No, I work for myself. I don't work for JVC or Panasonic (or Serious Magic or Prompter People or any of the other companies whose products I loudly, and repeatedly, endorse).stephenlnoe said:
That bothers me too. A lot. But, also, keep in mind that usually happy customers don't write in and complain, so when you see complaints, you're usually seeing a disproportionate number. If you didn't have dead pixels, would you even think to write in and say "hey, my camera has no dead pixels, isn't that great?" 'cause in the years I've had a DVX, and been on this board, I don't think I've ever heard anyone talk about dead pixels. Same with the Sony cameras I used before it. In fact, the last time I had a dead pixel was on a Sony DSR500 -- and with that, you just do a black-balance and it automatically masks the dead pixel, and you go on from there. So the fact that we're seeing multiple reports (at least 5, if you count the reports from England, New Zealand, Italy, the camera I used, and the camera that shot the JVC demo footage). Needless to say, I'll be picking up the camera in person down at EVS, and I'll fire it up and test it before taking delivery.Isaac_Brody said:
Didn't get a chance with the handheld unit. The one I used was stuck on a Miller tripod, with a mattebox on the front and follow focus. It was very, very front heavy -- I adjusted the sliding plate to get it to sit as far back on the tripod as possible, and that helped a little.
It feels like a broadcast camera. Switches and handgrip and basically what you'd expect. In other words, it's nice. As far as the lens, operationally it's nice, they had a follow focus on it so I wasn't using the lens' focus ring directly. I went looking for chromatic aberrations and such and didn't really notice any, except I've got one clip that has a very, very puzzling artifact in it, something I don't remember seeing with any other broadcast camera I've used. So I want to test the same circumstance on a different camera before determining whether it's a problem or not.
Dropouts seizing a whole GOP does happen -- it happens on the Sony whenever you get a dropout (video freezes for 15 frames or 1/2 second), and it can happen on the JVC too -- on the demo footage that they had playing in a loop, there was a full-GOP lockup. The JVC's GOP is much shorter, so the freeze-up isn't for nearly so long. But it can happen. It looks like JVC's somehow managed to make it not seize up the whole GOP every time. And the dropouts were more prevalent at the beginning of the tape, they happened less frequently as time went on.WarrenS said:
Stay tuned -- tomorrow I should get a chance to help someone else deliver some "scoop" footage under controlled lighting circumstances, etc. Don't know when the footage will be available for posting, but I'll definitely know more by Saturday.
Most of the time I found myself focusing on the CRT, which was a little distracting but it's just the habit I kept falling into. But when using the "Focus Assist" function (which basically is a nice sharp colored "peaking" function) I found that the viewfinder seemed quite reliable in settling in to accurate focus. I'd focus using focus assist, then verify against the CRT, and it was usually spot-on. And that was using wide-open iris; obviously focus will be a little less critical the more the iris is stopped down.
Let me try to temper this -- like I said above, don't draw any conclusions based on the number of dropouts I got. There's no way to know how many hours that camera had on it, and what type of tape it had had run through it, and whether the new MQ tape caused the "mixed lubricant" issue or anything like that.harlan said:
I'm calling Rush today and adding that to my order! Also, HDV Rack for any situation where the cable is reachable is a *must*, for my peace of mind.
I am too. I hope we get an official response from JVC to announce if there's a self-repair/masking process (like the Sony DSR series does) and/or what the repair policy is. As mezelf or someone else said -- with three million pixels in there, it's gonna happen -- one or two are going to go bad. If you can mask 'em, then it's no big deal. If you can't, then in my opinion it's a *big* deal. Maybe a dealbreaker. Hopefully we can hear more reports from more users.
Again, like I said above -- it isn't just pixels that you won't notice while shooting. You also don't see the effects of the motion smoothing filter on the viewfinder or on a monitor. And I couldn't find a way to display the 24p or 30p effect either -- everything looked glass-smooth at all times in the viewfinder, and that is misleading. So that's why I say you gotta have HDV Rack -- that's about the only way that you'll see what you're *actually* getting. Or at least play back any footage before moving on, although I hate rewinding/reviewing footage off tape in the field, as there have been occasions when I've lost the end of a clip from not having fast-forwarded enough, etc...
Yes, they can get stuck pixels, and it even happens on SD cams as well, but the better cams have algorithms to mask it -- which means you never see it, you never notice it, and it's no big deal. The HD100 may also have such an ability, but I haven't heard of whether it actually does or not, or how you'd go about masking the pixels, if such a process does exist.