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First HDTV Camcorder

Posted by CowboyNeal on from the crispy-clear-baby-videos dept.

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."

26 of 286 comments (clear)

  1. Rumors of even *more* advanced stuff.. by Bowie+J.+Poag · · Score: 4, Funny

    ...I've been hearing rumors that Kodak is developing a system that uses individual molecules to store information. Basically, the light contained within an image interacts with this stuff called they're making called "film"...The film is incredibly cheap to mass-produce. More amazingly, the resolution of the image being captured is practically infinite -- The only limiting factor in image resolution is how small the individual silver nitrate crystrals are.

    The 1900's are gonna fuckin RULE.

    --
    Bowie J. Poag

    1. Re:Rumors of even *more* advanced stuff.. by asparagus · · Score: 4, Informative

      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. ;-)

    2. Re:Rumors of even *more* advanced stuff.. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 3, Informative

      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.

    3. Re:Rumors of even *more* advanced stuff.. by spooje · · Score: 5, Informative

      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)

      --
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    4. Re:Rumors of even *more* advanced stuff.. by Alioth · · Score: 5, Insightful

      Even with the resolution of digital exceeding 35mm, digital still has some artifacts that film doesn't.

      Digital is now fine for happy snappy sort of photographs, but for anything I want to keep, it's still not good enough to replace 35mm. The other thing is I've still not seen a digital camera which will take my Nikon lenses for anything less than about 6 grand. Add that to the printer you need to get real photo quality (i.e. not inkjet) and it gets really expensive to get 35mm quality in digital.

      Doubtless in the next few years we'll see digital cameras which will take interchangable lenses for sane prices - at that point, I'll probably use film for medium format only. But until then, I'll stick with my trusty SLR film camera.

      --
      Oolite: Elite-like game. For Mac, Linux and Windows
    5. Re:Rumors of even *more* advanced stuff.. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Insightful

      Excuse me?

      Let's do some math... using _your_ 2k as an example (real pros really want 4k [arri wants to make a 4k digital movie camera with lockheed martin for example)

      so your image is 2000 wide by 1125 high (assuming a newer, 16x9 format image) - note that this is basically the same res as hd now (1920x1080) - almoust universally agreed on that it is not as good as film (except by that hack Lucas).

      So, per frame, with a 24 bit depth you get 6.43 MBytes per frame. Now professionals normally shoot at 24 frames per second, so our of the camer head you've got to move ~154 MB of data per second, again doable, but not to a recording medium located on the camera like tape or a on-cam hard-drive. So we compress it. HDCAM (the current standard) compresses the image 13:1 so down to about 11.8 MB per second - which will easily fit onto tape, but not easily on a portable, camera mounted hard disk.

      Motion picture people hate HD for 2 reasons right now: 1 - it has to usually have a f*%$ing cable from the camera to directors monitors (normally with film, we just use a mini NTSC transmitter that goes off the video tap on the film camera, but that's not good enough for HD somehow now)
      and more importantly 2 - it won't shoot off-speed.
      Slow motion effects require the camera to shoot at many times the regular rate (don't eve start about panasonic's 'hd 60 frame per second offering - it's crap) most pros need a camera that can at least shoot 150 fps.... right now only film will do that (and also in the near future)

      doing the math again for 150 frames per second we get about 1GByte per second! now tell me exaclty how you plan on making something that will record even 30 seconds of action at that rate that is even slightly practical in a production environment. (a raid array is _not_ practical in a production environment)

      Also, film has a larger colour gamut, equivalent to somewhere near 36 (or some would argue even 48 bit) depth. It has greater latitude than digital (can see into a much more contrasty range, or for the neophytes, the range between how dark something has to be so become black, and how bright something has to be to become white) HD has somewhere around a 5 stop latitude, and some films sit at around 9.5 stops!

      Plus, when you buy a $200,000 film camera, it will still work in 20 years, and you'll still be able to get film for it, and your old film will still be usable. in 20 years, your $100,000 HD camera will be garbage, your tape will have oxidised and will now have so many errors on it as to be unusable (film keeps for over 100 years if stored properly) The beauty of film is that virtually all the tech is in the film, and not in the camera. every time Kodak or Fuji make a new film, I get an upgrade, for the cost of the film. Every time Sony makes a new Hd camera, you have to spend $100,000.

      Film will be here for awhile, get used to it.

      I have used and shot both film and HD, and one day digital WILL kill film, but that day is farther off than the moore's law pundits think it is. HD is NOT film it is pretty video.

      Cheers

    6. Re:Rumors of even *more* advanced stuff.. by mbabauer · · Score: 4, Informative

      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...

    7. Re:Rumors of even *more* advanced stuff.. by agallagh42 · · Score: 3, Insightful

      I think it's obvious to most people that film still has it's place in some niche markets, like those you speak of. However, digital will get there eventually. It's already there in still photography. As this article points out, it's pretty much there in consumer level video.

      Sure, it's got a bit of catching up to do in professional level video, but I give it another 5-10 years max before digital totally kills film in every aspect.

      Look where digital was 10 years ago. There was not really any such thing as digital still cameras. Even digital scanners were still hugely expensive. Now I have a 5 megapixel point and shoot camera with 256MB compactflash in my backpack that cost only about double what a high end film camera in the same range would cost (Canon S50, highly recommended by the way).

      In 10 more years, we'll probably have 20 megapixel disposable cameras for stills, and our ultra-high definition DV camcorders will record to a 100TB compactflash card at 20GB/s.

      Just give it time...

      --
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  2. awesome by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 4, Funny

    this will allow me to pirate theatre screenings with uncanny quality and resolution.

    oh sweet lord in heaven, let this beauty have stereo mikes .. oh creator of all that is copyable .. let this fine device not be scarred by the evil of digital rights management ... I will be producing an eyepatch and parrot for my shoulder, post-haste!

    Glorious movie theatre, I am here .. I am within your comforting womb .. I wish nothing more than to suckle at your darkened swollen teat, and to distribute the nectar of your loins on P2P filesharing networks far and wide .. if the burly man by the door doesn't catch me.

    I shall distributed unauthorized reproductions only when the muse moves me, and lo, she has moved me this night!!

  3. Good job slashdot by abhinavnath · · Score: 4, Funny

    To the editors: word.

    You have successfully posted two stories on two different revolutionary camcorders with no dupes.

    Yet.

    --
    My other sig is also a .Porsche
  4. Well, because... by cybermace5 · · Score: 4, Insightful

    With digital cameras at regular stores with resolution over 5 megapixel it makes you wonder why it took so long to produce.

    The logistics behind capturing, processing, and storing that much data at video rates.

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    ...
  5. Digital camera's Vs Video recorders by Michael's+a+Jerk! · · Score: 5, Insightful

    With digital cameras at regular stores with resolution over 5 megapixel it makes you wonder why it took so long to produce. Speed. With a digital cameria, you have *one* picture containing 5 megapixels, and a little time to process / save it. With video, you need to constantly save those same images one after the other in realtime. Video encoding/compression must be done *very* quickly in realtime.

    --

    I'm not Seth.

  6. Single CCD? by cascino · · Score: 3, Insightful

    The single CCD is 1/3" true 16x9 with 1290x880 native resolution.
    I don't know about you, but there's no way I'd shell out $2500 - $3500 for a camera with only a SINGLE ccd. I'm sure the resolution's great, but I'll take an XL-1 over this thing anyday.

    1. Re:Single CCD? by Lumpy · · Score: 3, Insightful

      Bingo. My Canon XL-1 will kick this HD camcorder's butt any day just based on 3 simple things.

      1 - the XL1 has a real lens no integrated crap like this thing.

      2- XL1 has 3 CCD's

      3- the XL1 overall produces the absolute BEST picture for any camcorder that costs $4000.00 No other camcorder can record clear enough to show you DV artifacts easily. (Simply gain-up to add noise to the picture to hide the DV artifacts.

      I have seen captures from this camera and a XL1 together. (Both shot on the same set at the same time)

      you cannot tell the difference.

      plus the XL1 has had a progressive mode for over 5 years now. movie mode is 30 full frames per second.. non-interlaced..... and looks DAMN good.

      XL-1 is the only choice for doing anything serious outside of the pro SONY cameras.

      --
      Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
  7. This is actually major news to some people by mao+che+minh · · Score: 5, Interesting
    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.

    1. Re:This is actually major news to some people by Jah-Wren+Ryel · · Score: 5, Interesting

      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.

      --
      When information is power, privacy is freedom.
    2. Re:This is actually major news to some people by Jah-Wren+Ryel · · Score: 4, Informative

      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.
  8. Just remember, kids: by Murdock037 · · Score: 4, Funny

    Hi-def digital cameras do not necessarily help you make better movies.

  9. Great Leap forward but still falsl short by MrCaseyB · · Score: 4, Informative

    Theres some great comments at this link

    http://www.camcorderinfo.com/content/jvc_introdu ce s_professional_high_definition_jy_hd10u_02_07_03.h tm

    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.

    1. Re:Great Leap forward but still falsl short by zenyu · · Score: 4, Interesting

      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. ;)

  10. No wonder, really. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 4, Insightful

    With digital cameras at regular stores with resolution over 5 megapixel it makes you wonder why it took so long to produce.

    Actually, no. It's a different thing to make a camera that can take stills and one that can do continuous video. The size of the CCD is not the issue. The speed of the CCD, the processing power of the underlying electronics, and the storage density with it's associated problems is why this is an engineering challenge.

  11. Re:Hello? by yoink! · · Score: 5, Informative

    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.

  12. 750/30p? WTF? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 4, Informative

    ...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.)

  13. MPEG makes editing hard... by captaineo · · Score: 4, Interesting

    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)

  14. Because the MPEG4 you know and love is dead by Small+Hairy+Troll · · Score: 5, Informative

    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.

  15. lines = horizontal resolution by flimflam · · Score: 3, Informative

    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.

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