Technology and Innovation

The most interesting question is: Why does a smaller, hdv tuner, AVCHD camera with, say, a chip that is 1/6″ in size, with over a million pixels packed onto it. have differences, both good and bad, versus a chip that is 2/3″ in size, but is only considered standard-definition with about 320.000 pixels?
In a small, high-definition-resolution chip, the pixels are smaller and packed more closely together to fit onto the chip, leading to a lower signal-to-noise ratio than a standard-definition chip would have achieved.

This is great for most situations; however, we think there’s room for a brighter light for those utilizing HDV camcorders in low-light situations. One drawback is its difficulty in connecting to our camcorder’s accessory shoe. A small plate that should slide firmly into the accessory shoe is a rotating one, and it is loose enough to cause some concern.

Auto exposure gave us accurate exposures for all normally-balanced scenes we shot. We could easily compensate for strongly backlit scenes by pressing the backlight button or switching to manual. If a subject is predominantly bright or dark, the AE shift does a good job adjusting for these extreme values.
You select white balance (WB) modes through menus. The default requires four steps, but you can move this and other buttons to an earlier menu page if you prefer. Our WB tests shooting a Macbeth ColorChecker chart revealed that manual WB is somewhat more accurate than auto. Manually white balancing provides a one-percent average variance from color neutral toward blue-green. Auto WB gave us a nine-percent average variance toward red-green. The included WB shift feature will get you even closer. The HC7 buffers its auto WB adaptation to different lighting conditions by taking about ten seconds to fully adjust.

There is a school of video asset organization that is comprised of a series of shoeboxes in the closet filled with random tapes. Hopefully, each tape has a label, probably hastily scribbled upon in the field. It doesn’t take long before such a system becomes unwieldy, reaching the point where locating clips takes up more time than editing.
Square Box Systems has come to the rescue with CatDV Pro. CatDV Pro creates and manages a searchable database of every clip that’s ever been digitized into your system. It can capture the clip’s metadata and thumbnail images, as well as a highly compressed preview movie. This allows you to view and store your assets, once your original footage has been taken offline.  The first step in organizing your footage is digitizing it into your computer. There are two ways of doing this with CatDV Pro. The first and most intuitive is to capture the entire tape in your editing software, then import that file into CatDV Pro. The second is to capture from within CatDV Pro itself. (This will require a third party VDIG driver if you’re on a PC, or the optional Live Capture Plus if you’re on a Mac.)
Bringing in a full length clip from Final Cut Pro was a snap, and the file imported easily into CatDV. The clips automatically separate into scenes using DV time stamp detection, or using CatDV’s own visual frame referencing algorithms. The DV detection was spot on, and the visual detection was remarkably close, requiring a tweaking of a few frames to get just right. However, it’s a huge help if you’re cataloging footage from analog sources. CatDV Pro can import and manipulate any QuickTime media codec, including QuickTime flavors of HDV and DVCPRO HD.