Get film look on HV20

Taken from the following thread:
http://hv20.com/showthread.php?t=441&page=8

The way to do that is to lock the HV20 at whatever aperture you want- yes, it's limited to f1.8 but that's not far off of what the largest aperture the still-cam lenses are delivering- ie- f1.2. f1.4 or f1.8. Using ND filters to control exposure and fixing shutter at 1/48th.
Plan D (Fixed Shutter & Gain Variable Aperture)
ACTION: EXP lock function
1) Zoom to Full Wide- With Fixed Illumination Cap
2) Cine Mode
3) HDV 24P
RESULT> Fixed Shutter Speed & Varied aperture range

EXP Shutter Iris Gain
+6 1/48 1.8 0dB
+5 1/48 2.0 0dB
+4 1/48 2.2 0dB
+3 1/48 2.4 0dB
+2 1/48 2.6 0dB
+1 1/48 2.8 0dB
0 1/48 2.8 0dB = Default Based On Target Illuminator
-1 1/48 3.4 0dB
-2 1/48 3.4 0dB
-3 1/48 4.0 0dB
-4 1/48 4.0 0dB
-5 1/48 4.8 0dB
-6 1/48 4.8 0dB
-7 1/48 5.6 0dB
-8 1/48 5.6 0dB
-9 1/48 5.6 0dB
-10 1/48 5.6 0dB
-11 1/48 5.6 0dB

Wide Angle Lenses for Camcorders

Canon and Sony hawk some expensive wide angle lenses for their camcorders. But, it is actually possible to buy some cheaper and better lenses easily.

First, the Canon HV series cameras have a 43mm mount. Almost all lenses have a larger diameter. So you will need to buy a step up converter. Adorama and B&H have plenty of these for $6+. These have no optics, so the only difference is color and their length, which might affect how your camera focuses.

Raynox makes some good wide angle lenses in the $130 range. The model numbers are based on the zoom. The 5000 series is 0.50x, the 6600 series is 0.66x, and the 7000 series is 0.70x. The various Raynox 6600 models are all the same optics but with different threads on the lenses. They come in 43mm, 52mm, and 58mm thread on the camera end and have a 67mm thread on the front.

If you want a cheap wide angle lens, Merkury Optics makes a decent 0.45x lens that can be had on eBay for $15 and Amazon for $30. It is actually two pieces of glass-- a very wide angle and a macro lens. It comes with either a 52mm or 58mm thread on the camera end and 62mm or 67mm on the front.

Easy Vignette (and other effects) in Adobe After Effects

http://www.estrellastudios.com/blog/blog-video/after-effects-tip-quick-vignettes/

Here's a good tutorial. Basically, you create a layer mask above all other clips, double click the ellipse tool (which creates an ellipse that just fits inside your video), and expand the Mask settings and alter them (increase feather to 180, expansion down to -40). Then you can add an effect to get darker corners-- like Exposure, and set it to, say, -1.50. Of course you can add other effects too such as blurring.

Archiving 8mm Video

I have a box of Video8 cassettes with various home videos on them. Not having seen any 8mm camcorder in some years, I decided I had better back these tapes up before there are no devices left to play the tapes.

The best way to back the tapes up is to use a Digital8 camcorder and capture via Firewire. The perfectionists will recommend using dedicated tape decks, but these are very expensive and the Sony ones break down quickly.

I borrowed a Video8 camcorder with composite outs (a yellow RCA jack and a red RCA audio jack). I have a Hauppage WinTV card from the late 90s which can capture video. I connected the audio to my PreSonus Firepod. I disabled all other sound devices on the PC via the BIOS since Windows likes to randomly choose which device is active.

I followed the tutorial at this location: http://arstechnica.com/guides/tweaks/vidcap.ars

Briefly, NTSC 8mm resolution is at a minimum 352x288. That's only marginally useful information because your camcorder may have done better than that. I went with capturing at 640x480. I downloaded VirtuaDUB+VCR. I first started capturing with HuffyUV using YUY2 colorspace, but while HuffyUV is great because it can do lossless 2:1 compression, that's still a whole lot of data and I realized that even with 1 terabyte of storage, I would likely run out of space.
So I switched over to the lossy MJPEG encoder for some 8:1 compression. The quality of the tape from 1992 is not exactly stellar and MJPEG does a good job of capturing it all. I found I had to check each video afterwards to see if the audio stays in sync. About 1 in 5 captures would lose sync.
The only remaining issue is deinterlacing. I started reading about how to do it properly, and my head began to spin. It would be preferable to deinterlace BEFORE doing lossy encoding, since adding deinterlacing later would cause yet more lossy compression, introducing more generation loss.