just need to hear what your mixing in whatever editing program you choose. That doesn't require anything fancy, unless you plan on doing surround mixes.

 

I do have a Kona card and balanced XLR outputs on my computer, but they're unnecessary.

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Back less than a decade ago (7 years, in fact), HD YouTube was a fancy new thing that no one thought would take off. 'Web video' was 480p at best, usually less - and highly compressed. Saying you don't see 1080p ever changing for web video is not a very careful thought.

Right, but the vast majority of content on youtube/vimeo is not 1080p. In fact, most people upload purposely in lower then HD quality, so they can sell their higher quality version to the public.

 

1080p streaming on Youtube also looks like complete crap. Even if you upload a Pro Res HQ file, it looks horrible. I've done side by side comparisons of the Pro Res final vs the youtube output and they look like completely different products. So real good 1080p online just doesn't exist unless you use a service provider like Netflix who can afford the bandwidth to push data. Youtube and Vimeo just don't have it and even though Vimeo is substantially better looking then Youtube, it's still not very good in the long run.

 

as internet bandwidth increases with new technologies like fiber optics

But none of that has actually happened. Fiber has been "promised" for over a decade and it's just not happening. The cost to put fiber on the pole is too great, people aren't willing to spend $200/month for internet service, they just aren't. The average bandwidth in this country is 12Mbps and that number hasn't changed in 15 years! The only reason it's that high is because in the big cities, internet speed is pretty decent. Everywhere else it sucks, so our average speed is brought down as a consequence.

 

Plus pole to home isn't the problem. The problem in this case is the source. There are too many people hitting the high traffic sites like youtube and vimeo. So the streaming suffers greatly and as a consequence, it appears as if our internet it slow, where in reality it's just the host.

 

As an IT professional, with more certifications then I fill a wall with, I've been in the big server rooms this country has and let me tell you something, even directly on the OC lines which run across the country, the max bandwidth is around 12MBps. So if you can imagine that's the main pipe's bandwidth, just imagine a few million people hitting that pipe at once.

 

 

4k delivery on the internet will soon become the new 'HD', with 'HD' falling to the side of 480p quality of YouTube. When will this happen? Who knows - I'd say within 5 years though. Youtube is already offering 4K playback on videos, and services like Netflix, Hulu, and Amazon are now demanding that all original material shot for them be delivered at 4k.

Just because you offer a service and think about the future in your own productions, doesn't mean the service works. Netflix 4k is a joke, even with a super fast 300Mbps pipe, it still takes quite a while to cache enough data to stream. Plus, it looks like poop! All the blacks are swirls of MPEG noise and all the bright areas have big rings around them from the 8 bit format. I've done many tests with house of cards in 4k and I've not been impressed at all.

 

The one thing you may not quite understand yet is; the studio's are not signing on to 4k distribution right now, they just aren't. Yes, there is a very limited amount of NEW releases on UHD BluRay, but the numbers are stagnant. Sony is trying to make it a new standard, but BluRay was a HUGE deal for the studio's already, they don't want to go back through the catalog and as you probably know, most of the films today are finished in 2k anyway. Right now for all intensive purposes, UHD is a dead format. All the hype has come and gone so quickly, people are already talking about 8k at the home.

 

So you can sit here and argue about it all day, but the proof is in black and white. Since the advent of UHD in the US, 2 years ago... there have been only 54 titles released in UHD BlurRay. Some of those titles aren't even feature films!

 

Until your local broadcaster is spitting out UHD, 1080p will be the industry standard.

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1080p streaming on Youtube also looks like complete crap. Even if you upload a Pro Res HQ file, it looks horrible. I've done side by side comparisons of the Pro Res final vs the youtube output and they look like completely different products. So real good 1080p online just doesn't exist unless you use a service provider like Netflix who can afford the bandwidth to push data. Youtube and Vimeo just don't have it and even though Vimeo is substantially better looking then Youtube, it's still not very good in the long run

 

This bothers me, because sometimes YouTube looks okay. Other times a video will say "HD" or "HiDef" or "Hi Quality" and even have the option to go to 720 or 1080, but all you wind up doing is getting a "hi def" image of low compression video.

 

I want to avoid that. I mean, it doesn't need to look crystal clear, but, well, you know, I want it to look decent.

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It always looks like crap... all of my videos look like garbage on youtube. I've tried dozens of different compression types, I've even tried upscaling but nothing really makes a difference. Honestly, for a while I was only uploading things at 720p because it didn't make any sense to do 1080p since it wasn't any better quality wise.

 

Same video same upload Youtube:

 

Vimeo:

 

Here is the original file compressed at an h264... it's a bit on the warm side for some reason.

http://tye1138.com/stuff/episode7.mov

 

The Pro Res HQ looks entirely different.

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YouTube is only able to show what is uploaded. Most of what is uploaded is crap, so.... As for SD stuff masking as HD, yeah - it happens. YouTube allows users to upload anything without a quality check. You can put a 480p video in a 1080p timeline and export it to MP4. When you upload it to YouTube, it's going to be 480p no matter what you set it as. Sometimes this a problem with people actually being sly, other times it's because people just don't know any better. It is YouTube, after all.

 

As for 1080p never looking good at all, I don't agree one bit. I have a load of very sharp, compression free 1080p video on YouTube. I have seen a ton of crap, but that does not mean YouTube HD is somehow magically inferior to the same file on a PC. Sure, a ProRes HQ file will look GREAT compared to an MP4... Would anyone really question this at all, or expect some other outcome?

 

But I cannot get behind the statement that all HD on YouTube looks bad. It might look bad to you, but that does not mean it looks bad to many people. Perhaps working with ProRes all day has jaded you to what HD should look like in a perfect, glass-house world? I know when I work with DNx files I'm amazed at the quality compared to similar stuff on YouTube - but then I understand the YouTube counterpart still looks just fine.

 

I watched both the Vimeo and YouTube versions of your video above - I found nothing at all wrong with the 1080p YouTube version. It looked, to me, identical to the Vimeo version. Because I'm on a slower connection (2Mbps) I will not download the ProRes, but I will assume it looks as good or better, which I would expect.

 

BTW) Youtube has a guide on the best specs for uploaded videos, including compression types, etc. You can search for it. If everything you upload looks bad, it leaves me to think you're not following their recommended technical specs. Choosing 'YouTube' from the Premier Pro output menu will never provide a great video.

Edited by Landon D. Parks
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A lot of the professionally managed channels on YouTube seem to get decent resolutions. So yeah, I think it's more a case of some (read that as a lot) of amateurs, real amateurs who have only home movie experience, not knowing what and how to upload.

 

Tyler; I did notice a partial resolution increase. The YouTube footage looked a little soft. And where I thought I could see more detail in the fabrics, skins and dirt track on the Vimeo sample, the color did look a little off. But I see your point.

 

Interesting.

 

Okay, well, I'm no there yet. I've got a short to shoot. Thanks everyone :)

 

p.s. no, no real SFX,...maybe one or two fades...maybe a dream sequence....possibly a ghost sequence, but no green screen, model shots or CGI (as if I could afford it anyway). I plan on using Adobe for post, Final Cut Pro ... whatever number they're on these days. thanks! :)

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  • 1 year later...

It always looks like crap... all of my videos look like garbage on youtube. I've tried dozens of different compression types, I've even tried upscaling but nothing really makes a difference. Honestly, for a while I was only uploading things at 720p because it didn't make any sense to do 1080p since it wasn't any better quality wise.

 

Same video same upload Youtube:

 

Vimeo:

 

Here is the original file compressed at an h264... it's a bit on the warm side for some reason.

http://tye1138.com/stuff/episode7.mov

 

The Pro Res HQ looks entirely different.

 

According to Peter Gregg, the only way to make it look good is to upload it in 1440p. Below that, the compression algorithm wreaks havoc with the image.

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