JVC beating the "HDX100" at NAB?

Very interesting indeed! 720/24p with recording direct to hard disk... it'll be interesting to see how Panasonic's camera compares. 4:2:2 vs. 4:2:0, 100 megabit discrete vs. 19-megabit longform GOP, but the JVC has a removable lens option... and does "monochrome viewfinder" mean a REAL viewfinder, a B&W CRT, and if so, is it a high-def-resolution CRT?

... and, where did these specs come from? Are they posted on a JVC site somewhere, or just rumor?

If it's true, Canon's got to be hating it -- someone will be beating them to the punch with a removable-lens option for HDV. And if it's true that there's a Fuji option, well, that means there might be a variety of lenses to choose from... very interesting indeed.

Can we get some JVC confirmation on this?
 
it looks the viewfinder will be more like the Xl2 joke... I hope i´m mistaken and it´s the deal... Barry your writing looks you are excited like a child in christmas morning!

I hope Pana´s is better cos then it will mean an awesome machine, Sony being defeated at last, and the hell of the camera´s war!

Pana being 4:2:2 still have the point for me... And if my dreams come true with the specs i wish there will be hospitals full of indie filmakers hurted after avalanchs in shops and fights aroung little carboard boxes! It will look like clothes sales in big malls here, with women going nuts for a shirt and hitting each other with their handbags full of bricks!
 
Funny! If one wants to register, one cannot be from the US or Canada. Seems the list excludes those 2 countries... and maybe more?

Perhaps I should put one of the common-wealth countries? Or perhaps one of those countries who's size is about the size of my back yard? :evil:
 
The prohd.net site is one by JVC Germany, so maybe they do not have the right to put out their feelers to the United States resp. Canada. For all You are living in America, please go to http://pro.jvc.com and click on the ProHD picture (below) to register.
 
Funny indeed. So does JVC really believe that by holding back the information from US and Canadian customers we won't hear about before NAB? This website goes all over the world. I'm sure someone will spill the beans if they get information from JVC before NAB so why not release the information to everyone. Unless they won't release the information until after NAB.
 
See, Robert just proved my point. He'll pass the information on to us.

April will be an exciting month. Hearing the information about the JVC still makes me believe that Panasonic is going to pull something magical out of the hat.
 
They show a back lit picture on the JVC website of some camera. Jan can you put out a back lit picture of the HDX?
 
Barry_Green said:
... 4:2:2 vs. 4:2:0, 100 megabit discrete vs. 19-megabit longform GOP...
Click to expand...

Not to nitpick, but if we're comparing 720p24 apples to 720p24 apples, the data rates should be 40Mbps discrete vs. 19Mbps longform GOP.

(And yes, I do know that the Varicam records 100 Mbps to tape at 720p24, but what's important in terms of image quality is how much unique data is written to tape.)

Edited to Add: I realized after I wrote this that we don't know how 24p will be written to HDV, given that 24p is not part of the HDV spec. Some would argue that we should reduce the effective data rate of 24p HDV to 24/30 of the total (as we do for 24p DV). With long-GOP MPEG2, though, JVC could just encode 6 extra junk frames per second in a 30 frame stream using almost no data whatsoever; the beauty of MPEG2 is that it takes almost no data to record a frame that is identical to the previous frame. Or JVC could use 720p25 HDV and add just one extra frame per second. However you slice it, I doubt the final data rate for 24p HDV will be much less than 19Mbps.

It does, however, raise the question of what NLEs will support 24p HDV.
 
Makes you wonder how they could do it with a 3:2 or 3:2:2:3 pull down like the DVX with B and P frames. I guess it's doable, but it must be nightmarish on the NLE side. Or perhaps 24p if for DTE only?
 
Barry_Green said:
... and, where did these specs come from? Are they posted on a JVC site somewhere, or just rumor?

Can we get some JVC confirmation on this?
Click to expand...

I'm with Barry on this one. Did we ever find out where those specs came from?

(and we all know that Jan is the only product rep gutsy enough to take all the punches she gets by posting on here) ;-)
 
2:3:3:2 pulldown would be heinous, especially since 720p HDV uses a GOP size of 6. Using Advanced Pulldown would mean that every 5th GOP would have an I-frame based on the useless C-frame in the pulldown. Ugly beyond ugly.

I have to believe that they will use 720p25 and just add in an extra frame each second (or less likely use 720p30 with 6 extra frames per second). Adding an extra frame with no new information incurs very low overhead in MPEG2 because of interframe compression, and the rest of the bandwidth can be used for the frames that have actual information.

Even if the JVC records 24p DTE, it's not clear to me that NLEs will be able to edit HDV at 24p. I suppose that once they can edit 25p/30p HDV, it shouldn't be a major technology leap. If the NLE makers haven't tested editing 24p HDV/MPEG2, though, it's likely to be buggy.
 
The lens issue gets more and more exciting. On the German JVC internet site they wrote: "Wechselojektiv mit manueller Fokus-, Zoom- und Blendeneinstellung" - "Interchangeable lens with manual focus, zoom and diaphragm settings". Cool, is it not?
 
It´s the end of the world as we know it... Hehe... If this lens is correct then Sony is out AND Canon too (if they don´t answer soon with another camera or another lens as users are asking for the XL2)... ho ho ho... Interesting times indeed.

I think i´m gonna need some hibernation from here till NAB or i will have a heart attack!
 
I just realized a glaring problem with the 24p pulldown ideas I wrote above. Both of them require the NLE to pull out frames in such a way that the resulting video has unevenly distributed GOPs. If you throw away 6 frames a second from a 720p30 stream, you're left with 4 GOPs of 5 frames and one GOP of 4 frames each second. If you throw away just one frame per second in 720p25, you have a similar problem, but it doesn't divide as easily. I'm not sure if MPEG2 video streams are allowed to have GOPs of varying length like that, but it seems highly suspicious to me. The NLE would also have to send the data through a decompression/compression cycle, which would be a quality hit.

So I thought of another way that the new JVC could record 24p HDV. Since 720p30 HDV is comprised of 5 6-frame GOPs per second, the new camera could just record black to the last GOP each second. The NLE would then throw this GOP away completely and use the 4 other 6-frame GOPs to make a 24p MPEG2. On the minus side, the I-frame in the the discarded GOP would be wasted. On the plus side, the camera might be able to put a minimal amount of information in the unused I-frame, freeing space for the GOPs that carry meaningful information. And assuming that HDV uses closed GOPs rather than open, the NLE could use camera original data from the other 4 GOPs without having to send it through a compression-decompression cycle.

Of course, JVC might also just decide to go completely off spec, create a real 24p HDV solution, and hope that NLEs and the HDV standard accept it. That strategy kind of worked for JVC with 720p30 HDV; who's to say they won't try it again?
 
Slowing down the tape transport by 20%, record true 24p, get 20% more footage off the same tape... that sounds good to me. :thumbup:
 
Flintstone said:
Slowing down the tape transport by 20%, record true 24p, get 20% more footage off the same tape... that sounds good to me. :thumbup:
Click to expand...

That's another very interesting possibility. At first I thought, "so now we have to have new special VTRs that will run 20% slower? ugh." But then I realized that they could make it such that the tape looks like 720p30 HDV when played in a normal HDV VTR with the quirk that the action runs 25% fast. An NLE (or a JVC-constructed utility) could easily recalibrate the timing, though, and treat the 720p30 footage as if it were 24p. Problem solved.

At least for the picture, that is. Sound could be an issue, since you'd have to lower the sound sampling rate by 20% in what is already a sound-weak format.

A tweak that would be cooler IMHO, would be to run just 4% slower and record the 24p into a 720p25 stream on tape. That way, you get a higher bitrate (about 18.2 Mbps when slowed 4% versus about 15.2 Mbps when slowed 20%). You also don't have to muck with the sound sampling rate that much. I'm sure there's some reason not to do it this way, but it could be interesting.
 
Hmm, interesting developments. I'll have to take everything back, that I said earlier in this thread, about the new JVC propably being the 2/3" from NAB 2004.
It really seems that they are coming up with something good. Except for the 19 Mbits/s, that is. I just registered in prohd.net, but think I won't buy anything with 19 Mbits/s MPEG-2. Well, maybe I would, but I already have a 25 Mbits/s camera, and I am not that impressed with MPEG-2.
My only hope would be that you could record something with less compression on to the harddisks. But I doubt that will happen.
 
In my opinion JVC is the only company that by introducing a good product will not kill their own upper professional market because it is hardly exist (when was the last time anybody saw an ENG team running around with a JVC video camera)?
They can "afford" it when Sony and Pansonic simply can't.
 
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