Press Release: HMC150, "the new DVX"

[BobDiaz]

. . . On the HVX-200, 1 hour of source video should take up about 45GB of storage at the maximum data rate. . . Bob Diaz

On the HVX200 one hour of 1080 x 1920 takes up about 50 to 55 gigs of space at 24p, we do this all the time; in fact, when inserting the P2 card and firing up the HVX200 the with the above setttings a 16GB card will say 17 mins (reference of course) which is 16GB/17min=.94+GB/min. Our "rule of thumb" is 1GB/min. To gain space of course one can drop to 720 and the space on the card almost doubles the time BUT our experience says that the 720 video looks BAD! Not bad as in below SD but not even close to the quality as the 1080 which has been explained to me by those in the know here at DVXuser as a function of the chip in the camera and the internal program which is 1080 based.

This was a case of where I should have spelled out the context of what I was saying.... Sorry for the confusion I created.

100Mbps / 8 bits to a byte x 60 seconds to a minute x 60 minutes to an hour = 45G Bytes Per Hour

HOWEVER this is talking about just the 100Mbps being stored and does NOT take into account anything else, like all the necessary overhead.

Now when I say that 24Mbps AVCHD video takes 10.8G Bytes per hour, it's using the same idea, just the data and not counting anything else. When we add into account the necessary overhead, it should be in the range of 14GB to 15GB per hour of material.

The key thing I wanted people to understand was that the HMC150's files about 1/4 the size of the HVX-200's files. This is the strong point for AVCHD recording; smaller files = cheaper memory cards and less hard drive storage for the raw files.

The "price" we pay is that editing in native mode will be a lot slower, real time playback may not be possible on some computers, transcoding may be necessary to speed up the editing process, and there is a slight risk that extreme random and rapid movement in the image may cause motion artifacts.

Still, assuming that we can get HVX like images from a camera for under $4,000; this will be worth the "price" to many.


Bob Diaz

 

[Barry_Green]

so would this mean you would need a super computer to edit this in avc-hd?

No, the NLE manufacturers just have to work on their code some. You can get near realtime out of lowly Pinnacle Studio 11, so there's obviously optimizations that can be made. Also, most nVidia and ATI graphics cards have hardware acceleration for AVC built in, but I don't think most NLEs tap into that. If they did, you should be able to get realtime playback on just about any system.

Until then, there's always the transcoding option. iMovie from Apple transcodes AVC into Apple Intermediate Codec, and then it totally flies. I'm not a big fan of transcoding because a) it takes time, b) it takes up more space (sometimes a LOT more space) and c) it necessarily impacts quality, maybe a little, maybe not so little. But, if it's not possible to edit in the native codec, transcoding might be necessary.

We're probably a good six to eight months away from seeing the 150 land on store shelves; I hope the NLE manufacturers will be able to make great strides in that amount of time.

another thing i dont know why but i feel like if i ever got this camera i would still want to keep my dvx and probably use it just as much just because it was such a revolutionary camera and the hmc150 is not so revolutionary as the dvx

The DVX was groundbreaking (24p), and the HVX was equally groundbreaking (variable frame rates and tapeless). The 150 does seem evolutionary from there, rather than totally revolutionary. But, hey, we don't know what all the features are yet so maybe there's some good revolutionary surprises in store. I can't think of what, but maybe?

 

[Barry_Green]

BTW, is the HPX500 better on light than the HVX200?

Way better, yes. It's 1.5 stops faster, which means you can get equivalent brightness from 1/3 as much light.

One thing I don't like about the HVX is that it is a very very light hungry device.

All 1/3" HD camcorders are. The HVX is actually the least-light-hungry among the 1/3" cameras. Even so, it's still 1 to 2 stops slower than the DVX, and we all wish we could get back to that level of sensitivity!

Also, any way to get the data transferred out of the P2 cards faster? My experience on a laptop with an external HDD plugged in is almost "real time" that is, 17 mins of video takes about 12 to 15 minutes to offload.

A 16GB card takes about 8.5 minutes to offload on my laptop. Depends on the age of your hardware, the quality of the components, the technology you're using, the speed of the hard disk, etc. On my older Dell I got transfers like you get, or actually slower (4GB card took 4:15 to xfer). Same card, same data, on my newer SATA-drive Sony laptop took 2:20 to xfer.

Transferring to the internal hard disk is usually faster because you have the high-bandwidth SATA connection. Even so, USB or firewire should support up to 2GB/min without too much difficulty. I don't have a functioning FW800 or esata setup on my laptop but I would wager that transferring on my laptop to an esata or FW800 external Raid (like the Lacie Little Big Disk or the G-Tech G-Raid mini) should be even faster than 8 minutes to transfer 16GB.

The theoretical fastest transfer would be 3:20 to transfer a 16GB card, if the P2 card hit its maximum 640mbps throughput speed, and you used a transfer interface that supports a sustained 640mbps, and your target device is capable of supporting faster than 640mbps (and that's a tall order; you pretty much need a three-disk RAID to support that speed).

 

[mikkowilson]

Fastest I've transfered a full 16GB card was 7min 15sec.

Direct file copy in Windows XP on a new laptop [the specs of which I can't recall] with a PCMCIA slot to it's internal HD.

- Mikko

 

[Barry_Green]

HOWEVER this is talking about just the 100Mbps being stored and does NOT take into account anything else, like all the necessary overhead.

And it doesn't also take into account that a 16GB card doesn't give you access to all 16GB (just like no 300GB hard disk has an actual, usable 300GB of space!) You get something like 14.7GB on a 16GB card, I think -- haven't actually checked.

The key thing I wanted people to understand was that the HMC150's files about 1/4 the size of the HVX-200's files.

And, again, let's point out that this is only when using *maximum* quality, and assuming that we get 24mbps. If we only get 20mbps, then at maximum quality the file sizes will be 1/5 the size of the HVX200's. And if you use 13mbps, the file sizes will be 1/8th the size of the HVX's, and if using 9mbps the file sizes will be 1/11th the size, and using 6mbps the files will be 1/17th the size!

Now, obviously -- the quality will not be equivalent, once you go down to 6mbps! I wouldn't think anything under 13mbps would be "production quality" and I do expect that we'd all crank it up to the maximum and leave it there. But in case you ever needed to do it, it's kind of cool to know that you could record high-def footage and store it at 1/4 the cost of DV footage.

This is the strong point for AVCHD recording; smaller files = cheaper memory cards and less hard drive storage for the raw files.

Yes, and there's other advantages too, such as that your raw clips are instantly playable on blu-ray drives.

The "price" we pay is that editing in native mode will be a lot slower, real time playback may not be possible on some computers, transcoding may be necessary to speed up the editing process, and there is a slight risk that extreme random and rapid movement in the image may cause motion artifacts.

Exactly. There's no free lunch. AVC-HD is not for everyone, and the higher you go up the production ladder, the less likely you'll find it satisfactory. But as a format it trumps HDV handily, so for those folks who found HDV acceptable, I would think they'd be thrilled with what AVC-HD can do.

(excepting today's editing hassles, of course, but even then we just have to look at history to see it was over six months before you could edit Sony FX1 HDV footage on either FCP or Avid, and it was a LONG time before you could edit it in realtime without transcoding to CineForm or AIC or something like that, so the fact that you'll be able to edit immediately is a point in the 150's favor and hopefully the NLEs will show rapid growth and quickly get us to the point where AVC is realtime in the timeline in its native form.)

Still, assuming that we can get HVX like images from a camera for under $4,000; this will be worth the "price" to many.

That's why I think this cam is so interesting; it's like a "budget" HVX for those who are willing to put up with long-GOP. And it's not just the price tag (which we're GUESSING will be under $4,000, folks, so nobody kill us if it's more!) but it's also the cost of the recording media. Using SD cards instead of P2 or SxS cards makes the total cost of ownership so much lower. And SD cards are getting cheap enough that it may not be all that impractical to use them as a distribution medium too. I mean, if you got hired by a client to shoot footage, well, granted you can't give them a "tape" but -- you could, perhaps, give them an SD card. If you found the 9mbps rate acceptable, that'd mean you could get somewhere around an hour of footage on a $12.00 4GB card -- that's about the same price as an HDV tape (and by the time the 150 comes out, card prices might be half of what they are today). At 13mbps you'd get about 40 minutes, if my numbers are right.

At full quality at ~20mbps, you'd get about an hour on an 8GB card, and the 8GB card is going for $23 now. More than HDV tape today, yes, but then again that's potentially XDCAM-HD quality, at the same price as an XDCAM-HD disc. From memory! No need for a deck, anyone and everyone should be able to read an SD card. And prices might be 75% to 50% lower by the time the camera hits the shelves. Interesting times indeed.

 

[Kholi]

I do wonder if there'll be a working model at NAB and if we'll have any sample footages any time soon?

November's a long time to wait.

 

[drdimento]

. . . That's why I think this cam is so interesting; it's like a "budget" HVX for those who are willing to put up with long-GOP. . .

I just read the links that Professor Dieaz posted and everything I could find on this I-Frame (Intraframe) and all about compression and MacroBlocks and efficiency and will have to say that I don't think this camera is the least bit interesting so far as "quality" and "real" is concerned.

This is obviously an HDV replacement idea and once again follows the GOP stair steps to "losses" or is the beter technical term "lossy" That's not interesting that's consumer (which is probably why it came out in the consumer market and shows up on (as one poster stated above) on low end Studio 11 right away and thus at best I see this as a ProSumer since it does have some pro featuresets in it. It's an HDV replacement. Sort of like a "sectional" - "double wide" . . it's still a trailer, just two of them.

It's MPEG and MacroBlock, just smaller blocks . . but still "long" GOP which is what? Less I-Frames and MORE compressed. That image on Wiki that shows the differences (losses only) is really a good way to look at the story. I asked of 10 pro videographers over the last two weeks "We are thinking HD, what direction you would go?" They said:

LEGEND (They Use - They Recommend for HD)

Panasonic - Panasonic HVX
JVC - 2 Panasonic HVX, 1 Sony Z1U
Canon - 2 Panasonic HVX, 1 Canon HD
Sony - 4 Panasonic HVX, 1 Sony Z1U

For reference, one of the Sony people is a Sony diehard and should probably be excluded however, that gave us 10 )

When we asked why, almost unamous they said it was because it had the best of the best with regard to image and light (although we weren't with them on the light thing) and that it pretty much had to be better since it had more data per picture. As 4 of the 10 pointed out, a image file almost always equals less of a picture . .so . . that's where it went.

 

[Robert M Wright]

Well, I went up to Circuit City yesterday with an SDHC card, and managed to shoot a few clips onto it with an SD9. The sales guy there obviously was getting paid by the hour and didn't give a rip if he sold anything, and wasn't exactly helpful. The camera was tethered to like a 2ft (maybe less) security wire (the ones they use to keep cameras from growing legs). I was in a hurry too, so I really didn't spend any time trying to figure out the camera controls (should have read the manual before I headed out). That is one incredibly small camera! I found the joystick pretty difficult to use. I did notice it had zebras (cool).

When I got home, I was pretty frustrated by only being able to view the clips with NERO's Showtime. I searched the web and found something, using a batch file and a DLL, that takes the clips and splits out the MTS file into apparently audio and video stream files and generates an AVS script to use with AVISynth, to frameserve. I had to modify the batch file though, to generate an AVS script that would frameserve at full raster. For some reason, it generated scripts that have AVISynth down size the image to SD resolution.

Anyways, I did manage to get the video into VirtualDub and was able to look at it frame by frame. I can't say I was real impressed. One thing that stood out, was what looked like ghosting from temporal noise filtering. Maybe they are having a tough time getting clean images from those tiny chips? I don't know.

 

[BobDiaz]

When it comes to comparing video cameras, we need to compare apples to apples. It makes no sense to compare a camera that may sell for under $4,000 to cameras that sell for a lot more than that. Once we know the price for sure, then we can compare it to cameras in the same general price range. HD Cameras that sell in the $3,000 to $4,000 range all have to deal with Long GOP in some form.

In the same way, you really can't tell much from looking at an SD9, with a 3 CCD 1/6" Sensors. The HMC150 has 3 CCD 1/3" sensors; roughly 4x the area of the SD9. The HMC150 will also offer a higher data rate than the SD9.

I know for a fact that MPEG-4 can reproduce beautiful images, because I have downloaded several of Phil Bloom's works. His Kew Gardens In Winter shot at 720/25p has a data rate of 4.3Mbps and would have been around 10.3Mbps if it was 60p. At 1080/30p would have been about 11.8Mbps assuming the same compression ratio. The image is sharp, the colors are rich, and I'm not seeing any macro blocking errors.

Granted that Phil's work does NOT stress the Long GOP CODEC, but we know that the MHC150 will offer a much higher data rate and we'll have to wait to see how well its CODEC will stand to random rapid movement.

You will find the video files under his blog:
http://www.philipbloom.co.uk/Philip_Bloom/Home.html

Kew Gardens In Winter:
http://web.mac.com/philip.bloom/Blooms_Blog/Blooms_Blog/Entries/2007/12/14_Blog_5.html


We have about 7+ months until the HMC150 comes out, so there is time for Panasonic to work with Software companies to make sure the editing software is compatible. Given that they already have AVCHD Cameras already out there, it's a safe guess that the work is already in progress.


I see the month, NOVEMBER being listed, did Jan say November or are people guessing that month?


Bob Diaz

 

[Robert M Wright]

In the same way, you really can't tell much from looking at an SD9, with a 3 CCD 1/6" Sensors. The HMC150 has 3 CCD 1/3" sensors; roughly 4x the area of the SD9. The HMC150 will also offer a higher data rate than the SD9.

Quite the contrary, really. Studying the performance of the SD9 can potentially answer some very important questions about the HMC150 (and HMC70 even - but who cares about that).

If we can assume that the HMC150 imaging system and codec will not under perform the SD9 (which would seem like a pretty safe bet), we can make some (potentially quite useful) logical deductions about the minimum performance of the HMC150.

It would be pretty astonishing if the three 1/3" CCDs in the HMC150 under perform the thee 1/6" CCDs in the SD9. They both use CCDs, so we are not looking at the sort of potential fundamental differences in performance, that we might see between CCD and CMOS technologies. It would also be pretty astonishing if the HMC150 offered poorer DSP performance, than the SD9.

Somewhat amazingly (at least to me), is that Panasonic shipped the SD9 (consumer camera) earlier than the HMC70 (allegedly professional camera), yet with a higher maximum bitrate for the codec in the SD9! I am assuming that with the HMC150, they won't repeat that seemingly apparent blunder (along with somehow losing the focus ring)! It is very plausible that the HMC150 will offer the same, yet no greater, maximum bitrate for the codec as the SD9 though (let's hope not).

A big question in my mind (apparently shared by many others), is how well will the codec hold up in high motion scenes? Specifically, will the images get seriously blocky???

What I am seeing here, would strongly indicate that the answer to whether or not the codec will produce seriously blocky images, under stress, would seem to be a very welcome "no".

I made sure to induce stressful motion, in the little clips I shot in the store, and the results, when viewed frame by frame, thus far, are very encouraging in that regard. I can see some minor blockiness with what basically amounts to the equivalent motion of a whip pan (and should induce what amounts to I frame only compression), but it appears trivial enough that it just wouldn't seem to present any real world problem.

Now that I have a reasonable method to view (apparently unaltered) images on a frame by frame basis, I am very tempted to go purchase an SD9 and do some much more careful and thorough testing. One thing I would like to determine, is how high they are pushing the absolute peak bitrate of the codec, with the SD9 (should be pretty easy to do). If they are, let's say, pushing it to around 35mbps (somewhat plausible), I would sure like to know that. That could tell us a lot about the maximum likely potential performance of the codec in the HMC150.

 

[BobDiaz]

Robert M Wright,

If possible, please post a a still frame or a cropped still image of what you have seen.

Now that I understand that you are just using the SD9 to judge minimum performance level, everything makes sense. It seems reasonable to assume that the HMC150 should be better than the SD9. However, anything is possible, but if the HMC150 is worse than the SD9, that would be suggest that someone just went brain dead at Panasonic.


OTHER THING:

A look at the photo posted not too long ago showed the HMC150 under a clear plastic display case. While I have BIG hopes that a working prototype will be at NAB, maybe not...

Either way, I'll have all sorts of questions to ask Panasonic.... Let's hope all the answers aren't, "That's still under development, so we don't know yet..."

I've done a search of the letters, "WFM" and can't find anything video related except, "Wave Form Monitor". So, my hopes of a Wave Form Monitor are very high. Even displaying a single scan line on the WFM would be helpful, all would be even better. As long as The reference lines for 100 IRE, 50IRE, and 7.5 IRE appear on the monitor, that would be VERY SWEET!!!

The MODE Button and the 3 LEDs suggest that there's a Camera (record) mode, a MCR (Memory Card???) mode for playback, and a PC mode for transferring files. My big hope is that while playing back, one could hit the record button and record within a split second. It may seem logical for that function, BUT the Sony EX-1 does require a re-boot to switch from playback of clips to record. The last clip playback does not require a re-boot, very odd...


Bob Diaz

 

[ilauzirika]

will this have a pre record function? that would be great.

 

[William_Robinette]

My big hope is that while playing back, one could hit the record button and record within a split second. It may seem logical for that function, BUT the Sony EX-1 does require a re-boot to switch from playback of clips to record. The last clip playback does not require a re-boot, very odd...


Bob Diaz

Bob, the HVX does what you are describing extremely fast (IIRC) so I have high hopes it won't the the 40 seconds or so of the EX.

 

[Robert M Wright]

I'll try to get a couple frame grabs uploaded, maybe tonight. I've got doctor's appointments this afternoon.

 

[BobDiaz]

will this have a pre record function? that would be great.

As I recall, Jan did say it would have the "pre-record" function... I just can't recall exactly which part of this thread she said it....

Bob Diaz

 

[BobDiaz]

Found it.... Not

Hi Folks,

Have not read all the way through this as I have way too much to do this am. Barry asked me to step in and clarify what this camera is. If you think of AVCHD as the new DV then this camera (the 150) is the new DVX100. It has 24P, it is economically priced, right where long GOP recording should be. But it is a very nice camera and it records to SD cards, just like all AVCHD cameras do.

Is it the replacement for the HVXX200, clearly no. It does not do 24P in DVCPRO HD. It doesn't do variable frame rates, it does not have P2.

Now with that information, is the 150 a great little camera, I think it will be. Is it a filmmakers camera, depends on where you want to use it. Keep in mind it is the new DV camera. Any place that bought a DV camera might like one of these. So wedding guys, schools, other institutions and high school sports. Lawyers, doctors , well you get the picture it is the new DV. Nice little camera,

Hope this helps,

Jan
__________________
Jan Crittenden Livingston
Panasonic Broadcast & TV Systems
Product Manager,
DVCPRO50/25, AG-DVX100B, AG-HVX200

http://www.dvxuser.com/V6/showthread...=125340&page=3
(Message #88)
Note: I added the bold print in some sections to help point out key things.

I know I read pre-record somewhere, but where....

Bob Diaz

 

[Daygola814]

I can't see this camera producing better images than the HVX. Why would they do that on a camera that's half the price.

Don't get me wrong, I'm hoping it does. I can't really see it happening though. But maybe I'm wrong. I hope I am! rogar-BigGrin(DBG)

 

[TimurCivan]

Wave Form would be AMAZing.....

God i wish the HVX had one......

 

[ilauzirika]

Wave Form would be AMAZing.....

God i wish the HVX had one......

if the add that to the HMC it would be normal that they added it to a new HVX (also, is it possible to add a waveform by upgrading de firmware or does it require something hardware related?)

 

[ryvac]

lets also hope that "LCD" botton will make the image filp.