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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."
My guess would be that whole 30 frames/sec thing. :)
Only on slashdot can a posting be rated "Score -1, Insightful".
Believe it or not, such specs on a camcorder, at that price, will be most highly prized by the adult film industry. Don't ask me why I know that, because frankly, I'm not allowed to tell.
JVC made a real accomplishment here, no doubt.
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.
;)
I think the initial market will be film students. Right now a lot of them struggle to raise $50k mostly to buy and develop 35mm color film stock for their thesis films. With this camera they can buy the camera and the editing setup for $5-6k, this is easy to raise in comparison. Some are already doing digital editing of scanned 35mm anyway so for them it's just the cost of the camcorder really. It's surprisingly cheap to scan film btw, like $13 for 8 minutes of B&W film; I guess it's volume since that's about as much as my local photo shop wants to charge for a 36 exposure roll of still photographs, or maybe I'm just a sucker.. The mpeg2 will suck, but at that resolution maybe it won't matter so much, a student film needs to look good on a 10' screen not a 300' one. Eventually this will make it into the hands of your uncle, and then hopefully he'll make good use of iMovie to edit the thing down to just a few minutes of torture.
Blockquoth Mr. Poag:
Actually...no, film ain't cheap. It's damn expensive. Figure five bucks for a cheap roll and another five for cheesy one-hour development. That's $10/24 pictures, or $2.40/picture.
In contrast, I've got an Olympus C730 digital camera. It's 3.2 megapixels--enough to get better prints than you will from that cheesy one-hour place. I can fit a couple hundred photos on a single $120 256 Mbyte XD card. Even if the card were single-use, that's still the equivalent of close to $500 worth of film. And you can re-use and re-use and re-use that card for a looooong time.
The upshot is that I can blow the equivalent of a thousand buks of film in a day just to get a few good pictures and not even think twice about it. I'm sure that's important for a professional. For me, a realtively new amateur, it's truly invaluable. No way in Hell could I even think of this hobby if it weren't for the unbeliveable cheapness of digital.
Cheers,
b&
All but God can prove this sentence true.
Last time I saw specs on this camera (the site is slashdotted now), I noticed that it records MPEG-2 at over 20Mbit/sec. This is going to look quite good, since broadcast 1080i HDTV streams are limited to ~18Mbit/sec - and the camera is 720p so there are fewer pixels to compress. On the other hand, if they use full MPEG-2 it will make editing very difficult (and lossy) since the software will have to break apart and re-encode the frames around each edit.
They might be using I-frame only MPEG, which is basically the same as JPEG for each frame, or DV. In this case the 20Mbits/sec won't look nearly as good, but editing will be much easier (and lossless).
A good application for this camera might be low-budget filmmaking, where the final output format is NTSC but you want a better image than DV can deliver with its horribly lossy compression... I don't really see the point of working at 720p since the vast majority of HDTV systems are designed around 1080i. Well, perhaps this is just a stepping stone to a 1080i camera...
(and just to pick a nit - there is no such thing as a 30 frame-per-second video format. Ever since the advent of color, NTSC video has been 30000/1001 frames per second, or 60000/1001 fields per second)
Yes, film IS expensive. However, it is also worth it. I buy black and white film in bulk, for about $3.00 USD per roll. Processing it in my bathroom maybe takes 25 minutes, at $0.50 USD per roll. Depending on the film speed I can get an amazing 16" x 20" continuous tone print. Even the best inkjet printers on the market are NOT continuous tone, regardless of what the company's marketing department says.
Slide film is what really breaks the bank, running at roughly $15.00 USD for both the film, and processing. However, off of a 35mm negative, I can scan at 4000dpi, with no visible film grain (using Fuji Velvia ISO 50, or Sensia ISO 100) for a final resolution of approximately 20 megapixels. The ONLY digital equipment that can come even close is a digital back for Hasselblads that runs at $25 000 USD. And although Zeiss makes some great lenses, Leica still has stricter quality controls, and better glass. Oh.. My M6 will last me over 50 years. Any digital camera will be obselete in two.
I wrote the review up on camcorderinfo.com about the unit, and I can tell you after having used it that it is easy to use the MPEG stream. Just convert it to a HuffYUV encoded AVI and edit from there. DV25 definitely holds enough bandwidth because broadcast 1080i tops out at 18 megabits a second! True though that the color leaves something to be desired...
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.
It may be amazing, but when I read the above it does not seem very practical.
They will at least have to fix the encoding to be in real time. What broadcaster is pepared to have to pre-encode all material? And what would happen to live transmissions?
Also it seems like there will be a hefty delay in the encoder when it is ever going to be realtime. How else can it iterate over a group of pictures long enough to include scence switches?
Finally, it seems like the broadcasters have to hope that you don't zap. If I come in to your channel watching the video insert, how will I get the presenter head picture when that is apparently back-referenced in the video stream, but I did not receive it because I was on another channel at that time?
- ease of storing lot of pictures
- ease of duplicating pictures at home
- ability to shoot as much as you want for free
- ease of putting pictures to 'net, sending as email etc
-
And the quality is alread good enough so regular folks just taking pictures won't notice the difference anyway.
Also the DVX100 has a sweet cinegamma gamma setting that really looks great, it's basically a flat gamma curve with no shoulder. Also you shoot at a 1/48 second shutter speed, like film, which helps even more. The PD150 can do some nice footage, but the 24p mode is exclusive to the DVX100.
Incidentally, Sony has a prosumer model now called the PDX-10 with even more on-chip resolution than the DVX100, which lets it do 16:9 natively, but the important thing to remember is that as long as the chip has at least 345,600 pixels used, that's fine, cause they just all output 720 X 480 pixel images, so even if a chip had 1 billion pixels, it wouldn't help unless you were outputting a larger image than 720x480. The XL-1 has 280,000 , not sure on the PD-150, and the DVX100 has 410,000.
But yeah, just seeing the side by side footage of the DVX100 vs the PD150 on DVD should convince anyone that the DVX100 is one super super super awesome camera. You can get a CD showing it at promax.com i believe, you have to phone and ask I think.
sig:
See the "..for smart people" banners Wired runs here? Look elsewhere guys.
I'm also quite interested in this, hope he answers your question. Actually, now that I think about *activate google powers*: first search result for h.264 is this @ :
Ok, that doesn't tell me much, but a search for h.264 and royalties brings this up :
I likes me the sound of that.
Point is, if you need the functionality, video just will not do.
I'd say that it depends. I have noticed a lot of nice-looking pieces on cable lately that were shot with video. Now, I'm sure it was relatively-high end equipment. Not BetaSP or anything, but definately high pro-sumer grade.
My point is just that it really depends on the project. Is it worth the hassle of film? Because that's what film is. Wow does it look great, but lighting, metering, sync sound, more complex equipment, and so on.
Sometimes, film is the only way to go...but personally, if it's up to me, I'm very satisfied with the look and quality of something shot on miniDV. Light carefully, frame carefully, PLAN your shoot, and then tweak what you need to on the computer.
I have no allegiance to either, I just like what causes the fewest headaches.
--
a.b. murray