Camera Review - Canon HV20

by Sim Warren

1st LOOK:

Having owned larger, more expensive camera’s in the past – buying the HV20 wasn’t, at first, an easy decision.

I work full time as a Video Producer for a Kent based film production company, so looks and first impressions are very important when shooting for or with a client. I’ve seen camera crews turn up on a shoot in a vinyl branded van or lorry unravelling case after case of production gear, but when it comes down to the filming, they’ve only used their standard kit.  Camera, tripod legs, mic/boom a reflector and monitor. Was the van and the red carpet really needed? Perhaps.

So why am I mentioning all this, well the Canon HV20, for those in the industry worried about impressions, probably isn’t going to tickle your fancy.  It’s the size of a small bag of sugar, and it’s sleak silvery shiney surface will help you blend in with the amateur’s and tourists.  Maybe that’s what you’re after?  Although this unique little camera can be used like lego to add mic’s,lights,lenses,dof adapters,rail supports and more, I use this camera at home, for personal projects, so I have nobody to impress only impressions to be made from my finished work.

WORKING:

The HV20 has two menus. The first is accessed from a rear joystick to monitor manual exposure and sound levels. The second hosts controls such as shutter speed - and aperture-priority, cine and scene modes, along with image effects, white balance presets and still-image mode. Alongside CineMode the HV20 shoots 24p for those looking to imitate film. To a professional in the field, they’d question the quality compared to real film, but to others none the wiser this little gem really is the icing on the cake.

I use manual focus for all of my filming, but one thing I’ve found when testing out the Instant Auto Focus mode, especially in low light is that the camera sometimes struggles to keep it’s focus. Fortunately the Instant AF uses a special sensor on the front of the tape compartment that measures the distance to your subject, so if it does lose focus, it’s able to rescan the focus very quickly.

The HV20 boasts a 3-megapixel, 1/2.7-inch CMOS sensor just behind the lens of the camera to record in HDV at 1,920 horizontal and 1,080 vertical pixels. You also have the option to shoot still images and SD material, but the camera will downscale this material to as low as 2.07 megapixels for 1920×1080 16:9 still images.

The life of one BP-2L13 battery is about 65 minutes, so I would highly recommend purchasing some spares if your planning any long shoots or holidays.  This is where I buy my spare batteries from: HV20/HV30 Batteries.
At 69mm the LCD screen is moderately sized displaying a 211 pixel resolution. With it’s playback options on the bottom of the screen I do find myself pinching the buttons a bit too hard and I worry about damaging the screen, it would be nice to see the playback functions on the top of the camera out of the way of the LCD.

RESULTS:

To anyone looking to enter the HD world, at under £600 this is an excellent introduction to film making and the results speak for themselves.

Take a look at some videos shot with the HV20.

Shot by Sim Warren: Twoneil DOF adapter: Canon HV20

 Shot by Sim Warren - With DIY Track & Dolly.  Track & dolly article here.

Http://www.editcrunch.co.uk

Basic Colour Correction - By Si Cox

 Introduction

There is alot to know about colour correcting your film, but over a series of lectures, I’m going to go through some of my techniques, workflows and tools I use on a day to day basis.

 In the following steps I’m going to be concentrating on adjusting an image to increase the contrast. This is usually one of the first steps you’ll take when starting out on your colour correction. I’ll be making my correction using Apple Color, but many NLE’s have similar tools to do the same job. As you do more and more colour correction you might find other ways to do the same task, which is fine, its all about finding a workflow which is best suited to you.

 An image is broken down into 3 tonal ranges. Shadows, Midtones & Highlights. We will be adjusting each one to adjust our contrast, starting with the shadows (or blacks, pedestal, lift - various names, same meaning), then working on the highlights (whites, gain) then finally the midtones (gamma, mids).

In your chosen application, either navigate to the controls or add a 3 way color corrector to your footage. You should now see 3 coloured wheels, each coupled with a brightness control either around the edge or along side. This is what you’ll be using to make your corrections.

Once you have you image to be corrected open and ready, start by looking at the waveform monitor and have it set to Luminance.

At the bottom of the waveform, is 0. This is black. At the top is 100 and this is white. What we are going to do is make sure that the darkest areas of our images (the shadows) sit on or near 0, and that the brightest parts of our image (the highlights) are on or near 100 and the rest of the image is nicely in between. Now is a good time to note that going over or below these values will send your image out of Broadcast Safe areas, which will cause you problems later down the pipeline, so its good to get in the practice of getting your image between 0-100. I’ll do another one of these on that later though..

 So looking at this image (Im using an image courtesy of www.redrelay.com I believe - a very good resource for RED footage), you can see by looking at it that it looks somewhat flat. You can double check this now by looking at the waveform monitor.

As you see, the dark areas of the image are sitting up and around 11, the midtones are sub 50 and the highlights are ranging from 80 upward to 100. Starting with the shadow control start lowering them until the very bottom of the image starts touching 0. Be careful not to crush them, otherwise you’ll begin to lose detail you might need. If your going for a crushed black look, you can do this later, but for now we’re concentrating on balancing the image.

Shadow Adjustment

So now you’ll see that your image has got a whole lot darker, dont worry, we’ll fix this. When adjusting each tonal range, they also effect the other tonal ranges, so you need to work them against each other, which is why control surfaces are a better way to do such corrections, as you can adjust all 3 at once, rather than one at a time and having to keep going back and forth. Ayway, now your blacks are sorted, next we’ll pull the highlights up toward 100. Keeping an eye between the waveform and the monitor, raise your highlights til the brightest areas are touching 100.

Highlight Adjustment

A little better, but not there yet. Have a look back at your shadows, they will have raised slightly, so you need to go back and lower back to where they were. So now we have our shadows and highlights sorted, the image still looks a bit darker, so turn your attention to the midtones. For the purpose of this example, we’re gonna be raising the midtones. So using your midtones control, raise the mids until they sit roughly between 30 and 70.

Midtone Adjustment

Almost there. Again, your shadows and highlights will have been adjusted follwoing that correction, so go back and fix those until your image looks good to you. I personally like to keep images rich, so never go to high with midtone adjustments, but its a personal taste thing.

Final Image

So now if you go back and forth between the orginal image and the corrected image, you’ll see we have nice deep shadows, rich midtones and bright whites.. Checking this with the waveform monitor you can see just how much we stretched out the image to give it some life.

 And thats pretty much the first thing i do when getting an image. First eyeball it, then check what your seeing against the waveform and start correcting. Within a short amount of time this process will take you little time at all, and even quicker if you work off a control surface.

 Thanks for reading. Any questions please ask.

Si Cox

http://www.editcrunch.co.uk

Jamin Winans - The short film from Jamin Winans about a mysterious DJ who is sent to a busy city block to mend a series of tragic events that occur in our everyday lives. Winner of over 40 film festival awards worldwide.

Did you know just how much our cameras struggle to do a simple task like make a white bit of paper look white?

Video camera’s read light in one way only.  They dont adapt like our eyes do, cameras need to be programmed to know what it right and what is wrong.   If you look through the viewfinder of a camera indoors a white object in the shot will appear an orangey colour due to the surrounding tungsten lights we use in our houses.  White objects under the sunlight outdoors will show up a bluey colour.  So we need to program our camera so that it can understand the the correct colours in the shot based on the surrounding light sources.  The best colour to use for this is white.  Hence - White Balance.   

A white peice of paper indoors will appear yellowy orange until you’ve told the camera that white shouldn’t look yellow, it should look white!  You do this by going to your manual white balance settings and you’ll find a manual one push button setting which you need to press and you’ll instantly see the change. 

White balance is measured in K after Kelvin so on some video cameras you might have a 3200k display setting for example.  You dont really need to worry about the number of Kelvin you have unless perhaps you’re filming a multi camera shoot, in which case you might need to discuss with the other camera operator the Kelvin reading they got. 

Alternatively you have a series of white balance presets that work brilliantly, but are never going to be exactly correct unless you manually white balance for your surroundings.  If you move from one room in a house to another you might need to re-white balance.  For example a bedroom into a kitchen.  The lighting will most likely be different.  If you move from indoors to outdoors or vice versa you will certainly need to white balance.  Unless you’re lazy and you use the presets.

The blue coloured photo on the left is an example of not having set the white balance to read white in outdoor light.  Before I took this shot the camera was still set to white under tungsten light (indoors), so whilst outside, I pointed the camera at something white (A white van that drove past) pressed the one push preset button and blamo.  The results are in the photo on the right.

http://www.editcrunch.co.uk

There’s a glitch in the system!    Apple have not been able to create a cure for this annoying problem with the H.264 codec.  The problem is that when you export films using the H.264 codec you will/may notice a gamma blow out look.  The colours will be faded and less rich.   Whilst we don’t have a fix, we have a great work around.  Using Quicktime or your editing software export tools, you need to choose the Brightness mode from the Filter tab and decrease the brightness to -7.   This will balance out the gamma loss and ensure that visually your films are not lacking in colour.  We’ll update everybody when we find a fix.  

http://www.editcrunch.co.uk

Organise your projects.  Get into good habits before it’s too late!  When I start a new project. This is what I do, I create a new folder called    “yourprojectname”.   Inside this folder I create 7 new folders.  Cutz, Bitz, Rushes, Music, GFX, VO, Scripts.  Obviously these names will change depending on your needs, but these are the default folder I create for a new proejct.

Stick to simple names for your videos.  As certain as you are that your film is now “FINAL” it soon becomes “MORE FINAL” then a “THIS IS SERIOUSLY THE FINAL” and so on.  Most video production companies use RC’s and FC’s.  RC standing for Rough Cut and FC standing for Final Cut.  If your working on an unfinished edit but you need to export it to show somebody for example, give it a file name such as: editcrunch_themovie_rc01 the next time you export this video it will be editcrunch_themovie_rc02 and so on.  If you plan to then make a different version of this film, change the file name. Something like editcrunch_webtrailer_rc01 and so on….. if you stick to this file naming convention, you wont end up sending somebody the wrong video, you wont have to watch the film to tell the difference, and well you’ve saved yourself alot of time.   Lastly, at times, especially with PC’s your computer might decide to just not play your file.  If this is the case, then it could be due to the long file name you’ve given it, or certain characters or upper case are conflicting.  So try and stick to small file names and lower case.

http://www.editcrunch.co.uk

Your tapes are small, tapes are cheap and tapes soon become the most precious thing to you after you’ve shot your scenes.  So look after them!  Below are some useful tips to help you look after your material.

• When using your tape for the first time, the first 20/30 seconds are known as the danger area, so always allow some run up time before you start to film. 

• Don’t run your tape up until the very last second because you want to squeeze your footage in.  Your footage is more important than the cost of a new tape.  There is a chance as the tape is near the end, something could go wrong. 

• It is not recomended that you re-use tapes, recording over old material.  An old tape is far more likely to have picked up overtime, some dust or grit on the tape.  Putting this older tape into your camera can lead to future material having errors or frame drop outs, or clogging of the tape machanism.

• Flick the “write protect” switch on your tape to ensure you or a collegue doesn’t record over it.
• Label your tapes using tape numbers, date it, and write notes about the content of your tape.  Dont get yourself into a situation where you record over valuable rushes using it’s still a new unlabelled tape.
• Do not leave your tapes outside in your car or in any place that’s likely to get cold, or hot, damp or dry. 

To stock up on new tapes - visit the Product Page.

http://www.editcrunch.co.uk

All consumer camera’s these days use Automatic focussing. You press record, and without you knowing the camera focusses. Simple. The camera has been designed to focus on the object that is centrally aligned in the frame. With this comes an image where nearly everything in the frame is in focus, your audience will then be less able to judge distance between objects (Known as depth.) This suites most family’s or tourists who’s main concern is capturing happy memories. But what If you wanted to get a bit creative, and focus on specific areas leaving others out of focus? Well to achieve this you would need a camera that has manual focus settings. 

 “How do I know if the subject I’m filming is in focus?”    

One quick way to manually focus is to zoom in on your subject until you cant zoom in anymore. Then use the manual focus settings until your subject is nice and clear. Zoom back out and you’re ready to go. If the distance changes between you (the camera) and your subject then you will have to re-focus!

 ”This seems like a lot of pointless work when the camera can do it automatically? “

Manual focus gives you more control over your whole shot, it allows you to tell stories as you focus from one object to another. As well as looking more professional, manual focus adds depth to your footage creating a mood and sense of distance.

 “What is pulling focus?”

Pulling focus is when you focus from one object to another.

Top Tip Video #1 - How a professional changes shots using manual focus.

In this video shot by Sim Warren there are some examples of pulling focus, using a specialist 35mm DOF adapter.

Canon HV20 with DOF adapter. from Edit Crunch on Vimeo.

http://www.editcrunch.co.uk

Click on the above image to purchase.

We found this Large Film Clapperboard on Amazon and we just had to share this with you.

Wether you’re making home movie films with your friends and family or rollerblading videos on the weekends or even professional short films for festivals and competition there is always room for a good old Film Clapper Board.

So why do we use clapper boards?

Well - Clapper boards not only note down the vital information for takes, scenes, date and crewing but clapper boards are mainly used as a way or syncing multipul cameras.  All cameras will be rolling whilst the clapper operator claps the board so that the Film Editors in Post Production have a visual aid for syncing multi cam shoots together.  A little tip for syncing these shots in Post Production is to visuall match the waveform on the audio track of the clap sound.  Make sure you lock all your tracks and this way they wont go out of sync.

MC

Click on the above images to purchase.

This smaller version of the Gorillapod is ideal for smaller video cameras such as the HV20/HV30 or Sony A1E for example.  Although it’s smaller and lighter, it only means you can squeeze this pod into harder to reach areas for more dynamic shots for your films!   At £26 this highly affordable peice of kit is going to revolutionise the way film makers approach films.