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Sony's HDV 1080i Consumer Camcorder
An anonymous reader writes "Sony has just announced a high-definition video camcorder that records in 1080i. A site was just created with a lot of information about the camcorder. The camcorder uses the HDV spec which records to standard MiniDV tapes. It includes 3 CCDs and along with the announcement it appears Apple and Adobe are now supporting the HDV standard. The camcorder carries a steep price at $3,700 though. See the original press release as well, though it doesn't contain much information."
It will be competing in the super-high-end consumer market through the professional market. It's similar to the Canon XL1 series, which go for similar prices, with similar characteristics (high end digital video, everything manual, etc.).
Craig Steffen
http://www.craigsteffen.net
I wonder how much storage space is on it, and how long it will take to transfer onto a PC/Editing system given 1080i's bandwidth requirements?
Uhm, one of the defining features of this camera is that it can do 1080i and 780p.
I beleive the JVC GR-HD1US has been avialble for more than a year now, and at a slightly lower price than the Sony. Sony seems to have been spending a lot of (well considered) money on the PlayStation 2&3 platform and ignoring the "consumer electronics" feild for a while now. They just aren't up to snuff compared to Panasonic, JVC, Zenith and the other giants.
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Actually, given the benefits of progressive scan, I'm surprised there isn't more equipment in 1080p...especially since the quality difference is apparent.
On the other hand...if you think about how much camcorders cost around 20 years ago...adjust for inflation...this really not all that expensive. I'm sure I'm not the only one who remembers the separate cameras and recording decks of days long past.
I'd be particularly wary of buying any NTSC/PAL camcorders with the new HD standards that are going to be set in the next few years. I'm hoping that by the time I have kids, there'll be more choices on the market with this kind of recording quality.
// Agent Green (Ian / IU7 / KB1JQO)
// IEEE 802.3: All 10base Are Belong To Us
I have a Sony DV camera and it works fine with iMovie.
Remember, You are unique...just like everyone else.
Screw Porn (HAHAHA). Throw caution to the DCMA and BOOTLEG, BOOTLEG, BOOTLEG. Now all I need is 3700$, some milk duds, and a rear seat.
My sony mini-dv works fine with my PowerBook. No need for proprietary software or drivers. The only think I had to do was get a cable.
My
-I get a piece of brand new tech for 500 dollars.
-I get a digital camera that uses the X3 sensor and has a true 8MP CCD, not this 1.5MP x 3 garbage that you see.
I am the Alpha and the Omega-3
RTFA:
"The HDV spec was agreed upon as a standard by Sony, JVC, Canon, and Sharp for new high-definition consumer camcorders last year. Along with the announcement of the new Sony HDV camcorder comes support from major video editing software companies including Apple and Adobe"
Go on the DV boards like 2-pop or creative cow and find me all the people who are unable to use sony's "not recognized and not standard" DV VTR's and cameras. They ARE standard and any editor that can capture DV can get video from them just as easily as from a JVC, Panasonic or Canon. No drivers necessary.
"I forgot my mantra."
I doubt many people really want to watch high-def porn.
It'll just make the flaws and bad makeup stand out more.
I know a lot of sony camera's only work with the proprietary software.. IF you use a USB connection.
However, if you actually go out and buy a 1394 cable, it works in all applications just like any other DV device would.
?SYNTAX ERROR IN LINE 42
It is really surprising that we have interlaced standards in the HDTV specs.
Basically, 1080i = 540 lines / refresh.
720p has 720 lines per refresh.
The problem with interlacing is that it introduces or exacerbates certain visual artifacts. This is one of the reasons some of the networks are sticking with 720p for their HDTV broadcasts.
Whether this interlaced standard is a carryover from the consumer electronics folks or not, I would stick with 720p until something nicer comes out. Be interesting to know the history here. Computer LCD makers are well settled on progressive displays at this point.
Is 1080p in the standard? I didn't think it was....
Anyways, fun stuff.
...that HDV's recorded bitrate is still 25Mbit/sec. While you might think that is a lot compared to terrestrial HDTV's 18Mbit stream, in fact, it's very little. In production you generally want to record MORE in acquisition than distribution.
The defacto HD production format, HDCAM, records something like 140-180MBit/sec, the uncompressed signal is something like 996MBit/sec.
The most likely market for this camera will be indie filmmakers, documentaries, and industrial/corporate promotional use. The price makes complete sense--and most of the market buying VX2100's and XL1's will probably look seriously at this.
Most broadcast/network HD will still be HDCAM, DVCPRO HD (off the popular Panasonic Varicam) or 35mm transfer.
Calum
I'm hoping that by the time I have kids
What? I thought this was slashdot!
You can lead a horse to water, but you can't make it dissolve.
Am I missing something?
Cost. Look at the bandwidth requirements of 1080p, 'til recently satisfying that on a consumer screen was pretty much more than anyone was willing to pay, given the dearth of HD programming. The cost balance was forged at the beginning of ATSC deliberations.
Hell, try driving UT2004 at 1920x1080 on your widescreen computer monitor with less than a Geforce FX5900!
I submit that if you use a progressive computer monitor and deinterlace 1080i it'll look OK, but I also submit that very few people here have a home theater that has a 1080p monitor. If you're very lucky you have 720p and can convert cleanly (or run a nice line processor).
Hell, I still have an analog TV, and won't consider digital until I move since I don't have enough room for a 60" screen yet!
Final Cut Pro HD has been out for what, five months now? And even before that some form of HD has been supported in Final Cut Pro. I am not familiar with the earlier versions of it, but some of the FCP books I have all discuss editing it.
It is cool to see a 1080i camera out there though. Give it a few weeks and there will be a consumer affordable model.
For now I will stick with my Canon Optura Xi.
On a serious note. I have been thinking about things like this for a while. It's not exactly a highly original thought, but more and more of high end hardware/software/electronics/mechanics are becoming available to the normal joe. This has been widely known and considered with apache/linux/mysql/php/etc., but it is happening in many realms other than software.
I think that we are stepping into a creative boon as a result of this. When only large profit-intensive, single-minded corporations have access to these types of materials you don't see much creativity in how they are used. However, you stick that power with a vast majority of the public and you are going to have some incredibly original and creative ideas. I am looking forward to the creativity too....Doggy style is so 20th century.
"1080 is supposed to be the vertical resolution, with horizontal at 1920. This is less than half the horizontal resolution."
Most likely they offset one CCD by half a pixel, which is a common technique in video cameras to improve resolution with small CCDs. That way they can get a good approximation to the full 1920x1080 luminance signal by mixing the signals from the three CCDs... the chroma signal is probably only being recorded at half resolution anyway, so it's less important.
Actually, given the benefits of progressive scan, I'm surprised there isn't more equipment in 1080p
The basic reason they don't is due to the bandwidth of the amount of information you'd have to transfer is double that of 1080i. And then you have to compress that information. Compressed HDTV runs at 19.8 Mega Bits/second. To do 1080p you would have to run at twice that 39.6 Mbps. This amounts to one full 4.7GB disk every 15 minutes. Not many devices can record that fast, except raid arrays. If you want progressive, use 720p for now.
Fly me to the moon Let me sing among those stars Let me see what spring is like On jupiter and mars
I think the more important question is whether you really need to see every zit on a porn star's ass.
IANAL, but I play one on
MPEG2 supports bit rates of up to 80 megabits/second. This is very high. The Cam is using up to 25 mbits and this is sufficient for HD. To give you a comparison, 8 mbits MPEG-2 is higher quality than you see on your standard TV. Besides, the only way to record it is to use some form of compression if you want a tape to last more than a minute. And MPEG-2 is better than some I could think of (think Redmond). Besides, MPEG-2 hardware compressors are very cheap compared to anything else, and MPEG is more versatile for this. Besides, since MPEG-2 is a SMPTE standard, they can garuntee that the files will be compatible with any program out there for editing them.
Fly me to the moon Let me sing among those stars Let me see what spring is like On jupiter and mars
I don't see that as a problem. 720p is the current top-end for "real" HD. 1080i is not "real" in my eyes because it is interlaced.
It's time we dropped interlacing completely (funnily enough, I was told that was one of the big benefits to digital, that you get 60 discrete full-resolution frames per second, and not 59.94 or 29.97 or some fucked up number). Had I been in charge of the FCC, when CBS threatened to pull their HD over the broadcast flag, I'd have told them, "hahaha, go ahead and pull it, 1080i sucks cock anyway, and so does the broadcast flag".
Plus, devices that are natively 1080i will have to upconvert 720p, which will cause an immediate resolution loss of 1/2 the full 1080i pixel array, since you're converting from 60 full frames per second, to 60 fields per second. And that's not even figuring in the resizing process from 1920x1080 to 1280x720.
I'd rather see 1080i downconverted to 720p, so that the 720p signal will run at native resolution . 720p is the current sweet spot for quality in HDTV, and people completely miss it because "1080 is bigger, durrrrr".
Interlacing should have NEVER BEEN ALLOWED INTO THE DIGITAL STANDARD AT ALL. Legacy interlaced material running at 59.94 fields/sec can be converted to 480p/29.97fps with absolutely NO loss, only problem is you get mice teeth (but they could just bob it in the receiver). For material shot and produced for HD, there should NEVER be any interlacing, EVER. Interlacing was only used as a cheap analog way of compressing the signal at a 1:2 ratio. Now that we have the bandwidth, there is no reason we can't have 60 discrete frames per second.
Oh, and don't even get me started on why we are already locked into MPEG-2 for DTT, despite the availability of better compression methods. Or why companies that broadcast on two separate NTSC licenses (commonly known as 'duopolies') are only being given one 19Mbps ATSC license? Due to this, such companies can NOT offer true HD for both stations. If the analog side of your station broadcasts on two 6MHz channels (discounting translators, etc - just the main transmitter), then you should get two 19Mbps ATSC licenses, point blank.
Digital TV sucks. It will be the end of television, as we know it. Mark my words.
FC Closer
Often when editing DV, you aren't making new frames, you're just cutting and shuffling around the existing ones, so when you export, many of your frames are not recompressed. This is more difficult with MPEG. because it uses interframe compression and you often don't have an entire frame to work from. I'd be willing to bet that when you capture from this camera, it comes into FCP/Premier as HDCAM somehow so that you don't edit in MPEG2.
"I forgot my mantra."
"More likely they're recording to tape at 960x1080"
Not if they intend to stick to the HDV standard: I may be wrong, but from what little is available on the web it appears that the the only recording option at 1080i is 1440x1080 anamorphic.
I've shot with the JVC HDV camera, and my impression of it is that the resolution is excellent (as is to be expected), but the real quality differentiator between it and a "real HD" camera is the quality of color and image delivered by the whole system, not just a high resolution imaging chip.
This is not suprising - I have always found the image and color quality of DV cameras to be much lower than even medium-end pro cameras (such as the elderly SVHS Panasonic Supercam). The prosumer cameras do not have $3,000 lenses. They do not have the amazing amount of color DSP going on as the pro cameras.
But at the same time, HDV cameras are better than nothing, and certainly good for "riskier" shots where a $100,000 HDCAM camera being lost would be a problem. You just can't skydive with a full-size camera, for instance...
One other issue is that 25 Mbps is really limiting for MPEG-2 HD (heh, so is 19.4 Mbps, but that is another topic).
If you are into a lot of action with lots of uncorrelated motion vectors, you might be better off with upconverted DV, as 25 Mbps is fine for inraframe coded DV.
People often observe that the HDTV standards specify 1080i, 720p, and 480p, but there is actually more to it than this. The ATSC standard specifies these resolutions at 60Hz (where Hz here measures refreshes per second, which is the same thing as frames per second for progressive scan, twice the frame rate for interlacing), but it also specifies lower frame rates. In particular the standard actually specifies 1080 line progressive scan at 30fps (because that has the same bitrate as 1080i at 60Hz) and also at 24fps (because this has the same frame rate as movies and other production on film).
Lots of people in the independent film industry really want 24fps progressive (usually referred to as 24p), because video shot this way can be blown up onto 35mm film and shown in a cinema, and can ideally provide film quality for a much lower cost than actual film (and which can be digitally edited etc etc much more easily than stuff shot on film. They have at times gone out of their way to kludge something similar from consumer DV cameras in the past. Quite a few films have been shot by taking a PAL SDTV camera, getting it to output 576 line 25fps progressive, blowing it up onto film and then running the resulting film at 24fps. The playback speed is slightly slower than the filming speed, but it is close enough not to notice. (Just as an aside, the reverse of this is often done when movies are shown on European TV, which are filmed in 24fps and shown at 50Hz interlaced (ie 25fps) on PAL TV. This sometimes explains why films have slightly different running times on European and American TV, and some actors complain that their voices have a higher pitch when they watch their movies in Europe)
Now this camera does not support either of these 1080 line progressive scan modes, presumably because the CCD sensor in the camera would have to be different to do this. It can apparently film 1080i 60Hz and then fake 30fps or 24fps progressive from that, and I would be very interested to see how good this is. It is undoubtedly much better than the old PAL DV camera at 25fps trick, but how it compares with cameras that film 720 lines in genuine progressive scan remains to be seen. These 720p cameras have apparently been a big hit with film-makers, but a genuine 1080p camera for a few thousand dollars would be something special. It would mean that film-makers could rent a camera for a few hundred dollars that could produce something very close to genuine cinema quality, and they could make movies with it without the costs of film stock. Sony have been making 1080 line 24p cameras for professional use for a few years now ("Star Wars Episode 2", the "Spy Kids" movies, and no doubt a few others have been shot with them). This would change the independent film world, as the absolute minimum amount of money required to produce a feature film with decent picture quality would be reduced from a few tens of thousands of dollars to close to nothing.
Here is the real reason for the 1080i/720p split:
Sony HDCAM: 1080i
Panasonic D5: 720p
Half of broadcasters went one way, half went the other. Keep in mind the existing business relationships at networks and stations.
But 1080i really does seem to provide a higher-resolution experience (when watched on a real 1080 monitor...) HDNET went 1080i, and most PBS content is 1080i. But I will admit it is really a religious issue.
I've never heard about the duopoly issue with DTV channel assignments. It is my impression that every analog broadcast channel is entitled to a DTV channel as well during the transition. Do you have a reference on this?
I can assure you that MPEG-2 is the ONLY codec that is broadcast-ready. Certainly when ATSC specs were defined, they weren't even thoughts.
I've seen the best H.264 and Windows Media live encoders on the planet, and they can barely get the same quality at the same bitrate as the best mid-level MPEG-2 live encoders.
Keep in mind that MPEG-2 encoders have had years to get better. People keep coming up with ways to cut bits, you now have live 2-pass encoders, pre-filtering, etc. MPEG-2 live encoding quality has improved 100% in the last five years in terms of equivalent bitrate quality.
I expect 2-3 years before the live H.264/WMT encoders can catch up with live MPEG-2 encoders.
From your mouth to God's ears. The end of TV as we know can only be a good thing.
"Unheard of means only it's undreamed of yet,
Impossible means not yet done." ~~ Julia Ecklar
Porn is what runs most of the internet.
Unfortunately, porn in high res it not the panacea you imply. Even on DVD I can see waaaaay too much detail. (think: sores, pimples, rashes, bruises, and surgery scars)
What do you guys who claim that HD porn reveals too much detail (i.e., pimples, sores, blemishes, scars, etc...) think you see when you actually have sex with a real person? You guys are making it clear that you're virgins. Well, HD porn will give you a better idea what it's like; It can be disgusting. So the argument that it won't do well is ridiculous because people go to prostitutes.