Motion Control
Motion Control is where the HVX200 shines. It provides Optical Images Stabilization (OIS) which stabilizes handheld shots without reducing image resolution.
The HVX200 has gone beyond any other camera in imitating film, providing speed control features that are only available on the Varicam, Panasonic’s high-end camera, and on actual film cameras.
Variable Frame Rate (VFR) recording, simulates film camera undercranking and overcranking which is used for fast motion and slow motion.
Most non-linear editors provide Time Remapping to slow down or speed up clips. Why would you want to do that in the camera? The reason is quality. In order to slow down a clip, an editing program has to add filler frames by synthesizing new frames from the adjacent real frames. These frames don’t carry any more motion information. So after a certain point, Time Remapping just doesn’t look good; the motion doesn’t look real. Likewise, when speeding up motion, the editing program has to drop out frames, and past a certain point it doesn’t look real. When you record slow motion or fast motion in the camera, you are getting actual frames the whole time. The result is glass-smooth slow motion. This is an effect you’ve seen a thousand times in movies but probably didn’t know that until recently it could only be done on a film camera. One classic slow motion example is “character walking away from a fireball”, like an exploding building. This is common in action movies, and it’s something that used to require film. Another example is martial arts sequences. Fight sequences are often sped up just slightly, so instead of 24 fps, they might be recorded at 22 fps.
The HVX200 doesn’t record audio when the frame rate is altered. Digital audio records at a continuous speed, and this data is associated with frames for playback. When you use VFR, you are breaking the relationship between the recording speed and the playback speed. The HVX200 can’t time-remap the audio while it is recording, so it just doesn’t record. If you want audio you either have to record it in a separate take at normal speed, record it on a second sound unit (or another camera), or record without VFR in 60p mode (which will capture audio), and then use Frame Rate Conversion (FRC) to drop the frames in post.
Undercranking with VFR enables you to speed up normal motion. You can even get a “Keystone Cops” effect. But what if you want to wait even longer between frames? What if you want to record one frame every second, or even one frame every ten minutes? That is time-lapse photography.
The HVX200 provides an intervalometer. Using this feature you can set the camera to wait up to ten minutes between each frame. With this kind of control you can show a flower blooming, for example.
Blur Control
Blur occurs in video when the medium is not able to keep up with the reality being captured. In general, there are two kinds of blur: motion blur – when something is moving too rapidly to be recorded as a sharp image, and depth blur – when something is out of focus (blurred) because it is in too far in front of or behind the focal plane.
The HVX200 shoots in 24 fps(film speed), 60 field per second interlaced (video speed), and 30 fps progressive, which is compatible with 60i but a bit softer like film.
24 fps video displays motion characteristics that are commonly associated with film. Specifically, if someone is walking briskly down the street swinging their arms, on film, their fingers and hands will be blurred. On 60i video it will not be blurred, but will be sharp. When shot in 24 fps video, the image is blurred just as it would be on film. If you shoot in 30 fps, some faster moving objects will display more blur than they would in 60i. But a lot of the human movement that causes blur on film will still be sharp in 30p video.
The HVX200 also provides shutter speed control. That controls how long the shutter is opened and the sensors are exposed to light during each frame. A high speed shutter enables sharp looking images without losing focus or detail even when recording very fast movement. A slow speed shutter enables a smearing effect even on relatively slow movements. The HVX200 provides a lot of shutter settings, but surprisingly, it lacks some of the slow shutter settings of the DVX100. It is difficult, for example, to get an image of tail-lights smearing like an afterimage using the HVX200. That is a limitation. But honestly, I don’t use that effect on the DVX that often.
