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Good cameras for filming skateboarding?

Filming skateboarding with a Panasonic HS100 with AVCHD format? AVCHD format compressed? Too low of a GOP rate?

  • My Dad recently bought a Panasonic HS100 for general use. The camera uses a hybrid SD/Built in Hardrive to store the footage it shoots. I study film and tv production at college and make skateboarding films for skateboard shops and websites for a means of making some money. I asked if I could test the camera on how it handled filming skate footage and was pretty let down by the results. The footage looked incredibly crisp on LCD playback but as soon as I imported the footage into imovie (I know, quite unprofessional but my version of Final Cut Pro didn't recognize the annoying AVCHD format) the footage looked as though the camera couldn't handle the fast movements of skateboarding, as though there was already an mpeg frame compression on the raw files? Does AVCHD have a built in low GOP (groups of pictures) level and will there be a way to raise it in the camera?

  • Answer:

    there should be a way on the HS100 to switch the bit rate setting from the jumpy/jaggy 13mb/s to a mediocre 17mb/s. 17 being the max either way, anything under 24mb/s (AVCHD's current highest setting) isn't even worth the step up to 1080i. 1080i at 17mb/s is just going to let you see the artifacting better. the newest FCP works with AVCHD natively but still takes forever to render. fun little fact; panasonic introduced the HS100 for $1200 and 6 months later cut the price in half to the current $600.

Jamie A at Yahoo! Answers Visit the source

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It's difficult to tell, the main reason it probably doesn't look good is because you have filmed interaced footage and either imovie doesn't deinterlace footage whilst you are watching it or the deinterlacer isn't very good. You should burn the footage to a dvd and play it in a dvd player to find out for sure. I have an HF100 which has avchd compression and it does struggle occasionally with fast movement, the nature of hd makes fast movements more difficult to film due to higher pixel amount on the same ccd. Hope this helps.

James H

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