Hi yall!

The Panasonic AG-DVX100P really is one hell of a machine.

I've got my eyes set on it.

But!

The only thing bugging me with it is that format thingie. Apparently, it only does 4:3. I need widescreen.

Is this an issue, or can I get away with it in post, without any quality loss?

And I don't want to buy any adapters. Those things are expen$$$ive!!!

I'm looking forward to exchange with all you guys (and gals?) in the future!

Yeah it looks like a pretty sweet camera.

The only way to go to a widescreen aspect ratio without loosing resolution is to use an anamorphic lens or in the case of this camera an adapter. I know you said that you didn't want to use an adaptor but I'm not even sure if there is one available for this cam yet.

You can "fake" the widescreen look by masking the image in either the camera or in post. Of these two scenarios masking in post is much better because you have the ability to reframe shots... especially those hairy handheld shots!

If you mask the image you're losing resolution. There's no way around that.

Yeah, it makes sense...
I think I've read about an adaptor, either in dv.com's review, or on the reviewer's personal page about 24p (and the pana).

What was Panasonic thinking! Offering a film-like picture without the film aspect ratio?!? I think the excuse is price, keeping it below the 5000$US mark, but that's not good enough.

Oh well... time to browse ebay!

http://www.panasonic.com/PBDS/subcat/Products/cams_ccorders/acc/a_ag-dvx100.html

check out this page for the AG-DVX100's accesories.

See down there? "Wide Angle Lens Adapter - 440$"

ok. So it's not that bad.

(but I still gotta convert in canadian dollars, which bring it mucho grande)

I think they were thinking it wouldnt be true anamorhpic anyway, so whats the point? The Canon XL1 shoots in 16x9, but its not true anamorphic so its lame. I have always just cropped the picture for that letterbox look, and it works great. It takes alot less rendering time to remove image than to compress the entire thing anyway.
Just shoot a little bit wider than usual. If your using a monitor (which you probablly should) you can put tape on the top and bottom to get an idea of what the cropping will do. Once you get used to it, you can eye it up pretty doggone good. Trust me, with the image that cam spits out, youll want to use it even if it means cropping. Although, Panosonic is supposd to rlease a bigger brother to that cam that will shoot true anamorphic and allow the use of pro lenses. Yummy.
R. M.

"Luck, is when opportunity, meets preperation." "There are 3 sides to every story. Yours, mine, and the truth, and none of us are lying" -Robert Evans

Where did you hear about the release of the "bigger" brother? I am really really interested in looking into that... if you have any links off hand that would rock. thanks

If you don't look I'll force you to _=_

Nooo! Don't crop the image to widescreen!

You loose a shedload of detail and resolution out of your picture. Yes, you can reframe but it does have an effect on visual quality.

The best way to do things is to get an anamorphic lens with adaptor. If there's a 16x9 mode, use that but DON'T CROP!!

You can get a perfect 2.35:1 aspect by using both anamorphic lens with the 16x9 mode.

Richard Purves
One Man Band
omb@blueyonder.co.uk
http://www.omb.pwp.blueyonder.co.uk/

What are you talking about? Placing a black strip at the top, and bottom of your image does not mean you loose image quality, with the exception of the small portion you cover in black. But who cares to see that.

Now lets talk about true anamorphic. Of course, this is a better way to go, but dosent necessarily make sense on a small student project. One, you will either have to purchase, or rent the adapter. Not to bad, and makes alot more sense if your going to use it alot, but most wont. Will you be showing on a 16x9 TV or monitor? If your end is just a VHS copy of your film, might as well crop.

I have shot 16x9, and then compressed the image in Avid. The compressions render time took FOREVER, and (atkleast to me) it seemed I did loose some resolution. Maybe It was just me, but it was more trouble than it was worth, atleast for what I was doing. If you cant shoot true anamorphic, crop. If anamorphic is possible, go for it.
R. M.

"Luck, is when opportunity, meets preperation." "There are 3 sides to every story. Yours, mine, and the truth, and none of us are lying" -Robert Evans

quote:

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Placing a black strip at the top, and bottom of your image does not mean you loose image quality, with the exception of the small portion you cover in black. But who cares to see that.

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Yeah, my camera has a "letterbox" mode that puts the two bars on top and bottom of screen...doesn't effect quiality at all, just takes a small portion of the shot away...

TacoWagonProductions

"They look like psychos? Is that what they look like? They were Vampires. Psychos do not EXPLODE when sunlight hits them. I don't give a f*** how crazy they are!" - George Clooney in 'From Dusk Till Dawn'

Like I mentioned originally the only way to shoot a true wide aspect is to use an anamorphic lens or adapter. The reason you don't loose resolution is because the wider image is optically squeezed to fit on the entire surface of the ccd. Therefore you are using the full resolution of the ccd to capture the image instead of cropping off the top and the bottom of the image. With native 4:3 ccds you NEVER use the camera's 16:9 mode as the whole point of anamorphic lense is to optically squeeze the wider image onto the narrow ccd so that later you can go back and unsqueeze it without loosing resolution!

Like Tizzy said though anamorphic lenses (as with the xl1) or adapters (as with any other camera without removeable lenses) are very expensive.

So if you want the "look" of a wider aspect frame you have to crop.

You probably don't want to do this in the camera because by doing it in post you give yourself more options (reframing, etc) but whether you do it in post or in the camera you are still cropping the active resolution of the frame meaning the "wider" image is made up of fewer lines of resolution.

so, basically,

crop = resolution loss but cheaper than buying adapter/lens

adapeter/lens = costs more but better picture

The final answer will be decided whether you prioritize saving money or having a slighlty better picture.

Tizzy: what i'm on about with cropping is that you effectively are cutting the resolution from 720x576 (PAL) to 720x405. Show that on any kind of big screen and you'll notice the picture going smooth.

I was working as an assistant editor for a short film called "Making Tea for the Mob". I was asked to crop the picture using a mask because although they had shot 4:3, the director wanted 16:9. So I did ...

... cue the premiere. FNA Films had rented out The Tyne Theatre and projected said film ... and it looked horrible. I noticed that the other film they showed, "Roulette" which was filmed with the same camera (an XL-1) but with the 16:9 mode looked a lot sharper and more defined.

Two films: same D.o.P, same camera, same lighting rigs but two different shooting modes. The cropped one looked worse.

Richard Purves
One Man Band
omb@blueyonder.co.uk
http://www.omb.pwp.blueyonder.co.uk/

rjpurves's experience interested me so I decided to do a bit of digging.

http://www.adamwilt.com/DV-FAQ-etc.html#widescreen

Check out the section "Why should I care about 16:9?" for information about the best practices for shooting 16:9.

According to this site it turns out that rjpurves was right that when he said it was better to shoot in 16:9 mode on an xl1. I won't bother explaining it here as this site does an amazing job on its own.

The one thing that I'm still unsure about is whether shooting 16:9 on the camera when using an anamorphic lens is a good idea... anyone got any ideas... it would make sense to me to shoot 4:3.

Was it a pre designed "16x9" mask that you applied to crop the picture? If so, that was probablly the issue. I do mine by hand (so to speak) cutting out the top, and bottom, which are left black, and look like letter boxing.

My latest film "Intersection" was shown at a theater, on the big screen. Before it, ther were two different shorts, shot on the XL1, that played before mine and were not cropped. Mine looked 10 times better. The year before I had a short in that same festival, on the same screen, that I had shot on the XL1, in 16x9 mode, and compressed for playing. I didnt like the look at all. To me it seemed like I had lost picture quality, and color density after the compreshion. Just me experience.

You say they were shot on the same cam, with the same D.P., but were they the same tape stock? Just curious. Buying cheaper tapes means you may not get as clean a picture. There are alot of factors involved. I just found, after dojg both, that the cropping was much easier, and less time consuming, but I could be wrong. Ill check out that link.
R. "dosent have all of the answers, all of the time" Michael

"Luck, is when opportunity, meets preperation." "There are 3 sides to every story. Yours, mine, and the truth, and none of us are lying" -Robert Evans

I was just looking at the article sugggested, and stumbled across something. It states very clearly..

quote:

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The bad news is that most inexpensive DV cameras (including the VX2000 and XL-1s) do 16:9 the wrong way.

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Furthermore, it says..

quote:

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The "wrong way" is for the camera to simply chop off the top and bottom scanlines of the image to get the widescreen picture.

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It says nothing about cropping in post. The XL1 does exactly what he says not to do. It is adding its on black,and therfore loosing scan lines. If you shoot, 4:3, digitize your footage as such, then put black lines at the top, and bottom, you arent loosing any resolution, just some of your image (under the black lines) The issue with in camer is this...

quote:

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When you throw the switch on these cameras, the horizontal angle of view doesn't change, but the image is cropped at the top and bottom compared to the 4:3 image (it may then be digitally stretched to fill the screen, but only 75% of the actual original scanlines are being used).

The "wrong way" is wrong because the resultant image only uses 360 lines (525/59.94) or 432 lines (625/50) of the CCD instead of the entire 480 or 576. When this is displayed anamorphically on your monitor, the camera has digitally rescaled the lines to fit the entire raster, but 1/4 of the vertical resolution has been irretrievably lost, and the in-camera algorithms used to stretch the image often create ugly sampling artifacts.

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There ya go. Take it, or leave it. Believe me, from what Ive seen from the AG-DVX100, if you were to shoot 4:3, and crop the top and bottom (after lighting well, good camera placment, movment, ect..) you will blow away stuf shot on the XL1, or atleast, look alot more "film like".
R. Michael
Tizzy Entertainment

"Luck, is when opportunity, meets preperation." "There are 3 sides to every story. Yours, mine, and the truth, and none of us are lying" -Robert Evans

Firstly, the XL-1 does an anamorphic like 16:9 compression DIGITALLY. This is why the viewfinder suddenly appears squashed when that mode is activated.

Secondly, the company I worked for on those two films did use the same tape stock from the same supplier. (www.first4media.co.uk who incidentally are excellent in the UK).

Thirdly, if you crop the picture in post as I had to, it's going to decrease pic resolution and make it look awful. 16:9 modes on a 4:3 CCD (e.g XL-1) are better, but still nowhere near as good as a true anamorphic lens.

If you can get a camera with a true 16:9 CCD (good luck), then you're laughing.

So, for my last film shoot (pics available on my new site!) we used a combination of Canon XL-1 and Panasonic DVCPRO gear. I got better looking pics with the XL-1 in 16:9 mode than with the Panasonic, purely because the Oanasonic cropped a 4:3 image into 16:9.

Cropping sucks.

Richard Purves
One Man Band
omb@blueyonder.co.uk
http://www.omb.pwp.blueyonder.co.uk/

Oh, and I dare say you're right about that camera getting better results than the XL-1 ... from what i've seen of your screen grabs it does look good.

Richard Purves
One Man Band
omb@blueyonder.co.uk
http://www.omb.pwp.blueyonder.co.uk/

You are right about the article... the camera does internally chop off the top and bottom of the image... all of the native 4:3 camera do! But you have to keep on reading man! Don't just read the article until you've found something that supports your arguement (btw I agreed with you until I read the WHOLE article).

The difference is not in the way in which the camera crops the image the difference comes in the way it compresses the image when it goes to tape. Since it digitally squeezes the image to fill the 4:3 aspect it utilizes all of the DTC blocks when it goes to tape. If you look at the examples on the site that this article links to you can see that it results in a slight improvement in vertical resolution.

If you read to the end of the article the author suggests that this is primarily due to the pixel shift technology on the canon cameras (xl1, gl1/gl2) and that this solution doesn't work as well with sony's cameras for example (vx1000/2000, pd150, etc)

But we were talking about the xl1 specifically right??

So at the very bottom of the article he states that anamorphic lens is the best (obviously), next is 16:9 on a canon or some panasonics, next is 4:3 with cropping in post, and last is 16:9 on sony and other brands.

Hey this guy seems to know what he's talking about and seems to have the proof to back it up.

The other thing is that Richard is using PAL camera (I think that's what he said) and I'm guessing that you are using an NTSC camera. That might also have an effect on the results that you guys are seeing. Just a thought

Yes, i'm English and so I use PAL equipment. I've tried to take this into account whenever i've posted messages on here.

This may sound arrogant, but PAL gives better results especially when blowing up to film. The NTSC 29.97fps seems unwieldly to me compared to PAL's 25fps.

You can argue relative merits between NTSC DV's res at 720x480 and PAL DV at 720x576.

Adam Wilt really does know what he's on about. I've learned more from that site then I did in two years of film school.

Richard Purves
One Man Band
omb@blueyonder.co.uk
http://www.omb.pwp.blueyonder.co.uk/

hey man it's not arrogant... PAL is superior to NTSC. I think everyone here and in the industry agrees on that front.

It was your comment about the benefits you saw to shooting in 16:9 on the camera (well on a specific camera) that made me think twice.

Hey it's ok if we can't agree on this issue... in reading more I've learned that most facilities doing blow ups of dv to 35mm can't even agree on this issue and it seems that while some of them recommend shooting 16:9 on cameras like the xl1 others don't.

In the end it's totally subjective anyway... just shoot the way you think looks best. I've always shot the same way Tizzy does but after hearing your experience and reading a bit I think I'll start experimenting with 16:9 in the camera.