Canon's Legria HFS11

When we tested four of the best AVCHD palm-corders (Issue 3) the Canon Legria HFS10 won by a nose. We loved the image quality, the fantastic autofocus, the neat styling and well thought out user interface.

Just a couple of months on and Canon have tweaked the formula, added one and released the HFS11.

Externally the camera is pretty much identical to its predecessor, which is no bad thing. It looks uber-cool and is light but solidly built. There are just two major tweaks inside the pretty package, and a few minor ones.

The first tweak is a doubling of the internal video memory to 64GBytes – enough for over 5 and a half hours of recording even at the highest possible quality (1080p/25 at 24Mbps).  Of course, there’s an SDHC card slot as well.

Canon have also improved the Optical Image Stabilisation – it is now pretty amazing. With a little care you can get a pretty steady shot right at the long end of the fabulous 10x zoom lens.

The HFS10 suffered from bad picture noise in low-light scenes – Canon have always had a pretty laid-back approach to noise reduction, preferring it to the blurring effect that too much software noise reduction exhibits. The HFS11 seems to have much lower intrinsic noise in darkened rooms than its predecessor without apparently resorting to just fuzzing everything out.

Other than that, the HFS11 carries over the features from the HFS10 that makes it the best in its class, from Canon’s pseudo-progressive scan to pro features like zebras and peaking focus assist. The progressive scan is interesting – it slightly reduces vertical resolution – like other Canon camcorders – hinting at some line doubling going on, but in real life (if you aren’t filming a static scene on a tripod) you get better apparent resolution using progressive than interlace. It’s also worth mentioning again Canon’s amazing autofocus, helped by the contrast detection dohicky on the front of the camera. It snaps into focus better – a LOT better – than any other camera in its class – or any other class come to that.

The HFS11 is available at a street price of about £1000 inc VAT, about £200 more than its predecessor. The new OIS and better low light performance just about justify the price difference but it’s still an expensive camera.

The DVD covers the additional equipment you’ll need, from lenses, viewfinder accessories and ND filters to shoulder mounts, matte boxes and follow focuses. Philip also demonstrates the menu settings for best footage capture, shooting styles and there is a set of DVD extras on post-production workflow.

The presentation is good, though you sometimes wish Mr. Bloom would get to the point a bit quicker (but that’s what the Fast Forward button is for, right?). The points, once reached, are both insightful and useful and – perhaps the best thing about the DVD – Philip Bloom’s enthusiasm, the footage shown from the camera and the interesting tidbits inspire the viewer to get the best from their own camera.

The down side is the price – £70 ($120) is a little eye-watering for an instructional DVD – though if it saves you buying the wrong bit of kit or wasting a day shooting, the expense should be reasonably easy to justify.

Adam Garstone

Arri's Alexa CMOS Sensor, now appearing in their new digital cameras, out next year

Film and television are, perhaps, two of the few places where C.P. Snow’s ‘Two Cultures’ actually do communicate. An extraordinary amount of science and technology is required to produce these defining art forms of the 20th Century. Albert Einstein is best known, of course, for a couple of theories of relativity, but this work was far too controversial at the beginning of the last century for an physician called Allvar Gullstrand, an influential member of the Nobel Committee. So, despite 60 or so nominations for relativity, in 1922 the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences awarded Einstein the 1921 Nobel Prize for his discovery of the law of the photoelectric effect, kind of as a consolation prize – we can thank a virtually unknown physicist called Carl Wilhelm Oseen for brokering that particular deal. Einstein gave the considerable sum of money he received to his ex-wife.

Albert’s Nobel prize winning theory gets to help the modern day image-maker too. Imaging sensors use a variation of the photoelectric effect he described and here, too, there are developing two cultures – those who follow the Charge Coupled Device (or CCD) and those true believers in CMOS.

The first step in either type of imager is to convert the light (photons) falling onto the chip into an electric charge (electrons). This requires a lot of difficult quantum mechanical calculations, so you can thank Einstein that he started the ball rolling with the sums. Fortunately, the photon’s don’t care – they hit some silicon and raise the energy of some of its electrons enough to free them and we have our charge. The more light that hits the silicon, the more electrons we get. A bigger bit of silicon (i.e. a bigger light sensitive area) will give us more charge for a given intensity of light as there are more photons hitting its surface – like the difference between catching rain in a sail or in a handkerchief. In principle, both CCDs and CMOS sensors convert photons to electrons the same way – the differences come in what happens to the electrons afterwards, and in the implications that has to the way the chip are made.

The little light sensitive pixels (photosites) in our sensor will continue to convert photons to charge as long as light falls on them, which is why digital stills cameras still tend to have mechanical shutters. The CCD’s electronic shutter works by transferring the charge in each pixel to a storage bin next to the light sensitive area. The chips are arranged so that charge can be passed from bin to bin until it gets to an amplifier at the edge of the chip where the charge is converted to a voltage.

CMOS chips transfer the photosite’s charge to a capacitor and then convert the charge on the capacitor to a voltage by having amplifiers right next to each pixel. Their ‘shutter’ is a switch between the photosite and the capacitor.

But which is better?

CCD image sensors have been around a lot longer than CMOS ones, so the technology is better developed. However, the techniques use to make CCD chips don’t lend themselves to making all the other digital gubbins that constitutes a modern image sensor. As a result, the analog to digital convertors, clock generators and so on are separate chips – which puts the overall system cost up. CMOS, on the other hand, is the technology used for most silicon chips, so a CMOS sensor chip includes everything you need to get a digital image data stream, reducing cost. They also use less power, so your batteries last longer.  There is a common myth that, because CMOS chips use the same technology as, say, the microprocessor in the computer I’m typing this on, they can be made on the same production line, further reducing their manufacturing costs. In fact, that is rarely true – the massive size of sensors and some of their manufacturing requirements tend to restrict them to dedicated production lines.

Talking of myths, CMOS sensors all exhibit ‘rolling shutter’ artefacts right? These artefacts are caused when a sensor doesn’t grab the charge state of all it’s pixels simultaneously, but instead transfers the charge line by line, so the pixels you are seeing at the bottom of the image were captured later than those at the top. In fact, there is nothing inherent in CMOS technology sensors that precludes the simultaneous capture of the whole frame, however this requires more transistors in the ‘switch’ between the photosite and the capacitor. That means that, for each pixel on the sensor the photosite must be smaller (to make room for those extra transistors). A smaller photosite is less sensitive to light than a larger one, so a CMOS sensor with a rolling shutter has better low light performance than a similar sensor with a full frame shutter. A stills camera has that mechanical shutter, so the designers will go for a rolling electronic shutter to improve the sensor’s ISO rating. The decision is harder with the CMOS sensor in a video camera. Most manufacturers choose low light performance and use a rolling shutter, but before you condemn the decision, remember that the shutter in a film camera also ‘rolls’ across the frame. In fact, at high shutter speeds (nowadays above about 1/250th), the same is true of a stills camera, as shown by Jacques-Henri Lartigue’s famous 1913 photograph ‘Car Trip, Papa at 80 kilometres per hour’.

For a given photosite size, CMOS and CCD sensors are now of a very similar quality, in terms of dynamic range (the range of light intensity, from black to white, that the sensor can capture) and signal to noise ratio, but CMOS sensors suffer from another image distortion artefact. Remember that each pixel has its own amplifier? Unfortunately, manufacturing tolerances tend to mean that the gain of each amplifier is slightly different, so exposing the sensor to a uniform grey won’t produce a uniform grey output. CCD’s aren’t immune from exposure artefacts either, of course. In a CCD sensor, if too much charge accumulates in a photosite it can leak into the adjacent pixels – because of the way the chips are designed, this usually appears as vertical or horizontal ‘blooms’ around highlights.

In both CMOS sensors and CCDs some of the silicon area of an image sensor is taken up by electronics that isn’t photo-sensitive – the transfer channels and anti-blooming gates in a CCD and the switching transistors and amplifiers in CMOS. Manufacturer’s often place an array of micro-lenses over the pixels to focus more of the available light onto the light sensitive part of the chips in an attempt to increase the overall sensitivity of their sensors. These work well when light hits the sensor at right angles, but towards the edge of the sensor it is less effective, resulting in vignetting.

CCD image sensors have been around for 40 years or so, but in only about 10 years, CMOS sensors have nearly caught up – the general consensus is that CCD still has a tiny edge in image quality, but each new generation of CMOS brings massive improvements. In the past the choice was clear – for quality imaging you use CCDs. At the current state of the art the choice is less clear and you would expect the next few years to edge CMOS ahead of CCD.

Either way, the ex Mrs. Einstein was very happy with Albert’s Nobel Prize, though she never really got the credit she deserved. It turns out Al was terrible at maths and got his (then) wife to give him a hand. Relativity in action, perhaps?

Nikon's new D3s still only offers 720p but with some manual exposure

The UK launch of the Nikon D3s initially presented a disappointment for fans of its video function. It was still only 720p at 24fps, it was still using MJPEG as a CODEC and it was still only a 2GB file size limit on a clip per clip basis. But having talked with Nikon’s product managers we came away from the event quite excited about what Nikon could bring out a little bit further along the product road map.

Asked why there was no 1080p yet, the reply was a honest one, “It would be a compromise for this particular sensor set up, you wouldn’t get the length of clip or the performance”. The fact that they were honest enough to see this as a compromise on top of the obvious compromise of DSLR hybrids makes us confident that Nikon are hungry to improve their video offering. They readily admit that Japan is hungry for feedback and the D3s is full of ‘tuned’ features requested from still photograpy users, at the moment.

So what does the D3s offer in the way of video. Apart from the 720 / 24p the main pull is the ISO. You can use the D Movie function all the way to the ridiculous 102400 Hi3 setting, whether you would want to is another matter. A video demo at the launch showed some footage of a bear walking in the woods, it looked very noisy and we wondered why Nikon would want us to see it. The fact was that it was shot two hours before sunrise in near darkness was interesting but you couldn’t help feeling this was ISO demonstrated inspite of good content.

You can also dial in aperture settings across the range but are stuck with only a true 24p, which is still better than Canon’s 5D MkII’s 30p stand off. The camera now has a dedicated Live View button which can be assigned to a button on the front of the camera and there is a reduced flicker mode for the LCD screen. You can also trim the video in camera but that function is already on the D300s camera.

It’s not however manual exposure as with Canon’s EOS 7D. You can control the aperture by selecting it in either manual or aperture mode. The iso and shutter will vary to take this into account. The user can increase and decrease the exposure control by 3 stops and they can also apply an exposure lock during the d-movie.

There is also a JPEG grab feature from the MJPEG stream if you need to quickly get a grab to someone who can’t wait for you to get the footage in to a NLE. And don’t forget the size of the sensor is still bigger than the RED One’s at 36×23.9mm which is only slightly smaller than Canon’s 5d MkII.

You also have stereo sound which has automatic gain control but also manual from within the camera and a full resolution HDMI out put from the C connector on the side, which may also be interlaced but we are trying to clear that one up! We do know that as soon as you plug in an external monitor the LCD screen shuts down to the lack of processing to supply two monitors.

The D3s is for still photographers would might want to shoot some video. The appeal of web video has dawned on Nikon with some of photographer Bill Frakes’ footage from Sports Illustrated being seen 60 million times online. This is nearly 10 times the people who saw Bill’s stills from the same event.

Our conclusion will be complete when we review the D3s but in the meantime, for Nikon, I think it’s watch this space. Without their own camcorder market to cannibalise this sleeping tiger could still surprise everybody.

Short BBQ video testing out the Canon 500D 720p mode with Nikon 50mm 1.8 lens and looks from Photoshop Extended. Camera and lens together you can get for around £650 plus £8 adapter.

We have started a new HD Channel on Vimeo for the results of our tests when we review equipment. We will also put other people’s test on there if it makes sense to do it (Like the BSC cameras tests). Because these videos are a result of reviews we don’t pretend that there are any kind of entertainment but some of them might be fun.

The HD Week – What’s In HD User Magazine Issue 03 by MM Pubs

iMovie 09. Finally usable...

At last! Apple has installed some credibility in to their junior editor.  iMovie ‘08 was a brave new world for their editor which turned out to be an alien one for many of the previously happy users. Apple even doubled installed the newly designed iMovie ‘08 with the old, almost predicting the unrest to come.

iMovie ‘09 is the same core editor but now has features which most editors already have as standard. You’ve now got a proper trim (precision) editor and you can also fade in and fade out the audio which unbelievably you couldn’t do previously. Apple are definitely playing catch up as you also get new stabilisation features and some pre-set filters which are pretty standard fayre.

There is some sympathy for Apple with their most basic of editors. With Final Cut Express and Final Cut itself flying above it what do you put into iMovie and what do you leave out? But I suppose that is taken care of with their pricing, iMovie is bundled with iLife so you could see it as a freebie.
iMovie ‘09 is definitely the software ‘08 should have been and is unsurprisingly a joy to use, almost expected with an Apple branded product. But for me the best thing is the new Maps feature. Remember the way Steven Spielberg used a maps scene to transition locations in the Indiana Jones movies and you’ve got the Maps feature. It works beautifully and has a real wow factor when played as part of a travel video.
For: Finally acts as a standard editor. Maps feature is sublime.
Against: Not enough audio parameters in-built, needs Intel Macs.

FX Factory Pro Plug-ins

I’m always a bit nervous about plug-in filters – most of them don’t seem to be terribly useful unless you’re producing budget game shows for the Far East. You know the kind – pink neon glows and exploding stars made of orange chrome. FXFactory Pro from Noise Industries, however, contains quantity and quality. Compatible with Final Cut Studio (FCP and Motion), Final Cut Express and After Effects, Pro includes 145 customisable filters, generators and transitions along with a maintenance application. Particular favourites of mine from the package include the flash transition – a great way of getting into and out of archive footage – led lights, just ‘cos it looks cool, and upscale, which resizes video but also has some edge detection and sharpening built in. There are far too many plug-ins to list here, but check out the website at www.noiseindustries.com. You can download and try FXFactory Pro free and fully operational for 15 days too.

Is this the original 'celeb' cam? The Mino Flip HD

Rock stars, pop personalities and movie stars all seem to love Flip Video camcorders, judging by the snaps on their websites. They’re just so simple (the camcorders, not the celebrities…) with a minimal user interface and a funky little flip-out USB connector for getting the footage into your computer and straight up to YouTube. Flip have now released the Mino HD, which ups the original’s VGA video capture to 1280x720p. There is 4GB of internal memory (no option to add any, simplicity is the key here) which gives you about an hour of recording. There is a miniscule, low res screen, simple transport controls and tiny, tinny speakers – disappointingly there isn’t a headphone socket.
Neither is there any form of image stabilisation or optical zoom, though there is a limited digital zoom. You hold the Flip very much like you use a mobile ‘phone’s camera – in fact, the capture technology is basically the same as a ‘phone and mobile manufacturers like Samsung are starting to integrate the same 720p capability into their products. Image quality of the VGA res Flip was pretty comparable to mobile ‘phones and the HD unit is better, though it’s still, basically, ‘phone quality’. You’ll need plenty of light and a steady hand to get anything usable. Personally, I’d put the £170 purchase price towards a high-end mobile phone and suffer the indignity of having to plug in a USB cable to off load the footage, but then maybe Hugh Heffner’s, er, ‘girlfriends’ know something I don’t.