New JVC 3ccd ...World's Smallest

[Advil Dremali]

How big are the CCD's on this little guy?

1/4th inch?

I Wonder if it'll have manual controls..maybe via remote control?

[Ron Evans]

Chris,
I believe that Pinnacle EDITION , Canopus Edius, Ulead and Womble will all edit in native MPEG2 ( including HDV m2t files for most).

Ron Evans

[Jesse Bekas]

Originally Posted by Tom Wills

I can't imagine buying this camera for a few reasons. First, it's too small. Whenever I go out on a film shoot I commonly have to bring extra support equipment for my little 4 pound camera, so imagine something that small. Another reason is no viewfinder. Ever try to shoot with no viewfinder on a sunny day? The final reason is simple: You only have one drive. The max you can shoot at any good datarate will be about 1-1.5 hours on that drive, maybe 2 if you have ultra-compression. Once you've shot it out, it's over. You can't do anything more until you transfer all that out to a computer. That's a huge downside for me. I commonly travel 8-10 hours by car to get to my film shoots, where I'm often around no computers (and sometimes no power), so I'd have a hell of a time trying to work with one of these.

I don't think the professional market is the intended target with this product.

[Don Blish]

Originally Posted by Joshua Provost

3CCD will mean better color reproduction. Now, I haven't heard anyone ever say this, but I believe 3CCD inherently means worse low-light performance, since the light is being split three ways for the CCDs. The minimum lux rating on the Panasonic 3CCD cameras is fairly high, 12lux?

As I understand these things, for same size chips, the three chiper should get both better color AND better low light performance. A single chipper has trios of sensors each with its own color filter for that spot. So the red receptor covers, at best 30% of the chip. With a three chipper, there are dichroic beam splitters that pass just the right color to each chip, (only red light to the red chip, other colors to theirs, no absorption to speak of) ... and then the receptor can cover nearly the entire area of the chip, say, 90%.

[Don Blish]

Originally Posted by Tom Wills

I can't imagine buying this camera for a few reasons. First, it's too small. Whenever I go out on a film shoot I commonly have to bring extra support equipment for my little 4 pound camera, so imagine something that small. Another reason is no viewfinder. Ever try to shoot with no viewfinder on a sunny day? The final reason is simple: You only have one drive. The max you can shoot at any good datarate will be about 1-1.5 hours on that drive, maybe 2 if you have ultra-compression. Once you've shot it out, it's over. You can't do anything more until you transfer all that out to a computer. That's a huge downside for me. I commonly travel 8-10 hours by car to get to my film shoots, where I'm often around no computers (and sometimes no power), so I'd have a hell of a time trying to work with one of these.

Its easy to dismiss this as having "only" a 2 or 4 gig CF card for a drive...but as soon as these get in the marketplace, you will upload the chip into your 40 or 60 gig "media player" and move on. Perhaps you upload one while recording on another. Lets not forget that an entire mini-DV tape and its fragile drive only has a raw, uncompressed capacity of about 13 gigs. Chips will gobble up that diaparity in just a few years.

[Radek Svoboda]

http://www.jvc.co.uk/article.php?id=100365&catid=2

More JVC hard drive cameras.

[Steve Nunez]

JVC made a huge mistake by not including a "DV" mode using standard DV compression......for now all the modes use a "DVD" type mode which means mpeg-2 compression........these camcorder companies have to realise that the average "prosumer" will likely want to edit the videos and should include a DV type codec for standard pc/mac editing......mpeg-2 is tough enough with the new HDV formats.
Let's hope Canon or Panasonic gets it right with their hd cams when they come out.

[Dan Euritt]

i have the little panasonic av100, which records 6 mbps mpeg2 onto memory chips... it's smaller than any of those jvc mpeg2 cameras, and that portability gives you a whole new outlook on consumer shooting.

i schlepped it all over manhattan last summer, carried it in my pocket... it's even smaller than the canon digital still camera i carried... you have to experience it to appreciate it... i did not have any issues with the lack of viewfinder, either.

[Steve Nunez]

Portability is great- but manufacturers keep thinking we need mpeg-2 "DVD" quality compression.....what most of us really need is a readily easy to edit format which is either DV or HDV- only the newest NLE's can work with mpeg-2 footage and usually recompress which isn't good- I love the tapeless idea- but give us a choice of codecs other than various levels of mpeg-2 compression.

[Jesse Bekas]

It does seem kind of weird that they didn't include DV25 compression considering the size of the HDDs.

Maybe it has to do with the transfer speeds of the drives they're using?

[Dan Euritt]

the reason they use mpeg2 is because it's ready to burn to a dvd, no encoding required... hopefully jvc included some halfway decent software for that.

[Zack Birlew]

Anybody try this camera yet? I see it at this store called Futureonics whenever I go to the Fashionshow Mall here in Las Vegas all the time. It looks pretty interesting, but it's $1800 and I'd rather save that money for one of the future HD cameras. But some people must buy these things, so anybody got one yet?

[Steve Nunez]

Yep- bnought one today and did some testing regarding a Mac solution to editing the .mod files this camcorder produces. (PC editing is possible with the included CD-Rom software)

Here's the scenario as I see it: the .mod files produced by the camera are muxed mpeg-2 files with the audio mixed in a non-standard Dolby Digital Stereo setup. This causes the video to be played (when renamed to .mpg) correctly in QT (and QT Pro) but no audio is played (although present.) The video has to be converted into a format FCP (or iMovie) can use natively. The ideal solution would be to edit the native mpeg-2 file without conversion- but this isn't possible with the present form of Quicktime (this may change in the future.)

I've used a very well lit clip with some sharp edges and subtle graduations to visually scrutinize the video clip and used the raw .mod renamed to .mpg clip as the "bar" conversions would be "up against."
Using Mpeg Streamclip (free download) I converted the .mod files to several presets and checked individual frames for variations to the original mod file. The absolute best quality with NO LOSS in video quality was produced by simply "demuxing" the clip into seperate video/audio files called .m2v and aiff (headed also works but doesn't change quality and is not needed) and these files can be imported into FCP but you'll need to create a custom sequence preset and when you get everything set just right- the clips will need rendering once imported into the sequence ~ FCP uses the QT engine and I haven't been able to produce a sequence preset that DIDN'T need rendering- if someone figures out the parameters- please post them here for us.
...after some variations in Mpeg Streamclip settings- I've found that using the DVCPRO codec produced the best image quality retaining about 97% of the original's quality- which is quite superb. The best part of using the DVCPRO codec is that you gain all the realtime effects and power FCP is capable of and both iMovie and FCP can use the files natively as normal DV! The downside is that the file sizes will be about 3X that of the original mod file. An hour of DV is about 13GB- so your 4GB Microdrive will end up producing 13GB of data on your Mac (no big deal considering todays cheap HD prices.)

Word of caution: some people have been using DropDV and I've tried this software. It produces a blurred conversion and isn't as good as the DV files Mpeg Streamclip produces (which are as sharp as the original mod files)....I urge users to try both free conversion utilities and check the results yourself. I am using an Apple 23" HD Cinema Display and was disappointed with the DropDV files. DropDV has the convenience of allowing "batch" processing by multiple file drop- but the quality isn't worthy in my opinion. If the program changes it's compression to DV- it would be worth a look.

Also note that when using Mpeg Streamclip, it's best to copy the .mod files to the computers HD and create another folder for the Dv conversions, as working from the Microdrive slows the entire conversion process a great deal...you can always delete the source .mod files after the conversion is done.

Another note worth considering is that there are a few variations to the DV codec and that DVCPRO 50 which has much higher data rates and 2X the file size of "normal" DV does indeed produce a 1%-3% better video. The penalty of a 2X file size maybe worth the effort for those trying to extract maximum quality from the original .mod files.

I was going to export stills and create a website showing just the results I've outlined here- but I don't think there are many Mac users using the MC500 and the relatively low postings on this forum (for the Everio series) led me to believe the effort might not be appreciated by many.

I hope this helps those that might be looking for a Mac solution to editing video from the Everio camcorders. If QT ever gains the ability to play the Dolby Digital Stereo portion of the muxed .mod file- we'll likely be able to edit the .mod files natively within FCP and iMovie.

If anyone cares to drop observations or comments- feel free to post them here.

Thanks everyone.

[Steve Nunez]

Here's a quick 3.7mb video shot with the 3CCD Everio MC500 in H.264 codec, quickly edited in FCP using the above procedure.

http://www.stevenunez.com/videos/omantis264.mov

[James Bridges]

Pretty impressive look since I am very dissapointed in this technology. Guess it is a great idea for purely consumer grade application. Have any footage without using close up shots? I'd be interested to see how it looks with long shots or some mediums.