Yes of course both XH cams have component out.

See the sixth photo down from the top of this page: http://www.dvinfo.net/canonxh/articles/images1.php

It's the same "D Terminal" type connector as the XL H1.

That's clearly visible in the picture of the rear output jacks, down below the AV jack.

Jeff, that's the latch to open the LCD screen. The tape loads on the right side.

Ah, I stand corrected. Good catch, Dave! I was looking for it to be in the same place as my Z1U.

Of course it should say "Open/Eject" for the tape carrier access. Here is a picture that does show this button. Look at the third and sixth photo on this page: http://www.dvinfo.net/canonxh/articles/images2.php

The tape carrier is on the right-hand side as Dave states. The open/eject button is on the top right next to the zoom rocker.

Wait a sec, since the XHG1 has both audio and video out on the HD-SDI outputs, is there going to be an "XLH1s" to add this function since the XLH1 only does video out on its HD-SDI?

I'm also a little confused at the moment. If I can get uncompressed 4:2:2 HD out of the XHG1, then why would I get an HVX200? I know P2 is an easier solution and I never have to settle for HDV under any circumstances, plus it's cheaper by $1,000 or so depeding where I get one, but the XHG1 looks pretty snazzy at the moment.

I suppose I'll have to wait and see one when they come out, but I hope Panasonic or even Sony have some sort of response ready or pull the "New Canon Camera Panic!!!"-switch we all know they have. I'm not a fan of HDV or the "f" modes, but if I can get the ease of use of HDV with the option for uncompressed output, plus the option to use my current Canon GL1 battery collection, then I may just pick one up by next summer.

But this is all assuming that the RED or SI cameras aren't all they've been hyped up to be when they officially launch.

That exact question is currently being discussed in our XL H1 forum at this very moment:

http://www.dvinfo.net/conf/showthread.php?t=72349

Please direct any responses on this subject to that particular thread. Thanks,

Bottom line for people buying the HVX200 seems to be that it's the most convenient way to record DVCProHD footage with a 'look' that HDV can't match. But an HVX200 with 16 minutes worth of P2 memory costs as much today as two of the entry-level Canons will cost in a few weeks, so depending on your needs that's a big price gap. I think both product lines will continue to be successful, but anyone doing long-form work should wait for the Canons.

P2 and its tapeless workflow definitely has its place; that's why I've been reluctant to write up a "camcorder comparison" chart with the HVX200 or anything else for that matter. The Canon XH camcorders really compare fairly only to the Sony Z1 and FX1, but even then it might not be all that fair of a comparison. Maybe whatever Sony brings out next will be though.

P2 is a workflow decision... it's also the least expensive way to get into the DVCPRO HD format. I've always tried to impress upon people to choose the format first, then worry about the camera. Hence, why bother with camera comparison charts. For HDV 1080i, it's pretty much between the Sony FX1 / Z1 and the Canon XH, unless you need the big 'ol Canon H1 or the tiny little Sony A1. Right tool for the right job, eh?

Or if you have specific ideas about what you want in terms of camera design, you can start from that. Up until now all the low-cost HD cameras have been so different from each other that it was pretty easy to pick on that basis, with recording format being just one of the important variables. With the new Canon cameras it gets tougher because they clearly compete directly with the Sonys and offer an interesting alternative to JVC and Panasonic at a competitive price. I would think a comparison chart could be useful at this point, with a large disclaimer at the top not to consider any one specification critical unless you know it's critical for you. And by all means "try before you buy" for any HD camera, if you can arrange to do so.

To be thorough, there are tapeless workflow options for HDV cameras, plus the option to shoot both tape and tapeless at the same time.

On the 7th picture on the 2nd images page, I noticed there's a button called "MAGN.". Do you think this is the same as the Z1's 'expanded focus' feature, or is it a common Canon feature I don't know about?

So what's the August Canon announcement?
 

A 2/3" chip XL H2 ;-) ?

It's the same as the Focus Assist feature on the XL H1; it magnifies the viewfinder image by 200%.

Also download Yahoo toolbar, and you can add a button called Translate page. A couple of clicks, and it translates the site perfect.

Tape Transport?
 

Does anyone know if Canon has upgraded the tape transport in the current/forthcoming crop? I'm still smarting over the high-dollar, poor customer service, of getting the transport replaced on my GL2 when Canon *should* have issued a recall. Should I continue to budget $250-$500/year for transport replacement?

Matt

how often does that happen with any camera?

Rest assured that since it's an HDV camcorder, then it ain't at all the same tape transport as the GL2. Most likely it's the same one from the XL H1, and I haven't heard of any problems with that one.

About every time, Bob? The XL H1 is still selling for full MSRP, at $8995... the XL2 sold at full MSRP for several months... just about everything does in this business. Of course I'm talking about legitimate dealers! Not the gray-market fly by night box houses.

I also thought their was a street price,,,,I guess I'm more used to Nikon than Canon.

So has anyone ever went to film usining 24f?

No need to translate the Japanese pages when we have info here!

http://www.dvinfo.net/conf/showthread.php?t=72315

and

http://www.usa.canon.com/consumer/co...&modelid=14057

and

http://www.usa.canon.com/consumer/co...&modelid=14061

hwm

I should have posted this yesterday.

I waited a long.. time to see what Canons offering would be before buying a HD camera. I think these cameras are double the price of what they should be, and years overdue, and yes, I think all the prosumer cameras, except some of the cheaper Sony, are too much as well.

--------------------------------

I remember when I first saw the exceptional looking XL1 and GL1, beautiful but so costly. Even today these old cameras are a "beautiful selling point, with the exception of the JVC HD100 series, they stand out from the crowd. heres to the old Canons, they might have got behind the ball over the years before HD, but that didn't really matter as the were ahead of the ball in the first place.

The story went, at that NAB2004 site for one example, that a number of 720p cameras from other manufacturers were planned after the HD10. Then Sony stepped in and they converted their plans to 1080p and the cameras were delayed. I much rather would have had 720p sooner with 50/60p options then have had to wait years for these versions. If Canon were to release a full version 720p50/60 version of these cameras at half the price today (and 36Mb/s+ (or 25mbps H264) even 10bit) I would be very tempted.

I think the industry has missed a very good chance in HDV to stratify their product lines, with 720p at the bottom, and 1080 and 1440 I & P at the top. Now is the time of the rise of H264 (why didn't they use th older Mpeg4 for HDV).

Good luck to you Canon.

i won't be paying $7,000.

I will pay $4000 for the XH-A1. I even plan on reserving one the first chance I can.

Agreed that the Canons are at least a year late to market, but the pricing is plausible compared to the competition (especially the base model). $3999 for a camera which will record over 700 TV lines of discernible resolution on inexpensive tapes with a 20X zoom lens and XLR inputs? How is that not a fair deal compared to what we've been paying for 'prosumer' cameras up until now? Sure, it'll be better when the street price is closer to $3000 like the FX1 is now, but that's not bad for the MSRP.

How about because real-time MPEG4 encoders weren't ready, and it will be years before it's realistic to edit MPEG4 footage directly in real time? A better question would be why all HDV cameras don't offer an option for a 35 Mbps bit rate, which appears to make a noticeable difference compared to 25 Mbps?

I think the tape transport issues on the GL2 are probably critical on the decision of Canon not coming up with a 'GL3' and also the fact they are going 'Sony style' and make 2 very similar cameras with different price ranges.

Regarding the price, it seems very good taking into account the competition. Why would Canon be selling the HA1 for $3k if the FX1 has been around for quite a while? People would just think Canon didn't have any faith in these cameras, or was desperate to take Sony head-on for some reason.

I don't think these prices are bad at all. These are prosumer cameras meant to make money with and not just cheap consumer models. These new cameras could very well have the same image quality of the H1 which has been known to hold it's own with the SONY 350 as well as the F900.

Remember the FX1 is a consumer camera. The Z1 which is the pro version does actually cost more than XH-A1. If you want to spend $3,000.00 and feel you can get by with a FX1 then maybe you should go buy one of those. I for one want the amazing chips and features that Canon has. When compared to the Z1 isn't this camera much more of a value? True 24F recording, high quality detailed chips, image control, the option of having SDI. For many there is no question that the Canon is the way to go just for the 24F alone.

To this date the XH-A1 is the cheapest prosumer HDV camera with the Z1 and the JVC HD-100 next in line around $5,000.00. Yes if you want SDI it will cost more but then again is there an option for SDI on the other cameras I just mentioned. The JVC HD-250 will have SDI but it will again cost closer to $10,000 or more. At $7,000.00 this is the cheapest camera ever made in the history of man to have SDI. If SDI isn't a big deal to you then get the XH-A1 for $4,000.00. If $4,000.00 is too much for a camera then perhaps you are in the wrong business. I have never even bought DV cameras for less than $4,000.00.

Agreed. I don't see how $4000 can be construed as "too expensive" considering all that the camera does. It should pay for itself in no time. If it hasn't paid for itself within 90 days of buying it, then something's wrong with your business model.

There's only two things that a $4000 camcorder can be. It's either a business tool, or it's a luxury item. If it's a business tool, then it's paying for itself. If it's a luxury item, then its affordability is a highly subjective and personal matter. Either way, how can you complain about the price?

I'm wondering about those extra jacks on the G1. From the pictures it appears the only differnce between the two cameras are the jacks themelves. Notice how there isn't some big box on the side of the camera that would house some sort of logic board. So it makes me wonder if the A1 has the same abilities just not the jacks to access them. Maybe something a physical hack would solve? As sacrilegious as that may sound right now.

Overall these cameras look excellent. Great job Canon.

Also does anyone know if these camera can rotate the image 180 degrees in-camera for use with those fancy DIY DOF adapters? I've heard the XL2 can do that. Never inquired about the XL-H1 though as it's out of my price range.

It's not clear by these listings in IMDB, but the Canon XL-H1 can shoot in 24f and these 5 movies used (at least in part) the H1.

http://www.imdb.com/SearchTechnical?CAM:Canon%20XL-H1

I think until there is full, native support for 24f in the major NLEs, then it will be awhile before it is a common format to shoot in when intending to go to film. Of course, with Canon's announcement yesterday, I'm betting that native support is just around the corner.

One of the big differnces is the HD-SDI output. If your only planning on using one camera how important is having that? Also for shooting events, docs or maybe an indie can you live without SMPTE?

Sony A1, and the HC1 was not too far behind.

I agree, about the making money thing, it could also be argued for Red and Viper. But I would value 35mbps for a prosumer camera, and cheaper prices for any base consumer camera that isn't more than 25mbps.

Cheap Mpeg4 compression was not as far out as people think, and used on 8Mp motion camera years before. H264 editing is here shortly, I have talked to an company insider. General computer power is catching up with older advanced design concepts which have had the power for a number of years in actual chips. What we see today is nothing compared to what we can see tomorrow. Some of this is just company politics (like not being the preferred company internal solution) some a technology speed problem.

The problem was that companies were caught up in processing power doubling every 18 months (which is why we are not looking at 20Ghz processors shortly). When this processing power rate increase slowed, it caught them off guard, they are now trying to implement alternative parallel designs to catch up. It has been recently revealed that Intel is planning a 32 core chip for 2010. If such a chip ran at 1Ghz per core, the combined power consumption might be 3.2W for 32 Billion Instructions per second (very rough estimates). For 32W, or 100W, we might expect something like 96bip+. That is 2010, but you should ask, when will we get 8 cores? A lot of these cores are moderate in performance compared to dedicated programmable parallel systems planned for the GPU/Cell/etc. Even the Ambarella h264 camera chip contains enough power to tackle editing.

We can conjecture that everything is impossible, but the figures and designs do stack up, and I think that companies are planing for this level of processing being available for NLE's to use fro their cameras, before they committed. This year it might cost $2000-$4000 in computer hardware cost, but next year maybe $1000-$2000.

Discussion moved from Industry News to Canon XH forum.

Congrats Greg -- your initial post drew 150 replies and more than 4,000 views in the space of about 24 hours. That's nothing on some other sites but around here that's actually quite a bit.

Today's $4K computers can barely handle 2-3 layers of 1080i MPEG2 without making performance compromises, so it's going to be a while before we can handle several layers of MPEG4 effectively. If/when professional MPEG4-based cameras start shipping, the footage will either have to be converted to an intermediary format for editing or someone will have to provide dedicated hardware acceleration to make native editing work. We should have eight-core personal computers by next year but that may not help much, because performance doesn't scale linearly with more cores and it takes time to rewrite software to take advantage of such systems.

And no matter what happens with hardware it will be easier to edit MPEG2 than MPEG4, so we'll get better peformance for the former on any given computer setup. HDV may not be perfect but it's a useful compromise given currently available technology; if it just had a slightly higher bit rate we might not be talking much about other alternatives. So maybe AVC cameras will prove to be more useful in the long run, but we're going to need some kick-a$$ computers to process the footage.

Maybe, maybe not. ATI and nVidia are supposed to be incorporating dedicated AVC hardware decoders in their graphics cards, which might make AVC editing practical much sooner than later.

Why would you say that? MPEG-2 is a processor pig, we don't know if MPEG-4 necessarily will require more horsepower to edit. The compression phase may be more complex but that doesn't mean the decompression phase will be slower (and in editing, it's the decompression phase that's most interesting). And a dedicated MPEG-4 hardware chip on the graphics card could make AVC editing as responsive as DV editing.

Remains to be seen, but with the rapid adoption of AVC in so many other aspects (digital broadcasting, satellite broadcasting, European HDTV broadcasting, IPTV, blu-ray, HD-DVD etc) I think guesses of how difficult AVC-HD will be to work with are probably not accurate.

You'l never hear me say a given technology is impossible. Maybe not currently available, but not impossible. I spent 25 years in the semiconductor industry and I have seen pipe dreams become reality far too many times in that quarter century.

I'm still fond of reminding people that in early 1980's they claimed we could never break 1200 baud on a standard copper wire phone line. Hmmm...and here I sit typing on a 5mbs DSL line using copper wire.

My only complaint about technology is that there is always someone in the human race that finds a way to abuse it or do great harm to others.

I know we will get realtime H.264 in due time, just like we started encoding MPEG2 with software and then graphics boards and sound cards started popping up with dedicated MPEG2 hardware encoding/decoding.

-gb-

I do know to edit native m2t, you need a lot of computing power, so who knows if it'll be easier or harder or the same with mpeg4. For now, using DIs on a PC really works, or the Apple Intermediate Codec on Apple NLEs (or native mpeg2-ts in Final Cut Pro 5).

heath

I'd be very surprised if MPEG4 is less processor intensive for editing, so as you speculated it's more likely we'll see hardware-assisted solutions. Maybe that will happen sooner than expected, but at the very least it's going to take a carefully configured system to edit AVC footage effectively. It will probably be easier to just convert to a digital intermediary, which we can already see signs will be supported.

The important question is whether there will be a sub-$5K AVC camera which would make something like the new Canons seems overpriced. So far Panasonic is the only company proposing something plausible in that regard, and that likely won't ship until late next year at some unspecified price. So the Canon prices are perfectly reasonable today given the other available alternatives, and will presumably drop by next year when other cameras become available.

Canon's English Press Release
 

Wow, things are really a buzz here in Canon land...

Here is a link to the Canon USA website press release for these two new exciting entries to the HD 3chip world... Go Canon!

http://opd.usa.canon.com/templatedat...xha1_xhg1.html

I didn't really want to start a controversy, I was trying to post a final post before we got onto the subject, but then a few myths cropped up I though I'd address, and maybe I contributed a few more.


Ill, answer a few more posts here to.

Of course, it depends on what you are doing with it and how advanced, and what level of computer configuration you are using (assume I am talking of minimums). And using an intermediary like cineform, is a way of editing, with 2Ghz I understand. So my pricing takes into consideration those things (and H264 is far more intensive then Mpeg2).

I was talking about 32 cores per chip, or when we will get 8 cores per chip. And it will help a lot, sometimes linearly, mostly nearly linearly, with software written for it that way. I understand multi core software is already in use in some NLE's, as well as GPU acceleration, you just have to use those products. The other thing is so much PC software is written inefficiently it is hard to judge what is possible from an application, unless it is written well.

Exactly, if they are going to sell prosumer cameras, and sell them as low end professional cameras, they should have a data rate to match. We don't need 100MB/s Mpeg2, but 35-50Mb/s goes a long way, and we would not be as interested in the alternatives.

The interesting thing is, from reading, that various wavelet schemes can produce results not quiet at the level of h264, with, by the looks of it, a lot less processing power. We make the mistake of judging the performance off of hardware assisted decoding, which, in many cases, wavelets do not enjoy. But h264 takes advantage of long development through Jpeg to Mpeg4, where as wavelets are probably yet to make their stride. I am interested in how techniques like 3D wavelets might help, I recently read they perform a transform over 3D space, with the third dimension being time/frames, to take in motion.

I have spotted a H264, encoder, on a diagram of one of the graphic chips months ago. So yeah, possible. Using H264 is probably not going to be as far fetched as people think.

Another thing that has come up in discussion, is the H264 pro codec Panasonic is to release next year (and I think camera release might be at NAB, rather than latter). It is frame based Intra, without the intermediate frames it is going to be a lot less processor intensive then Inter, or what people think.