Austin posted his tests (440 MB) comparing the 1 year old HDV HV20 vs the 6 months old AVCHD HG10 and brand new AVCHD HF10. The new HF10 can record full 1080p at its highest quality mode at 17 mbps, compared to just 1440×1080 of the previous Canon consumer camcorders. Note that the HV30 is exactly the same as the HV20 in quality.

According to the tests, the HG10 is visibly worse than any of the other two camcorders (it has this “mushy” cheap Kodak look), while the HV20 still beats the new kid on the block HF10! The HV20/30 is slightly more detailed and has less pixelation than the HF10 (plus, it has a much more compatible 43mm filter thread and bigger sensor that allows for more background blur). The HF10 has visible mpeg4 artifacts (much more than HV20’s mpeg2), but on the other hand it seems to have less fringing than the HV20.

Anyhow, the AVCHD cameras are obviously closing in to the HV20/30. Regardless, we are still one more year behind before a consumer AVCHD camera is able to beat it. That’s how good that camcorder is (no wonder it still sells like hotcakes for less than $700 these days). The rein of HV20 will end for good when manufacturers are able to offer full AVCHD bitrate to their full 1080p streams (24 mbps, according to the standard). So far, this has not been possible for many reasons: you hit the FAT filesize limit faster, you need an even faster PC to edit, and it requires really fast media and internal chipset. When these roadblocks are out of the way (1-2 more years), AVCHD camcorders will shine in their full glory.

So these bozos are trying to shut down the most popular (500,000+ registered members), most useful, cellphone forum on the web: HowardForums. The reason is because some guy posted a URL that gives full access to Sprint’s paid videos. A URL that was never protected, but was publicly available. But it seems that they want to shut down the forum completely! How over-the-top is that? It seems that they are either as evil as they seem to be, OR, they put these theatrics just for Sprint’s eyes only, so the big Sprint bosses don’t get too mad with them. Regardless, I can only call this “moronic”.

Of course, not everyone at MobiTV is a moron. Not my engineer friend who works there for example. 😉

Update: MobiTV backed down. Good to hear!

Everything is so damn relative in this world. Nothing can be set to stone as truly “good” or “bad”. I won’t give a real-life example on this, but I will utilize my favorite subject, “Lost”.

Last night’s episode, “The Other Woman”, was a so-so episode. Not a fantastic episode, but not crap either. At the end of each episode, DarkUFO (biggest “Lost” fan site online), posts a poll to rate it. Options include: Awesome, Great, Ok, Poor, and Awful. Then, after a few hours, it is compared towards older polls of older episodes. There are thousands who vote on these polls, and so this is the closest you can get to an accurate viewer’s rating of an episode.

“The Other Woman” has a very low average scoring (3.68/5) compared to most other episodes. But here’s the kicker. If you read the comments on the episode comparative chart, you will see that the vast majority of the viewers felt that the episode was judged way too harshly. And I agree with them. The episode was much better than some other episodes that occupy the bottom of the list. Not only that, but we got some real answers too (e.g. Widmore is the “bad” guy, the ‘Tempest’ station was used by the Hostiles to kill the Dharma employees, Charlotte might be aggressive but possibly not a villain). So why was it judged harshly?

The reason is simple: Because the previous episode, “The Constant”, was one of the best “Lost” episodes ever. Viewers did not judge “The Other Woman” to a generic TV entertainment threshold, but they judged it compared to their previous “Lost” experience. “The Constant” has just raised the bar, and it was too recent to not take into account the pleasure viewers got from it.

So basically, “what’s best”, or “what’s worse”, is not necessarily judged compared to an abstract generic value, but compared to other concrete values that serve as reference. Everything is relative.

Now that we got one of the best TVs in the market (tsk, tsk…), we can clearly see which DVDs are well-encoded and which ones are not. However, doing some tests last night, we found that the encoding is pretty consistent between most DVDs and what makes movies look good or not is another factor: film grain.

If you look carefully, film grain differs from frame to frame. And this gives a huge headache to the mpeg2 encoder, because such predictive algorithms rely heavily on the fact that picture doesn’t change much from frame to frame. Most movies are shot on film, and so DVD quality is lower of what *it could* be. And then we popped in the “Star Wars: Revenge of the Sith” DVD in the player. The quality was near-HD. And the reason: it’s shot digitally. No film grain crap. The encoder had such an easier time to encode, that the quality was like, twice as good as in other movies.

I had already stated to JBQ that when the HD versions of the Star Wars prequel movies come out I would re-buy them, but seeing the kind of quality these DVDs have, I don’t think I can justify the $60. Especially when Star Wars was shot with 2k cameras, and so re-sizing to 1080p won’t yield that much of an advantage. We will definitely re-buy “Lord of the Rings” though. Its visual quality looked like grainy shite compared to Star Wars on DVD.

And speaking of Star Wars. No background blur, no DOF shots, no film grain. And yet, it looks cinematic. This just shows that the “movie look” is not 24p, it’s not even DOF, or film grain. It’s the lighting, sensor size and the lenses used that allow for greater dynamic range. Which means that trying to emulate the movie look with a stock $500 camera is POINTLESS. You can get close if you are extra-careful, but it won’t be the same.

Oh, shut up. Jobs says that Flash is too slow for the iPhone. Well, there a few problems with this statement:
1. Apple has the power to push Adobe to optimize Flash for ARM.
2. The iPhone is one of the fastest embedded devices in the market. When Nokia sells a 300 Mhz phone with full Flash support (not just Flash Lite), I don’t see why the iPhone can’t do so, especially when Youtube should be able to playback fast enough on the iPhone. Youtube is the No1 flash application that reviewers are testing when getting devices with full support, and iPhone’s CPU and accelerated drivers should be able to handle it fine.
3. This smells like a strategic problem, Apple not wanting to give in video support to Flash more than anything else.
4. …and look who’s talking. Has this guy used Quicktime on the PC? QT is extremely slow decoding on the PC. Maybe he should optimize his own shit first before taking aim at others.

Personally, I am waiting for full IM and Flash support on the iPhone. It’s the two features really missing. And I don’t take “no” for an answer.

One aspect that many videographers ignore many times, is lighting. Lighting and sound is more important than being able to “record in 24p” during the quest for that movie look. Look at the video here. This video is a behind-the-scenes look at the shooting of a music video clip. An expensive film camera was used to shoot the actual music video. But a Panasonic HD digital camera (presumably the HVX-200) was used to shoot the behind the scenes documentary video. Check the shots where the Panasonic camera shoots the “documentary” part, and the shots that the same camera is pointing to the singer at the time of the actual music video shooting. Notice the difference in lighting, as when shooting is taking place, there are some big reflectors set there by the crew. Notice how more of the “movie look” you get at these specific scenes, than the normal documentary scenes, which looks like normal video. And yet, it’s the same camera. It’s all about lighting.

What a lovely plasma TV. The Linux-based Pioneer Kuro 5010FD arrived an hour ago, and the CEVA/Eagle guys who delivered it also installed it for me. I love its “dot-by-dot” exact resolution support with no overscan, its 24p support, its intense blacks. SD footage looks a bit crappy, but HD looks marvelous. So far, so good.

Last night, when we disconnected our old 55″ Sharp, we temporarily placed there a cheap 32″ 1080i LCD TV that I had around in my office. What a disaster. Literally no blacks, not enough picture modes, and a weird line was moving up towards the middle of the screen: JBQ theorizes that the TV runs at 60Hz instead of NTSC’s 59.94Hz, or that it’s an issue of sync between some parts of the TV – the panel is not reading the framebuffer at the same speed as the upscaler is filling it. The Kuro does not seem to have this problem. That’s the difference between a $500 and a $4000 TV, I guess. You get what you pay for.

I also played around with some settings on the Comcast cable box to output via DVI/HDMI 720p instead of 1080i for FOX, ESPN and ABC, as these channels broadcast in 720p instead of 1080i — in contrast to what most other channels do. Using 720p on the cable box when the source broadcasting is also 720p, it’s better, because then no interlacing and upscaling to 1080i takes place by the cable box, and no de-interlacing and upscaling to 1080p is taking place by the TV. The fewer hoops and conversions you do over the original broadcasting, the better it will look. This is true for 1080i TVs too, not just 1080p ones. The difference in quality is not big, but it’s there. So I guess, Thursdays will be our 720p days, with “American Idol” on FOX at 8 PM and “Lost” on ABC at 9 PM. The rest of the days will be 1080i.

Can’t wait for JBQ to come from work to hook up the PS3 too, so I can view some of my own videos on the TV, and test the Blu-Ray player and its 24p support too. I got “Mission Impossible III” from Netflix for this purpose alone as this action movie has lots of movement, making it a good title to test the 72Hz feature.

Update: Two more friends of ours, working at Google too, will be getting that same TV (60″ version).

Teresa is my hero. Her blog, “f*cking c*nts“, is ingenious. An excerpt:

“You have no right to be proud, unless you did it yourself. That goes for anything from racial pride to patriotism. Your race, gender and nationality are fucking accidents of birth. Being proud of something you got stuck with when mamma squeezed you out is stupid. You have a right to be proud of your own personal accomplishments, and perhaps those of your children (if you were actually a good parent, and your kids didn’t succeed by sheer bloody-mindedness alone). That’s it. Your parents fucked, Mom got knocked up, and ~9 months later, there you were. Race, gender and nationality handed to you out of some cosmic lottery machine. Fuck your white pride, black pride, national pride, and all the horseshit that goes along with it.“