Followup: The Panasonic HMC150

Posted November 17th, 2008 by Graham

Hello again everyone! It’s been a little while since my last post. My brand new Panasonic HMC150 has come in and I’ve had a chance for about a month to use it in various environments and I must say I’m more than impressed with the camera. The decision to buy this camera was definitely a good call. Shooting onto SD cards instead of tapes is just about the most liberating thing I can think of after nearly eight years of shooting on DV tapes. More of my thoughts about the camera (with test footaage!) is after the jump.

Ease of use

Having used a DVX100B for the last three years I was a little worried about going to a new camera because I’ve literally just mastered the manual controls on the DVX. After about 5 minutes of shooting with the HMC my fears were gone. This camera handles exactly like a DVX, the controls are in generally the same locations on the camera body, and navigating the setup menus to customize my settings were very intuitive. As far as when shooting, after the first few moments of using the camera and getting used to it, I nearly forgot that I was using a brand new camera, everything was very familiar.

Workflow

Let me put this quite simply. I LOVE the workflow for this camera. You prep, you shoot, you transfer the footage and you edit and post. Gone are the days of Logging & Capturing in real time and waiting for hours and hours of footage to digitize. Instead, if you’re using Final Cut Pro, you’re using a different process called Log & Transfer. Log and Transfer lets you look at the clips that you’ve recorded (and here’s the best part) as individual clips. Every time you hit the record button you’re creating a new clip. No more making your own subclips or marking clips in a huge queue of footage.

Currently I’m letting Final Cut convert the AVCHD footage to Apple’s Pro Res 422 codec. The file sizes are quite large especially if the footage I’ve shot is in 60P, but I anticipated this and I’ve got a few spare 750GB hard drives waiting to be filled up with loads of HD footage.

Previews & Preferences

One of the biggest concerns I’m hearing from folks about the AVC format is that the footage is being compressed before it is put onto the SD card. So essentially when you’re shooting on the AVCHD format you never get a full-quality uncompressed master version of your footage to work with. I, too, was very concerned that the footage I would shoot with this camera would come out blocky and digital-looking and noticibly compressed. One of the last thoughts in my mind as I clicked ‘buy’ to purchase this camera was, “Surely Panasonic’s QA dept. wouldn’t let something out of the gate that produced shoddy footage.” I must say, my instincts about Panasonic’s QA standards have held very true. Of the footage that I’ve shot with this camera, the footage I get back from the camera looks just as good as any other digital footage I’ve worked with and I have zero complaints whatsoever. I’m not so concerned about working with a compressed format because honestly a lot of research has gone into making this compressed AVCHD codec look as good as it can possibly look.

Working with SD Cards

The main reason I jumped on this camera was because it shoots on cheap, and readily available SDHC cards. P2 cards for other HD cameras are a strong proprietary format, but they’re extremely expensive. As far as for SD cards, I found a great deal on SDHC Class 6 cards at NewEgg.com — 16GB cards for $40 each. I bought three and even found an awesome little case to keep them in. Three 16GB cards allows me to shoot about 330 minutes of HD video with the HMC.

Test Shots

The first footage I shot with the HMC-150 (720/24p):

Outside shots, late evening (720/24p):