Characteristics
One difference between consumer and professional video cameras is picture quality. Does the camera produce sharper, more colorful, more beautiful images? And if so, is there any way I can characterize what makes this camera’s images special and unique?
Another key difference between consumer and professional video cameras, and a lot of what you pay for, is the ability to turn things off – to turn off automation and to take manual control over the quality of the video being recorded. Consumer cameras all have auto focus, auto white balance, auto exposure and so forth. It’s whether you can turn these features off – and what kinds of control you are left with when the automation is disabled – that defines the creative control the camera offers.
When I familiarize myself with a camera, these are the items I’m looking at:
1. General image quality. Is it worth the extra expense?
2. Manual controls:
a. Frame control
b. Motion control
c. Blur control
d. Image control
Tech Specs
Video cameras are a whole solution assembled from a number of individual technologies. The overall solution is always greater than the sum of its individual constituent parts. Comparing technical specifications is interesting, but I only find it useful up to a point. After that, I’m more interested in what a camera solution can produce than in how it works. I care more about the results than how it gets there.
There are a number of really great camera reviews on the XH-A1 that focus on broader applications than filmmaking, different characteristics, and dive deep into the technical details of how the camera works relative to other cameras. Many of these reviews are available online.
Part 1: Image Quality
I was very fortunate to be able to shoot the Canon XH-A1 side-by-side with a Panasonic HVX200 and a Panasonic DVX100. This is not a “camera shoot-out”. This was a shortcut for me to understand the image quality of the XH-A1. And I needed something to compare it to. And these Panasonic cameras, out of the box, generate the most lush and beautiful and film-like images I’ve seen.
Color
As you can see in the images above, with default HD settings on both cameras, the XH-A1 image looks washed out and has a bit of a magenta haze. I initially thought this might be caused by the difference in recording codecs. HDV favors detail resolution and DVCPROHD favors color. However, I soon came to understand that this has more to do with the default settings in the XH-A1 than with the camera’s capabilities.
Below, I performed some rough color correction in post, boosting the saturation, brightness, and contrast. In my opinion, the corrected version looks pretty good. And I’m sure I could have tinkered with it using more sophisticated color correction and gotten a pretty good match. The important thing about this little experiment was that I realized I could get a pretty good color match in post. And that caused me to think about whether I could get that color match to happen in the camera.
The XH-A1 provides for sophisticated in-camera image processing. This processing works on the “raw” image before it is compressed. It provides controls for changing the brightness and contrast, the color saturation and color temperature, and to digitally sharpen or blur the image in various ways. These controls are called “custom presets” and can be stored and loaded to give different looks to the image. I experimented briefly with the custom presets. If I had more time I would have tried several of the “film look” presets that people have created and posted on dvinfo.net.
I’ll come back to this discussion later in the review in the section on Image Control. But for now, let me just tell you that with the right custom preset settings, the images the XH-A1 produces are very similar in all aesthetic respects to the images the other two cameras produce.
There is some debate about whether it is better to alter the look of an image in the camera or to “shoot flat” and modify the image in post. With the XH-A1 it was clear to me that getting as close to the look you want in the camera, before the 7.1:1 compression of HDV, is critical to getting the best image possible. Thankfully, Canon has built in all the features necessary. The custom preset controls on the XH-A1 are as sophisticated as controls found on much more expensive professional cameras.
The Image Quality of the XH-A1, with respect to color, is very good and comparable to other professional-quality cameras I’ve used. I expected a much greater difference between the DVCPROHD color of the Panasonic HVX200 and the HDV color of the Canon XH-A1, but was surprised by how similar the coloring can be with the right settings in the Canon.
Here’s the bottom line: If you are going to use a Canon XH-A1 you have to learn about and use custom presets. I found the default settings in the camera to be fairly useless for my purpose of filmmaking. But with the right custom presets, the camera really performs.
