NAB 2004: HDV camera/deck announcements! Post 'em here! (esp. JVC)

[Lynne Whelden]

I think what we're seeing here is a collective effort by the major manufacturers to slow down the "HD for the masses" movement. Clearly the HD10 was not meant to come out so early. Keep in mind that for all these guys, there is no life after HD. Repeat that three times...What, are we then supposed to demand holograms or something? That's why we're seeing nothing but plastic models and vague suggestions of a product a couple of years from now. I've said it before...if this movement is going to gain momentum, it's going to take an upstart company, maybe an independent shop or China to break it open with a camera we can all appreciate. This new JVC CMOS camera is nice but it's going to end up too expensive for most folks. And the old JVC camera doesn't sound like it's going to undergo any changes anytime soon. NAB was like so much of life--the dreams leading up to it were more fun than the real thing.

[Adrian Douglas]

This year's NAB is pretty much what Chris has been saying all along. It generally takes about 18 months for gear to hit the streets after a new format is agreed upon. So now you'll all just have to keep shooting with your HD1/10s and speculating for another year.

[Heath McKnight]

Probably a three chip version of the HD10 is next. That's my guess.

heath

[Paul Mogg]

I just got back from two days at NAB and just thought I would quickly sum up the information I gleaned relative to the new HDV cams and FCP HD,
of course I would take any info about these cameras with a grain of salt at this stage.

JVC HDV CAM
The new JVC HDV cam is supposedly a year away yet, but who knows? they may suprise us and deliver it early to beat SONY, I'd say that's as likely a guess as any..
I was shown a sheet of specs for this cam that was supposedly all the info that people working on the booth knew about it themselves, on it I saw:
3 * 2/3" CMOS chips, , recording formats: 1080i/60, 1080/24P, 720/60p, 720/24p
Standard B4 Lens mount, comes with a new affordable Fujinon HD lens, it didn't mention anything about price and nor did the rep know, he seemed to think that the $20k "for the body only" rumor we've been hearing, was reasonable ..
Nothing on the sheet said anything about 25mbps data rate, or anything about recording data rate at all, I asked about this and the rep said he didn't know.
I was pretty suprised by all those formats, that would be very nice if they all turned up in the shipped camera.
The mockup cameras they had on display looked like standard ENG camera bodies, with all the usual stuff on there: ND filters, gain, white balance memory, XLR audio inputs, firewire I/O, BNC video out, T/C BNC, Genlock, ..etc.. etc.

SONY HDV CAM
Also supposedly 10 months to a year away.
The prototype on display looked quite convincing, by that I mean more of a final design than just a mockup.
3 * CCD's, the rep thought that 1/3" was a good guess.
It had a lot of professional features on it: built-in ND filters wheel, XLR audio inputs. Manual volume controls, the lens focus and zoom rings looked like they might be capable of fully manual operation, but that's a guess.
They were stressing that it was 1080i/60 only, and everybody in sight was telling them it needed 24p.
I talked to the Japanese rep that seemed to be in charge, I said that I thought the picture quality they were showing from the camera in their demo looked exceptional, and I was wondering how they'd conquered the MPEG2 compression noise. He told me that what they were showing on screeen was not shot on this new camera but on an FW900 HD cam, and then it was downloaded to the prototype that was displaying it. It sounded like a very honest admition, but it also struck me as a bit of a cheat if it was so.
They stressed that the specs had not been finalized yet and could change.

KINETTA CAM,
I really wanted to see this cam but was unable to find it at the show, I hope someone "more in the know" got to see it and will print a report, if this is the 10K camera people have been talking about it would be marvelous.

IKEGAMI
Ikegami will also have a new "lower cost" HD camera out in about a year. It is not HDV, it records in an AVID compression codec, and records data to hard drives or flash ram drives.
This is a full-on professional HD cam, ENG style body, and will likely be killer if you can afford it.
No pricing was available.

I didn't see any other new lower cost HD cams announced from anyone, but then I didn't look very hard either so I might have missed some.

FINAL CUT PRO HD
For me this was the most exciting thing at the show, and has the most immediate impact on those currently using the HDV format
My understanding of this product is that Apple have optimized FCP and the DVCPRO HD codec to work together so that you can now edit 720p HD native in this format (which is what the Varicam records in by the way) on a standard G5 using regular ATA hard drives, no additional RAID arrays or I/O cards needed, ..just input from their new ($25,000) deck via firewire to a G5...
.....or if you happen to be using HDV, skip the $25,000 deck part and just input from the camera via firewire, then convert and edit in this DVCPRO format!! ...and together with the Lumiere HD package you've got a very inexpensive native 720p HD editing system.
Did I mention that FCP HD also supports realtime HD monitoring via the second DVI output on most graphics cards?, that pretty much rounds off an unbelievable package to me. I can't wait to try it out. They were demonstrating up to 10 streams of HD on the timeline, being realtime edited, but I don't know what the I/O system was to enable that. I did hear that your could do two streams realtime from a standard 7200 RPM ATA drive.

Anyway, I hope this is of some interest.

Paul

[Lynne Whelden]

One comment on the Sony DSR 000--has anyone been struck by the fact that it's awfully heavy on the front end? How could you even hold it up to your eye without a brace of some sort? What with the mic, a little 16:9 monitor and the fat lens up there and nothing on the back end to counter it other than a battery, it doesn't look like a fun camera to hand hold.

[Heath McKnight]

Lynne,

You just described the XL-1(s) perfectly! We'll manage, I'm sure, but who knows what the final camera will be like?

heath

[Heath McKnight]

Paul,

Great report! That Ike cam almost sounds like the new Panasonic low-cost HD camera we've been hearing about, minus the Avid codec.

heath