I've been playing around a little with the footage Paul posted. And I know this is not a very controlled test of the ability of the camera. What I did was grab a few frames of Mini-DV that were on my drives. Now, this is complicated by the fact that my Mini-DV footage started out on Super-8mm film and was telecined to Mini-DV, so there's an apparent grain structure as well as the limitations of Super-8's resolution (which I still prefer to straight Mini-DV), plus the effects of bleach bypass processing. Anyway, I took a frame of my Mini-DV and grabbed a 64 x 64 pixel chunk of it (representing about .011 of the total image) and grabbed a 100 x 100 pixel chunk of one of Paul's frames (which is about the same percentage of the image) and blew both selections up to 320 x 320 in Photoshop. After screwing around with several images for several hours, I think what finally sticks out to me is that I need to get a life. ;-)

Er, uh, but other than that, I felt that the JVC images seem to hold together pretty well as a relative selection is enlarged. I threw one set of my test images together against a neutral background in Photoshop and stuck it on my page, if anyone wants to check it out. If you want to see something more telling, double the size of the entire image and you get 640 x 640 selections and double-sized originals.

I know this is all very unscientific, but it seemed fairly informative to me. It's a big file, it's a .tif about 5 megs in size.

Here's the URL:

http://www.conventicle.com/reztest.tif

-Rob

I'm not exactly sure were you are going with this test. Wouldn't
it been a better comparison if you had shot the same footage
and then scanned the 8 mm negative into a computer?

<<<-- Originally posted by Rob Lohman : I'm not exactly sure were you are going with this test. Wouldn't
it been a better comparison if you had shot the same footage
and then scanned the 8 mm negative into a computer? -->>>

I've shot thousands of feet of Super-8 and the telecine house that I use returns my footage on Mini-DV. That's as close to Mini-DV as I really have any desire to come, so for me it's a fair test of what the HDV format offers as opposed to what I'm used to using. I tried to include all the caveats up front. I probably shouldn't have shared that image since this isn't a film forum, but I thought that since I'd been messing around with it and found it as interesting as I did that maybe someone else might, as well.

That said, I'll probably end up using an HDV camcorder for my next project. Since I don't have to do any production until next year, though, I have time to wait around and see if anyone offers up a more workable solution than the JVC. It's the first DV format to come along that I'd consider working with.

Thanks for explaining this a bit more. I see now where you're
coming from. So your conclusion is that the JVC holds up pretty
well resolution wise?

<<<-- Originally posted by Rob Lohman : Thanks for explaining this a bit more. I see now where you're
coming from. So your conclusion is that the JVC holds up pretty
well resolution wise? -->>>

Well, I have a lot of bad habits as an editor. I tend to occasionally reframe shots or do quick zooms in editing and doing that with Super-8 to Mini-DV is kind of a "stylized" thing. The grain pumps up and it feels kind of "gritty" to me (others have had less-kind ways of phrasing it, but I like it). The same kinds of thing done with these images holds together really well, IMO. Even in the really noisy frames or like that dog mouth with what looks like a compression artifact of some kind seem to hold together really well as many times their original size. As more full-featured cameras using this format become available I think a lot of student and indie filmakers are going to adopt it.