The Cult of HV20

I first learned about the Canon HV20 HDV camcorder while flipping through WIRED magazine’s 2007 gear roundup and saw it listed as their top pick for the new breed of hand-held High-Definition camcorders. I am not an impulse buyer – I am the type that deliberates for weeks even months over my purchases, and then, in a big flurry I go out and drop my hard earned cash on the next wave of gear I will use to unleash my creations. Because of this, I have pre-existing budgets for how much each component of my setup can cost. In the department of motion picture cameras, it was a toss up – did I go for the new mid-level priced cameras that afforded me the immediate opportunity of using interchangeable lenses (in the ballpark of three to ten thousand dollars) and go hungry for half a year while I figured out how to make my money back? Or did I go to the low end of the price scale, leave some money for all the auxiliaries (newer, faster computer, tripods, filters, carrying cases, maybe even lighting) and be ready to rock; a one-man videographic monster?

I have learned from experience that it does not behoove one to skimp on the basics – because you will spend a lot more over the long haul upgrading and wishing you could do more – better to get it right the first time and get years of use and learning out of your equipment than get caught on the “if only I could…” trail.

But this new Canon XIVIA series seemed to be covering all the bases – it was shooting at 1080p at 24fps! Critics were lauding the color and sharpness of the resulting images! It had an auxilliary microphone input and HDMI out! It even had a hot-shoe for further expansion – all things I was looking for in my new video camera and yet it cost only US$800???

For that price I knew I could afford to dive in and take my chances. The specs were just too good and it was crossing all the requirements off my list. I decided on the HV20 rather than the solid state or DVD recording models because I already had dozens of crates full of standard def MiniDV tapes and I wanted the backward compatibility. Furthermore, having endured the DAT tape era, I recognized the value and cost-effectiveness of removable storage media. Sure hard drive storage prices are at an all time low, but somehow I find a cassette is still a safer storage medium over the course of time, than a hard drive. Besides, when I am filming active volcanoes in Ecuador, who know when I will be able to offload 200 gigs of video to a computer (should my laptop fail etc) – I would rather just pop in a new tape and keep shooting. That was my reasoning, anyway.

Little did I know that all of these considerations, and the choice I ultimately made to buy the HV20 would land me in the sweet spot of a phenomenon that led to the Canon HV20 becoming what I call the new Pixelvision.

For the uninitiated – the PXL2000, or Pixelvision as it came to be known was a limited run “toy” camera made by Fisher Price in the 1980′s that allowed recording of something like video, something like film to ordinary audio cassettes! It followed the exact same rationale that I had for purchasing my HV20 – the storage medium was cheap and easily accessible. When filmmakers got wind of this – they saw that not only had Fisher Price brought video-making to the masses, but they had somehow managed to engineer a completely new art form – Pixelvision film-making. Sure, it looked like grainy security cam footage – but the price couldn’t be beat and people have stories to tell. This led to a surge of indie Pixelvision film festivals that persist to this day.

Why is the HV20 similar? It hardly looks like grainy security cam footage – in fact it looks absolutely gorgeous! It is similar in that it affords all the quality of a much higher end option, but it is limited by its Prosumer point and shoot short-cutting; although it has a great deal of manual control, the control of the camera is not set up like a higher end professional camera. That meant it had to be “hacked” – tricks and workarounds had to be developed to force the camera to serve its master the same way a more versatile pro camera might.

Out of this grew the cult of the HV20. All over the web you can find busy chat forums discussing ways to build home-made focus dials, 35mm lens adapters, light and microphone mounts, and even how to use a cell phone to trick the camera into behaving the way a much higher end camera might and surrender control of the aperture and shutter speed to do its master’s bidding. Due to the limitations of the HDV format and the sort o compression that takes place in a smaller cheaper camera such as this, there are also extensive discussions on how to remove the inherent 3:2 pulldown and render out true 1080 24P 4:2:2 colorspace video. Some users have even developed elaborate programming scripts that call upon a wide variety of freely available video applications to create a holistic workflow for automating this entire process. Such is the enthusiasm for making true high definition, film-like product, and at the center of this maelstrom is the HV20.

Phew. I am so happy that I somehow found my way to the right camera at the right time. I have since purchased the Rode shotgun mic that was designed by one of the foremost developers of high end microphones especially for cameras of this size. With it, I was able to purchase a matching boom pole and audio extension cable – all designed to serve the HV20 format. I have purchased the Wide-Converter WD-H43 from Canon that fits the 43mm thread, and then gone on to discover a world of other 43mm lens filters that will increase my options for shooting under a wide variety of lighting scenarios. I have extensively researched the emerging plethora of 35mm lens adapters that feature very high end anachromatic lenses so that I can shoot with 35mmprime lenses from any of the major manufacturers out there: Nikon, Pentax, Canon, Olympus, Fuji and so on. What’s more, the companies building these lens adapters, which ultimately are there to allow more control over the depth of field with which I am shooting, are also shipping rod support systems and tripod mounts that allow me to transform my humble handheld “consumer” camcorder into a viable competitor to a 16mm Arriflex or even better.

And the stuff works. Just take a look at the footage streaming out all over the web.

This site is here for myself – so that I can catalog my research and experiments with this new camera system, and to attract those doing the same – in the hopes we can all learn from one another and start making those films, and telling those stories that we always dreamed of.

Welcome to the HV20 Experiments.

Keram

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