Panasonic AVCHD cam coming soon
 

Check it out, from Akihabara, at http://www.akihabaranews.com/news-12...camcorder.html

No model number or price, but will record HD at 6 or 9 mbps to an SD card. 3CCD it says.

Looking for an official press release from Panasonic...

Excellent find! Panasonic and Canon usually produce stellar products- I can't wait for more info!

The 6 and 9 figures is most likely for recordings in standard definition MPEG2.
The figure for AVCHD mode should be a lot higher.

Pretty sure those are HD bit rates... that's one of the best things about AVC and H.264 compression. At the Apple press event for NAB2004, I saw HD projected on a huge screen at 8mbps using H.264 and it looked great.

Darn, doesn't exactly look like the pocket cam I was hoping for. It even has a flip-out LCD screen.

Another concept picture of what it might look like is found.

http://www.watch.impress.co.jp/av/do...4/ceat8_04.jpg

But that footage was probably created on powerful computers given plenty of time to render the output. For cameras it would be better to get something at least close to HDV bit rates and preferably higher: H.264 at 25-50 Mbps would be very interesting. Seems like Panasonic has been saying they're planning to do just that, so let's see if they come through.

Different format though. You're talking about AVC-Intra at 50 megabits, vs. AVC-HD at up to 18 megabits. AVC-HD is a long-GOP format, sort of a "super-HDV". AVC-Intra is a frame-discrete format, no GOP, 4:2:2 color and I think it's supposed to be 10-bit as well, so it's sort of a "super-DVCPRO-HD". Different formats for different markets.

Right. Point being that AVCHD at bit rates of 6-9 Mbps isn't all that interesting compared to HDV, but give us the same compression technology with some decent bandwidth and now we don't need DVCProHD or uber-expensive P2 memory cards. In other words, I don't want another "pretty good" HD format, I want awesome quality recorded on inexpensive off-the-shelf flash memory.

Video footage of the new pana avchd Camera
 

This looks like a product announcement video. Nice looking camera. I did not get any sound. If anyone gets sound and could translate, that would be awesome

http://gizmologia.com/2006/10/ceatec...d-de-panasonic

Found an english version of the Panasonic AVCD announcement video
 

Took place in japan at Ceatec Tech conventions

http://www.digitalworldtokyo.com/200...sdonly_hid.php

Sweet!

Thanks for posting that link.

I like the looks of that camcorder.

I hope Panasonic includes a microphone input.

I also hope they'll give us 720/60p as a recording option.

There's also a great article about AVCHD here:

http://governmentvideo.com/articles/...icle_982.shtml

Jerry Jones
http://www.jonesgroup.net

Canopus is now listed among the supporters of this format. This good news for Edius users.

I thought this was odd (from that nvvtd review): "...the idea is to allow consumers to burn their own AVCHD videos direct to Blu-ray discs... with HDV, on the other hand, there would need to be a transcoding step (MPEG-2 to H.264) ..."

That's not correct is it?? Blu-ray supports MPEG2....

There is also an option for a variable bit rate of 13MBPS on average so it can probably go up to 16MBPS in fast action shots.


http://www.pcworld.com/article/id,12...s/article.html