Barry Green-- Maybe you can help clear this one up.

PappasArts

PappasArts

Veteran
Hi Barry, I read that the footage that you watched in the NAB JVC booth did not look good. One of my sources that was in the JVC booth watched footage they had on a CRT setup with a DVHS system playback. The ProHD footage was of Time Square and city shots. He said the footage looked cine alta like and was fantastic. After I read your post, I called him and asked what did you look at then. He says that it was material that said ProHD 24P. He shot pictures and video in the booth of the setup and that's what it was.

What did you see Barry? I know this was the same setup since the booth was not the titanic in size. Is my friend blind and needs glasses. You said you watched stuff on a Plasma, but in the JVC booth they had the footage my friend watched on a good CRT setup. I'm even more confused......

Maybe Barry you can help clear this one up?


Michael Pappas
 
Hey Michael,

I'm about as far away as you can get from Barry in terms of knowledge, but I was at the JVC booth at NAB and saw what Barry has commented on.

On the right side of the booth that had the HD100 setup, there was a plasma showing the Times Square footage. I believe there were shots of flower stands and passer-byes waving at the camera person. IMO those shots could have been made with the HD1. There was a great deal of blocking in the high-contrast areas. The colors were okay, but the image didn't seem to be the same "sharpness" that was being out-put into the HD CRT's that were receiving the live feed and seemed more akin to MPEG1 than 2. I was quite impressed with the live output from the HD100, but the footage that was playing on the plasma left a lot to be desired. Perhaps your source was watching some footage at the Lumiere booth? I know they had a few demos with some footage, but I'm not sure if it was ProHD or not.

Maybe all this is due to a poor plasma monitor as has been suggested. It's silly that they would promote their product in such a manner, but not surprising.

-Tim
 
Agreed with Tim. What I saw, and Adam Wilt and Nate Weaver and NBCShooter all saw and commented on, was that plasma screen with the mediocre-looking footage. Blurry, very noisy, pixellated with macroblocks, and just not overall "wow" impressive. Especially considering that immediately next to the plasma was a CRT showing the live output of the HD100, and the difference was startling -- the CRT definitely had the HDTV "wow" factor. The plasma footage looked somewhat blurry, flat, pale, and just didn't have the "snap" or "wow" of the live CRT footage.

As has been said multiple times, I expect that the problem was the monitor, or even perhaps the method of playback (they were playing back from a D-VHS deck, so it's possible that it had even been dubbed/recompressed to another MPEG-2 stream).

But yes, as far as the subject footage, it had a "ProHD 24p" logo in the lower right, and it was of Times Square and some flowers and street scenes.

Nate said that he stared at the footage for a good five minutes, and then some shots came up that were quite a bit sharper. So speculation may also be that whoever shot the footage just didn't do a very good job at it, didn't focus very well, etc.

Now: Steve Gibby and NBCShooter both saw similar footage at other places in the JVC booth, being shown off of CRTs, and that it looked much better (which leads me to again question the plasma involved). NBCShooter still mentioned a lot of noise, but I think Steve saw a wider variety of footage in more places and was overall the most impressed, including seeing footage at the Lumiere booth, stuff that I didn't see.

In short, what was shown on that plasma wasn't very impressive. But I expect that the camera is capable of much more than what was shown on that plasma, and I'm sure we'll see much, much better examples when it comes out.
 
Thanks Barry!


Barry_Green said:
Agreed with Tim. What I saw, and Adam Wilt and Nate Weaver and NBCShooter all saw and commented on, was that plasma screen with the mediocre-looking footage. Blurry, very noisy, pixellated with macroblocks, and just not overall "wow" impressive. Especially considering that immediately next to the plasma was a CRT showing the live output of the HD100, and the difference was startling -- the CRT definitely had the HDTV "wow" factor. The plasma footage looked somewhat blurry, flat, pale, and just didn't have the "snap" or "wow" of the live CRT footage.

As has been said multiple times, I expect that the problem was the monitor, or even perhaps the method of playback (they were playing back from a D-VHS deck, so it's possible that it had even been dubbed/recompressed to another MPEG-2 stream).

But yes, as far as the subject footage, it had a "ProHD 24p" logo in the lower right, and it was of Times Square and some flowers and street scenes.

Nate said that he stared at the footage for a good five minutes, and then some shots came up that were quite a bit sharper. So speculation may also be that whoever shot the footage just didn't do a very good job at it, didn't focus very well, etc.

Now: Steve Gibby and NBCShooter both saw similar footage at other places in the JVC booth, being shown off of CRTs, and that it looked much better (which leads me to again question the plasma involved). NBCShooter still mentioned a lot of noise, but I think Steve saw a wider variety of footage in more places and was overall the most impressed, including seeing footage at the Lumiere booth, stuff that I didn't see.

In short, what was shown on that plasma wasn't very impressive. But I expect that the camera is capable of much more than what was shown on that plasma, and I'm sure we'll see much, much better examples when it comes out.
Click to expand...
 
I should also mention that when viewing HD material, smaller CRTs usually can't show you everything that's going on in the image and it'll smooth over a lot of sins.

At the same time, what I saw on the plasma were defects that I'd be super surprised to see make it to production.
 
CRTs, no matter what the size or quality tend to give you a "rose tinted" view of HD and smooth out a lot of sins. I did some 3d renders for Panavision in 2001, and couldn't render them at full 1080 for timing issues as we were running up a NAB 2001 deadline, so I did them 3/4 size and upscaled them in AE, and although I could see this, and the keying artifacts on the HDCAM footage in AE on my Cinema Display, I could not see them on the Sony booth on their CineAlta monitor as they just don't have the resolution, and the beam profile does tend to smooth things out a fair bit. Basically, CRTs tend to make things look nicer than they really are.

Plasmas, on the other hand, tend to exaggerate defects in the footage, and add posterisation / macroblock like artifacts all of their own.

At the moment, I'm preferring the LCD solution for viewing HD with an eye to critical analysis, so I'm using the Decklink HD Pro and HDLink solution to a 23" Cinema Display so that I can see what's going on. On this system, the JVC footage actually looks quite nice indeed. I don't know if it's the same stuff that was shown at NAB, but it sounds like it. The luma is quite sharp, but considering it's 1280 full raster, still doesn't seem as sharp as the compressed 960 raster of Varicam footage I have - and I think that's down to the cheapo lens they're using. A better lens should really help here for the JVC. The chroma though, is terrible. 4:2:0 just looks nasty, and very compressed and blurry. This can probably be really helped with this new filter I've written for FCP, but I've yet to test on the footage. The Varicam footage's chroma still looks compressed, but an awful lot better and sharper, but it's no DigiBeta, which is a shame. Never-the-less, the JVC offers real 24p and looks better than any other HDV footage I have on my system, but really seems lens and codec limited. DVCProHD isn't the world's best, but it does seem visibly supererior to HDV, although I'll still be working on code to make it better still!!

Graeme
 
Jk.. Ruvi was a half-baked idea that Sony had a couple of years ago involving a proprietary
cartridge with Hi-8 tape AND the recording heads that worked once for like 30 minutes before
you had to buy another $50 cartridge for it... Really stupid idea..

Just making a funny about an antiquated recording method in contrast to today's
formats which are vastly superior in many ways to the days of analog aquisition, that's all.
 
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