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."

Comments

What took so long?

[Moonwick]

My guess would be that whole 30 frames/sec thing. :)

This is actually major news to some people

[mao che minh]

For those of you that are not "in the know" (I work for arguebly the most successful photography and digital imaging company in history) such a pioneering effort by an industry "under dog" is profound, and highly acknowledged by the industry. I caught wind of JVC's development about two months ago, and it had alot of corporate folk racing to beat them to the punch. There are at least two other major companies that will make press releases very soon concerning similar accomplishments, and if JVC plays their cards right, they can make alot of coin if they properly manage their patents.

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.

Re:This is actually major news to some people

[Jah-Wren Ryel]

As at least one other poster has pointed out - most people probably don't want to see high-def porn. Those cameras see everything - tv news anchors hate high-def because standard make-up just makes them look like crap when you can see individual pores on their faces. Most of the girls in porn are skanky enough to begin with. Now either they are going to have to start breeding genegineered porn actors (participators? fuckers?) with perfect skin, hair and other physical characteristics or a lot of their audience are just going to get turned off, not on by watching that stuff. Its bad enough when you can see their boob-job scars through crappy makeup on today's standard-def porn...

Meanwhile, on the technical side, the reviews I have seen of this camera indicate that it lacks a couple of important features, even in the pro model. The first is a reduced color gamut due to being a single-chip ccd, instead of a 3-chip (RGB) system. Many consumer level standard-def cameras are single-chip and that is part of the reason you can immediately pick out something recorded on a cam-corder versus real film. Apparently, as single chippers go, the JVC is pretty good, but there are plenty of 3-chip standard-def cameras available today in the same price range that should provide significantly better color range.

Also, related to that is a lack of flexible white balance. The report I've seen says that there are two white-point settings and that's it. Even cheapo consumer cameras have automatic white-balance and some of the prosumer ones have manual white-balance too. So, unless you happen to be shooting under ideal conditions, you could end up with your colors looking a little weird (anyone up for green porn chicks? - I kill myself with the puns today). You can fix white-balance in post, but that's generally a pain in the ass.

Re:This is actually major news to some people

[bellings]

Well, they're going to shoot using high-def cameras. They're not going to distribute high-def films.

Why won't they distribute high-def films? Not because there might not be a market for it, but because it's currently impossible. DVDs are only 720 x 480, and no-one is going to broadcast porn from your local PBS station.

Actually, this begs a serious question. Is there currently anything I could possibly use a HDTV for other than watching my local PBS station? The local cable system certainly isn't broadcasting any channels in high definition, and no commercial network affiliate within 300 miles of my house has a digital transmission yet.

Can you get HDTV through any satellite companies? How many HDTV channels do they have, and what resolutions do they actually broadcast HDTV, or just enhanced definition?

Re:This is actually major news to some people

[jaydho]

Higher-res is desireable, even for porn. Suze.net is an approriate example, they keep bumping their film-scan resolutions up due to customer demands. Granted Suze Randall is an awesome photographer and makes her models look great, but I've never been disappointed with too much resolution for any purpose.

Re:Great Leap forward but still falsl short

[zenyu]

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. ;)

Re:Rumors of even *more* advanced stuff..

[TrumpetPower!]

Blockquoth Mr. Poag:

The film is incredibly cheap to mass-produce.

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&

MPEG makes editing hard...

[captaineo]

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)

Re:Rumors of even *more* advanced stuff..

[Urkki]

But the thing is, you don't have to surpass or even reach the quality of real film for consumer use. Other factors, like
- 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.

Re:Single CCD?

[happystink]

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.

Re:Well

[Timmeh]

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 @ :

By any name, the codec, scheduled for completion in spring 2003, is a product of the Joint Video Team (JVT) of the International Telecommunication Union and International Standards Organization. And it's already making waves.

Ok, that doesn't tell me much, but a search for h.264 and royalties brings this up :

One of the initial goals of the H.264 project was that the so-called "baseline" codec should be free of problems with patents. It should be possible to build products using the technology without having to pay royalties. I originally laughed at this idea and talked about flying pigs, but it appears that the aim has come true; the baseline codec uses technology that is either not patented or the patent holders have waived their rights to royalties.

I likes me the sound of that.

Re:10:1 is stingy

[abmurray]

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