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First HDTV Camcorder
zymano writes "The JVC GR-HD1 will be introduced in May, it's the world's first consumer camcorder to offer 750 line resolution progressive video at 30 frames per second, recording MPEG2 video to MiniDV tape.
The price will start around $2500-$3500 . Some more info here with pictures. Also check out the pro version. With digital cameras at regular stores with resolution over 5 megapixel it makes you wonder why it took so long to produce."
Since this camcorder is not compliant with the regular MiniDV codec don't expect it to work with anything else but the included JVC software. Although specwise it's nice, this camcorder is has all kinds of new technology and uses it on a older standard.
Now you know why it takes so long to produce, although the goodies are available, a good infrastructure to support them is still not ready.
Maybe that accurate of light sensors are slower and take more than 1/30th to fully react to the range of light change it needs to deal with.
Psh.. what am I saying... "Maybe" is a bit of an understatement.
Shoot Pixels, Not People!
Theres some great comments at this link
u ce s_professional_high_definition_jy_hd10u_02_07_03.h tm
http://www.camcorderinfo.com/content/jvc_introd
I am all in favor of companies pushing forward with better devices, I appluad JVC. I do not see why anyone would want this at this time though. It's a bit preamture. How would you distribute the material? DVD is not HD yet, nor is DVCAM, MiniDV VHS, or digbeta or whatever. So exactly how am i supposed to view this material or share it with people? hook the camera up to the TV everytime? Maybe I'm supposed to buy JVC's DVHS deck for recording HD material, maybe I can get my friends and family to buy them too. No thats ok.
Another thing is it records in MPEG2. I enjoy the MPEG compression on my DVDs and OTA HD broadcasts, but that material sure didnt start off as compressed MPEG. I imagine after capturing, editing, compositing and then final output the PQ would be greatly reduced.
I work with HD material everyday, Scanning film to HD, working with HDcam and D5, rendering HD res out of 3dsmax, HD compositing with a Quantel iQ. Let me tell you, it is not easy. Being professionals even we struggle with the quirks of this new technology, EDL conversions, pulldown, audio sync, It's a beast. I don't really think the consumer level person is going to want to struggle with a non standard device that creates good looking pictures that hes going to have to downres just to view them on most displays.
I wish JVC all the luck, I wish I could buy one to play with, but In my opinion the technology isnt quite ready for John Doe and his girlfriend to make HD pr0n.
The practical res of 35 is 2k, 4k if you wish to be pedantic. Digital technology will pass this line soon enough, and then beyond. Film is dead. It was an amazing technology a century ago, but has failed to outrun the beast that is Moore's law.
;-)
The 2000's are gonna fucking rule. And, I'll be there to see them.
MPEG2 isn't enough of a standard for you? You can edit the stream like any other MPEG2 transport stream. Very standard. -Lorin (author of the mentioned site with pictures)
No, there are several HDTV spec'ed resolutions:
The formats used in HDTV are:
720p - 1280x720 pixels progressive
1080i - 1920x1080 pixels interlaced
1080p - 1920x1080 pixels progressive
You can get the whose story here at HowStuffWorks.
Encoding a 5 mega pixel JPG is easy... The hardware had trouble to create 750p MPEG-2 video in real time. That is the limiting factor.
-- Contradictions only exist in thought - not in reality.
That's $10/24 pictures, or $2.40/picture.
Your math surprises me.
Ten dollars divided by twenty-four is forty-one and two-thirds cents. That's about forty-two cents per picture, not $2.40.
...to offer 750 line resolution progressive video at 30 frames per second
Okay... no part of that made sense. (The sites are presently slashdotted.) The two standards for HD are 720p and 1080i. This camera obviously isn't 1080i, so it must be 720p. That's 720, not 750.
720p is 1280x720x60 fps. This camera doesn't do 60 fps, though; it does 30 fps.
In other words, and just being a totally pedantic dickhead here, this camera isn't technically HD. HD is either 720p at 60 f(rames)ps or 1080i at 60 f(ields)ps, and this camera does neither.
(Yeah, yeah. 1080/24p. But that's not a broadcast format, so I'm omitting it.)
I'm pretty doubtful this camera will sell well. Most of the buzz about this camera post NAB was negative-Industrial/professional users demand 3CCD's for accurate colour reproduction, little to no software exists to support desktop editing of the proprietary MPEG-2-TS compression stream, and the DV25 tape format doesn't carry enough bandwidth to accurately represent the HD picture.
I shoot 16mm film alot for work. I get a good Fiju color negative for about $35 per 400 foot role. 400 feet = 12 minutes. So seeing as the minimum time requirement for a feature length film is 90 minutes we can start to figure out the average cost of a small film. Let's be generous and only say they are shooting 10:1 ratio (10 takes for every one you use). That means we need to shoot 900 minutes of film. Now 900 minutes divides by 12 minutes (1 role) gives us 75 roles of folm to complete the movie. Now let's multiply the roles by $35 ot costs us per role and you end up with $2,625. This is not including developing, negative cutting or AB rolling. Let take the 900 minutes we need and let's see how much miniDV tapes will cose. I get them 3 for $10 at the local drug store. Each is 60 minutes, but at full DV I really only get 30 minutes out of them. So 900 minutes divide by 10 minutes per tape gives us 30 tapes we need to get. Now they come in packs of 3 so let's divide by 3 again and we get 10. So 10 packs x $10 = $100 I believe you can see just in the cost to shoot DV(at $100) is far cheaper than film (at $2,625)
Tea and kung-fu. Life is good. Rising Phoenix
There, I've said it. The latest MPEG work is centered around a new algorithm named H.264, or Advanced Video Coding.
This algorithm used to be called MPEG4 part 10, but is sufficiently different to MPEG4 to warrant a new name. Basically the H.264 algorithm gets you video that is the SAME quality as MPEG4 but at around HALF (that's 50%) of the bit rate. This means that you can in fact have 1080i video at bit rates lower than 9Mbps.... well within the maximum throughput of the current generation red laser DVD technology.... which explains why the DVD forum is considering using H.264 for the next generation of DVD's.... High Definition DVD. A whole High definition movie on a single DVD - and that's without having to move to a blue laser.
Don't believe me ? Take a look at the evaluation I did (self plug - who cares) a year ago comparing MPEG4 with H.264, I have a screenshot at balooga.com
The other point worth mentioning, that not many people realize, is that MPEG4 works well at low bit rates. As the bit rate increases, the efficiency gains afforded by MPEG4 diminish until a point is reached where you are better of using a good MPEG2 encoder. There are stations in the US that are actually broadcasting good quality 1080i at 12Mbps. MPEG4 won't get you anything more than MPEG2 at that bit rate.
The only niggle about the H.264 algorithm is the processing power required. My dual Xeon 2.8Ghz takes around nine hours (yes, I said hours) to encode a single ten second 1080i sequence. Granted the reference H.264 decoder (which is available for download off the web, by the way) is not optimized for speed and is not multithreaded in any way.... which is why I run three encoding sessions in parallel.
The H.264 algorithm requires so much power because it does so much. For example: Macroblocks can be any shape. The algorithm remembers scene changes so 'I' frames are not required when a camera goes from the head shot of the news presenter, to video footage, and back to the presenter. It senses those atrifacts that become apparent around, for example, text/subtitles in the MPEG2 domain and smoothes them out. It will iterate over a group of pictures again and again until it finds the best possible method for compression. In short, H.264 is amazing.
You just use Firewire to suck down the content to your PC. It's slightly less bandwidth than DV all in all. No new codecs, the MPEG2 is standard. Also the MPEG2 compression does not suck. Just check out my article about it. There are raw frame grabs up there to check out. The real complaint I have after working with the camera for a little while at the PMA show in Vegas is that the color is flat. Needs 3CCDs, then it would be GREAT.
-Lorin (author of one of the camcorderinfo.com articles about the camera)
They're not talking about pixels here.
It is in fact 720P/30. It dupes each frame on the output to give you standard 720P/60 (actually 59.94) on the output, or it can format-convert it to 1080i.
-- It only takes 20 minutes for a liberal to become a conservative thanks to our new outpatient surgical procedure!
My wife is a professional photographer, and, um, couple of problems...
1) Nikon sucks for digital. I know SEVERAL people who have the D100 and HATE IT. Controls suck, image is not white balanced well...pretty much sucks. Canon makes a MUCH beter camera.
2) Canon 10d is $1500, 6.25 mega pixels, and is an AWSOME camera. Magenesium-alloy body, great low-light focusing, awsome controls. Oh, and its not over $6k, as you suggested.
3) Kodak makes a 14d that is 14 mega pixels, has great color, and is under $4k last I saw. And guess what, its build using the Nikon body! Wow, that probably means it will accept your Nikon lens...hmmm.
4) I know PLENTY of pros that use the Epson 1270, 1280, 2000, 2200 for printing photo-realistic images. Many times, unless you bust the magnifying glass out, you cant even tell its not printed optically. Then there is the whole idea that the labs, like Millers, actually print digital images for less than negatives.
5) Most labs, including Walmart, actually scan 35mm film and print it on the same equipment that they print digital. Its called a Fuji Fronteer...look it up.
We (my wife and I) are members of several professional photographic orgs, and about 75% of everyone I know have either already ditched film, or they are contemplating the idea. The work-flow for digital is a lot quicker, and nothing beats the instant "polaroid" that is provided to ensure you that you got the shot correct. We still have several film cameras, including the Canon EOS 3, Elan IIe...even a Bonica ETRsi 645. They have now stayed on the shelf for the 3 years we have been digital.
Get with the times...
Dish carries HBO-HD, SHO-HD, PPV-HD, CBS-HD, Discovery-HD and is working on more. DirectTV has a similar line-up, I think minus CBS but plus Cuban's HD-NET.
All the major networks have HD shows, ABC, CBS and NBC have nightly line ups that are practically all HD - the most common exceptions are the "reality" crap shows because they shoot so much footage that just gets wasted it is not yet worth the expensive for them to shoot in HD. Other than that, any show that is new in the last two years is almost certainly HD and plenty of older ones have moved up too - NYPD Blue is a great example of an old mainstay that has been modernized and made a lot more engrossing with HD, it is like a whole different show now. Miracles, which I think was canceled, was a new show that was just beautiful in HD.
The one exception is FOX - for some reason they won't show anything higher than DVD quality (widescreen 480p) some of their stuff looks damn impressive for such a low rez, particularly 24 and Fastlane, but some looks like crap (Malcolm is always out of focus and the framing is terrible). The cartoons like Simpsons, Futurama (RIP) and King of the Hill are still all 4:3 but digital and 480p makes them look incredible. They get more bandwidth than a DVD (19mbps vs 9mbps) which may explain why they look so vibrant.
My local cable system (Comcast) has started carrying HBO-HD and SHO-HD along with all the locals
Here's a site that has a decent, but not totally complete, list of each week's HD programming.
HDTVGalaxy
Finally, with the right equipment, depending on your situation -- surprisingly cheap equipment, you can "tivo" HD easier than regular tv because it is already an MPEG bitstream, no encoding required, just pull it out of the are and drop it to disk. At 19mbps, you get about 8GB per hour. I watch all my HD timeshifted and commercial-free, it is totally the way to go.
When information is power, privacy is freedom.
I hate to say it, but H.264 is not all that. And yes, I know, since I've worked on programming MPEG-2 and MPEG-4 video compression libraries, and know quite a bit about the new spec.
Firstly, your comparison is between two vastly mismatched encoders - one is using a wide range of tools to near-maximum potential (H.264), the other is using a vastly smaller range of tools quite poorly (MS MPEG-4 distribution). The post-processing used by MS is much worse than the stock H.264 in-loop post-processing, the motion search is far worse, the quantization is "dumb" (i.e. trellis quantization would achieve much better quality), and it's not even using advanced MPEG-4 coding tools like QPel or B-frames. It's also missing subjective improvements like noise randomization, DCT-domain in-loop deblocking or masking based on luminance and temporal position (such as those you'd find in a good MPEG-2 encoder).
Also, the reason you're better off using MPEG-2 at high bitrates is because of better encoder tweaks, not some deficiency of MPEG-4 itself. The MPEG-4 bitstream is more efficient at storing the same data than MPEG-2 in almost all cases, and encoders will eventually mature to reflect this.
But I'm still excited about H.264. The quality diminishes rapidly when you disable the brute-force searches that make it so efficient, so don't expect miracles from high-speed encoders. Hardware implementations should be quite impressive though.
If you're still playing with it, ffmpeg recently added a native H.264 decoder which should be a good portion faster than the one you were using.
- HOORAY!