And another HD101 clip now available for download
 

Here's one more from Matthew Redmond and Scott Webster at Rocket Rentals in Auckland.

Download the following clip to your local hard drive and rename the .movx extension to .mov

http://www.hdvinfo.net/media/rocketn...0p30codec.movx

This 37MB clip is a native 720p30 QuickTime .mov file which can only be played by those who have the codec on their system.

That looks so much better it's not even funny. The .m2v posted earlier was definitely recompressed.

I'm not so worried about this camera at all anymore, really. It looks at least as good at 720p as my FX-1 CF30 clips...and maybe better.

Something else I just noticed pulling this clip into FCP5...and something I'd also noted from HDV (from FX-1) clips played in Quicktime Player...

...that the gamma is different between the two. Pulling the BMX clip into FCP and playing back there, the gamma is much better and not washed out looking at all. In the canvas window, things look terrific.

Also, my dual 2ghz handles 720p MUCH better than 1080i (surprise surprise). Almost just like DV.

What codec do I need to see it, Im on PC?

Thx!

QuickTime 7, Public Preview version 2. Get it from Apple at www.apple.com

But don't install it on an editing machine, especially if you're using Premiere Pro.

I keep my internet computer completely separate from my editing computer -- so should you!

;-)

Chris, I installed QT 7.2 and after that After FX just hang...neither would the clip play anyways. Just un-installed it and got back to QT 6.5, now it seems to work fine again!

I wish I could have been a little bit more patient waiting for an answer. Strange though that the clip didnt play eventhough I had installed v7.2?!?!

I so really want and need to see this clip!

Playback performance
 

I'm getting poor performance when watching these clips. It's probably because my system is getting quite old. I can watch the HD-WMV's fine and they look great, but quicktimes and mpegs I only get about 2fps. Are most of you getting realtime playback on these clips? Am I going to have to finally get a new system if I want to transition to HDV? or am I doing something wrong? My system is:

Dual Athlon MP 2200
2 Gigs RAM

I don't know, perhaps this is best attempted with a Mac...

I have a PC w/QT7.2 but have not tried to download this clip.

Arent there any JVC m2t clips? I have no problems watching sonys raw clips in m2t format, they run great on my Athlon X2 4400 with 2gb ram!

What is the diffrence between m2t and m2v?

On a PC 7.02b20 just plays the audio...

m2t
 

Soroush,

I think the reason we're not seeing the .m2t files is because the people who are posting these clips are using Macs, and they've mentioned something about it needing to be "wrapped" into a quicktime file or something.

I believe an m2t is the raw data from the cam and an m2v has been recompressed.

Watching the QT file on PC is gonna be sketchy at best...QT for Windows has never been the speediest.

You would think QuickTime would handle this. I've used plenty of Mac DV Quicktimes before - why not HDV?

The clips I've provided are not much -- just some trade-show floor stuff from the WEVA exhibit. But I'm uploading them as native .m2t's, straight off the tape. No recompression, no alternate codec, they're exactly bit-for-bit what the camera recorded. 30p & 24p, motion smoothing on & off. But the camerawork and lighting and everything are quite dodgy -- it was tough to get time to do even a halfway decent job when you're hogging the camera and other people (and the booth reps) want you to just move out of the way! :)

So there's nothing professional about how they were shot, but at least you can see a few seconds of footage in the native mode, etc. Some of the clips I just extracted a still frame from -- like to compare black stretch +3 against black compress -3, so you can see the effect on dynamic range. Or to demonstrate the color palette -- the standard default palette is indeed very muted, but you can juice up the chroma level to highly saturated candy-apple colors. Those shots are saved as .png's, so they're mathematically lossless compression (i.e., no additional JPG artifacts).

Well these shots in their native format do look far better than the ones posted previously. There is no banding in these originals. And the footage does look very nice.

There is a noticable amount of "grain" in the shot which lends it a very different look than what I am used to. I'm using the word different here, because I haven't decided if I like it or not yet :)

At any rate, most people will have to take my word for it, because the HDV codec is only available to FCP5 users. So if you have a PC, or a mac without FCP5 you can't watch this, no matter which version of quicktime you have. I don't know why apple won't let you download it.

But I am much more relieved about the picture quality from this camera, now that I have seen the raw footage.