HVX Focus Assist

BigMike

BigMike

Well-known member
Hi there:

After months of thinking and lurking, I've chosen the HVX as the camera I'm going to buy.

Doing my research, I took a weekend class on the JVC HD100U, then rented the camera for a weekend. I wasn't satisfied with the GOP compression they use. Resolution loss was too high on motion, but there are other solutions for that camera: Like pulling uncompressed video from the componant outputs, etc. The JVC has the potential to be killer if you can carry a lot of gear with you and use Cineform (a fantastic product, I might add).

The one truly awesome thing I found about the JVC was the focus assist. the Black and white with color outlines on high contrast edges is brilliant.

I am wondering if any of you who have recieved your HVX already can describe the focus assist on the HVX if it has assist? It Zooms in. RIght? Then you focus using the zoomed image on the screen. Right?

How does it work?

Does it work well enough so that I won't have to buy a hi def field monitor to go with it?

Thanks!
 
There are two levels of focus assist. One is peaking, which adds white sharpening outlines around areas that are in focus. The JVC's focus assist is like a super-turbo-ultra version of peaking -- the JVC turns the screen black & white and turns the peaking to a color (yellow or red or blue) so it's extremely easy to see where it is. The HVX's peaking is more subtle and it's white-only.

Then there's the actual "focus assist" function, which pops up a window in the center of the LCD panel that shows the central portion of the image at high magnification. It is either a pixel-for-pixel accurate extraction, or something close to it. It makes the camera very easy to focus. If you employ the zoom-in, focus-using-focus-assist, zoom-out to shoot technique, you may find that it's easy to get precise, accurate focus without needing a field monitor. We shot all the first footage on the HVX without having any sort of monitor, only relying on the LCD's focus assist, and it all turned out tack sharp.
 
Thanks, Barry. That's good enough for me.

Now that 3rd party software companies are making codecs for PCs that don't require hardware acceleration, I can hardly wait to buy!
 
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