No, no, Its Matt not listening to me and 'being cool' with freeze frames!
he did take the freeze out of the m2 file at my request.
Bloody editors...(I'm at his mercy as I can't drive FCP)

Hi Matthew,

I thought the native HDV format was short GOP MPEG2. So isn't that what .m2t is, an MPEG2 transport stream?

Ahhh, thanks for mentioning that. I was about ready to kick my Imac G5 out the door for not being able to 'keep up' with the high data rate.

-gb-

Urg. I can't say I'm really impressed. Maybe it's the motion smoothing, or maybe it's the compression but it seems that the background really gets blurred in all of the pans. Some of the chroma seems really blown out, and there seems to be a lot of sharpening... or am I missing something? A lot of that could be the wmv compression as well, but most of the Z1/FX1 footage I've seen seemed a lot cleaner than this.

Either way, I'd like to see more footage - some really carefully composed closeups, some fast action footage (martial arts or something) etc. Hopefully someone can show us the best this camera can offer.

-Steve

I agree. And why is it that JVC isn't making their own footage with the camera? You'd think they would want to show to the world how good their product can be in the right hands with professional lighting and good production values. Come to think of it, have ANY camera manufacturers released their own professional footage as a demo of their camera? I remember the XL1 making-of video for that Camcorder commercial. That was cool. JVC would want people to see the camera at it's best, no? Or am I missing something?

were any of those video clips shot with auto iris? Not that this would mean anything but I sometimes work for a guy where I have to shoot with a JVC DV5000 camera and the auto iris sucks on the thing. Everytime it is used everything gets blown out and washed out. Of course this isn't so much the camera as it it the lens. In these types of cameras a lot more of the control is put into the lens as opposed to the camera itself. I know the JVC DV camera is using the lower end lens that comes with it standard. Perhaps the camera is great but the cheap $800.00 lens that comes with the HD100 just isn't good enough unless you really know how to use a manual lens. I would love to see another lens used on this thing.

Remember there has to be a reason why the other lens for the HD100 from JVC costs $10,000.00. It wouldn't cost that much more unless it was a lot better. If it is that much better of a lens to cost 10 times more then how crappy is the standard lens?

Oh by the way I also notice a small amount of noise on the JVC DV5000. This is either just the look of JVC or maybe it is from a lower quality lens.

I feel like a real plonker now. The original clip was timed to music - hell I was having fun. And Scott, you thought it was cool - admit it!

"I'm an editor not an intellectual." :)

Yes, HDV is a form of MPEG2. But if anyone out there knows how to make a straight mpeg2 video file in "exactly" the same way that HDV is encoded, please tell me.

This is why i've been confused as to why people wanted a straight mpeg2 file.

I brought the m2v file into Edition and took a look at it with the CX color corrector. Man what a small gamut. Of course the image's were mostly of the gray concrete but still. Anyway, I adjusted the clips for full broadcast spectrum and it brightened up nicely and the colors came out and the detail. There must be settings on the camera to adjust for the shot you want to get. Were the shots fully automatic or did you set some parameters on the manual side?

Smooth motion is probably to blame in terms of the blurred backgrounds...it's what it does - it's a fancy blur. The pink fluro on the bike does kick out a bit, we agree, and yes things are sharp because as we've said the camera is set to factory defaults. There are matrix, knee, blacks, white clip levels, etc which we could muck around with, and detail can be dropped into the negatives.

The reason we've left it on factory is because this is what you get out of the box - in a hire situation this is important to know because most of your clients arn't going to be adjusting the menu settings to any expert degree.

If it is requested we could change some settings for you. The camera is away today on a shoot so no chance to play at the moment.

If I do work with more footage in this manner I am reluctant to post any clips in other than the native 720p30 files (unless someone has details on making an mpeg2 file which is identical to the HDV stream) as analysis of further compressed files is pointless. But in doing so you would have to have the codec on your machine to view these properly.

Matthew,

Use PVAStrumento (http://www.afterdawn.com/software/vi...astrumento.cfm) to convert M2T streams into the MPEG video and audio without recompression.

Problem is he's on a Mac. I haven't seen any way yet to remove the Quicktime wrapper from HDV captures...or if it's even possible.

I think FCP does not leave the stream untouched...my guess is that it takes the raw data and re-encapsulates it so FCP can deal.

These particular clips have now been withdrawn, but we'll have others available soon. Many thanks to Scott Webster and Matthew Redmond for sharing this video.

I'd like to see these clips, could anyone who downloaded them be able to send to me?

Hi Phillip,

Since you're in Auckland, just contact Rocket Rentals -- they're the ones who shot those clips and I'm sure they can provide them to you directly (not to mention actually showing you the HD100 as well).