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

Digital camera's Vs Video recorders

[Michael's a Jerk!]

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.

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:Hello?

[yoink!]

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.

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

[spooje]

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)

Because the MPEG4 you know and love is dead

[Small Hairy Troll]

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.

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

[Alioth]

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.

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

[Anonymous Coward]

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