HD camera for filming lightning at night

[Dawid Ciechowski]

Hi guys,

I need a new HD camera for filming lightning at night (and not only), so bright as VX2100. What do you think about SONY HDR-FX1000? Is it a good choice? I don't want waste my money again - I bought CANON HV30 and I'm disappointed.




Thanks in advance,
Dawid

 

[cdcollura]

Good day all,

The Sony HDR FX1 can do low light pretty well, I do own the camera.

It is good to 3 LUX, where the VX 2100 is good to 1 LUX. Not bad.

It needs to be toyed with, as there is a setting for gain, exposure, and shutter speed. The low light video is pretty good, once you have "dialed it" in.

 

[Dan Cook]

Hey cd,

Do you have any night clips from the FX1 available? I'm wondering how it is at night.

Thanks.

 

[Dawid Ciechowski]

Hey cd,

Do you have any night clips from the FX1 available? I'm wondering how it is at night.

Thanks.

Yeah, please post some lightning videos during night hours

 

[cdcollura]

Good day all,

Below are some frame-graqbs from the HDR-FX1...

Above: Twilight (8 PM or so) CDT in Kansas 2008

Above: Lightning in TX in (9 PM May 2007).

 

[Dawid Ciechowski]

Could you post frame-grabs in full HD? Thanks in advance

 

[Jason Foster]

The biggest complaint I've seen from lightning and other rapid motion issues with HD is the CMOS sensors versus the CCD. If you're not hard core or specifically into lightning as a business or artisan, then no worries, but otherwise stick with the CCD chips.

I also have seen a few snow shots with the consumer level CMOS and I don't like the affect it gives, but I haven't see a prosumer or professional level shot to see if the larger and 3 individual sensors fixes that.

 

[Dawid Ciechowski]

I know that CMOS sensor sucks, because I have it in HV30. Maybe CANON XH-A1 will be better? It's very bright (0.4lux) and it have 3CCD sensors.

 

[Mark Blue]

I'm in the same quandry as my good friend from Poland here. I have been looking forward to the day when I buy the HV-40 for a year now, and suddenly I'm getting cold feet. My mind is thinking why spend $800.00 now when ultimately I could spend 3 or 4 times more to get a prosumer camcorder with so much more like true low light performance.

For those who know this subject well, if you had 3 large burning a hole in your pocket which prosumer camcorder model would you go with? I've always been partial to Sony, but like Canon as well. Let me know and why.

 

[Martin Kucera]

Panasonic HMC-150 would be my ideal choice at the moment, depending on your budget. Seems like an amazing setup for storm chasing.

 

[Dan Robinson]

The Panasonic series cameras including the HVX200, the HMC150 and the HPX170 all use CCD chips as well as high-bitrate codecs, and are probably the lowest-price cameras on the market now for truly good HD lightning video. The drawback with these models is the low light performance, which is lacking compared to other HD cameras in their price range.

At last check, all of the other prosumer/consumer brand models currently under $10k are either CMOS based and/or low-bitrate HDV. If I had to choose a lightning camera now I would probably go with the 170.

On maybe an unrelated note, those cameras are still serious investments to make. If you've got the disposable cash to drop on them as a hobbyist, then that's OK. There is no longer a reliable market to support paying these types of cameras off with footage sales like there used to be. For that reason I'm not considering upgrading, as there really isn't any practical reason to justify the added quality. I'd love to have better lightning footage but not at the cost needed to do it

 

[Mark Blue]

Thanks for the replies and hopefully there are more to come. Just to clarify - and not to hijack the thread as I like lightning shots as much as the next guy - but I'm mostly interested in a prosumer camcorder for filming supercells and tornadoes.

Depending on which side of the storm you wind up on the contrast can get really dark (almost as if it's night time), so low light performance is my main concern. I know the Sony HDR-FX1 mentioned by Chris was a cult-classic that really made a splash when it was introduced. Hopefully there are current models available that have the same panache as the Sony did at the time.

 

[Dawid Ciechowski]

Panasonic HMC-150 would be my ideal choice at the moment, depending on your budget. Seems like an amazing setup for storm chasing.

Why not new PANASONIC HMC-151?

 

[Steve Worthington]

I went with the Sony HVR HD1000. The main problem I see is the auto focus is slower then I like but other wise I love the thing.

With the night vision turned on

With out the night vision

another late shot with out lighting around 9:00 pm

 

[Dan Robinson]

Why not new PANASONIC HMC-151?

I'd like to see how the AVCHD codec handles night lightning at those low bitrates before I'd recommend it. The 151 uses a 13mb bitrate, which by HD standards is very low, even despite the fact that it is AVCHD. By comparison, HDV is 25mbps, albeit an inferior codec.

Night lightning video involves subsequent frames going from all-dark to all-light and back, which is very hard for any compression codec to handle without artifacting. Even a good codec is going to choke on lightning if the bitrate is too low - it's a physical limitation of the bitrate.

All types of video compression basically looks for parts of the video that don't change from frame to frame - and then doesn't re-save that 'repetitive' data on each frame. For instance, if you have a shot of a car driving past a mountain backdrop, the only data that is changing in the frame is of the car. The mountain backdrop stays the same, and those pixels do not need to be re-saved on each frame. Hence, a codec can use a low bitrate and still capture a crisp video sequence of such a scene.

With nighttime lightning, again, ALL of the pixels on the entire frame are changing all at once, repeatedly. All dark to all bright in one frame, then back to all dark the next frame. No compression codec can keep up with that without some sort of artifacting if the bitrates are lower. I'd suspect that the 151's 13mbps AVCHD will not do well with night lightning as a result - but again, I'd like to see examples.

When looking for a good night lightning camera, the key is that it must have CCD chips (all CMOS chips suffer from rolling shutter) and the format must use a higher bitrate codec. The XDCAM 35mbps format produces good results, for example. However, all of the sub-$10k XDCAM cameras available (like the EX1 and EX3) have CMOS chips. The only sub-$10,000 cameras I know of now that are both high bitrate and CCD based are the Panasonic models.

Hopefully someone will come out with a newer consumer/prosumer-cost camera that uses CCDs. There are plenty of options in the pro realm, but only if you've got more than 20 grand to spend. CMOS has been taking over like crazy in the prosumer/consumer world, so it may not happen for a while....