my GZ-HD7 has just shipped.... where to post?
 

Please feel free to move my post.... I just figured that it
belongs here, since the GZ-HD7 does fit the description of
affordable 3-chip HD? :) Perhaps it is finally time to
modify this area to "JVC GY-HD100 / HD110..... / GZ-HD7" :)

I just got an email from Circuit City. It indicated that my
GZ-HD7 has already shipped via 2-day express shipping.
The delivery date is shown as 4/9. I called them up to
verify this and was given a UPS tracking number. However,
the UPS website only says "billing information received"
but it does show 2-day air package... :( Guess they
got their shipment in early... I just cancelled my pre-order
with Amazon and still have to find out how to contact
BH tomorrow.

I will make a post as soon as I receive it. Now if only
someone can tell me what to do with the footage. I don't
even have a clue what kind of format it's in. MPEG2....
but what kind?

Thanks!

The camcorder should be posted here:
http://dvinfo.net/conf/forumdisplay.php?f=74
I think the title should be changed from “Consumer /Single Chip HD Camcorders” to “Consumer HD Camcorders”

You should easily be able to drag and drop files from your camcorder to the computer.
Once you get the footage on your computer, do you think you can share it with us? I’m sure Chris Hurd might not mind hosting it for you. Or you can try one of the many file sharing sites such as megaupload.

You’re lucky you got it before Circuit City decided to increase the price by 100 dollars. Demand must be higher than they expected.

I’ve imported all of the HD7 video files that I have into Ulead Video Studio and was able to edit all of the clips so if you’re already editing HDV files in your computer, you shouldn’t have that much of a problem editing HD7 files on some editors.

By doing some math, I noticed that the 174MB file is around 2.9MB/sec. That’s much less than HDV’s 3.6MB/sec. The clips from the HD7 is supposed to be around 3.83MB/sec (26.6mbps). Hope I did my math correctly.

So basically the video from the camcorder should be better than that 174MB file.
My advise to anyone is to be careful when its time to export from your timeline.

I actually held one in my hands today at Fry's in Alpharetta, Georgia. A very nice camcorder, although I went there to hopefully see a Canon HV20. Unfortunately, they did not have the Canon, but the new JVC was there and it was impressive.

I am very torn between this JVC and the HV20, because I wanted the rich color capability and low-light functionality of a 3CCD camcorder, but also wanted the ability to use 24p and MiniDV media. Each camera has it's pros and cons. I am leaning toward the Canon, simply because of the videos that many contributors have posted. All have demonstrated nice color and some successful low-light shots. I haven't seen any footage from the JVC yet.

Does anyone have thoughts on making a choice?

You can view clips from here:
http://babelfish.altavista.com/babel...2Fzooma300.htm
Just remember to keep in mind that the 174MB file isn’t properly exported.

I've gone through some of the same thought processes as you. I really like the idea of the focus ring and the manual gain compared to that skinny, slippery roller bearing thing the HV20 calls a focus wheel. At least I think the HD7 will have manual gain. One site's First Look review says "yes" in the body and "no" in the spec sheet. But, like you, miniDV media is nice for archival purposes. Like a lot of you, I'm looking forward to a full review to get an idea for handling and low light. 24p for me isn't necessary so that won't hold me back with the JVC.

Good luck.

Dennis

almost all of my local Circuity City just got their shipment in...

only if I didn't pre-order! :( I could have picked it up last night! :)
Now I have to wait for the delivery on Monday....

I'm assuming the HD7 comes with software that's capable of burning
the videos to a Blu-ray disc. What kind of Blu-ray burner will work?
Any recommendations?

Thanks!

TODAY (Easter) would be a good time to buy this from CC...
 

While the stores are closed, they are offering an extra 10% off over $199. That means the JVC HD7 is already $1699-$200=$1499, and now subtract ANOTHER $150 off that just today. You're looking at $1350 before taxes w/ cheap shipping or in-store pickup if you are lucky enough to have it in-stock in your area. Not bad--I'm thinking of ordering now and waiting for review to possibly cancel...

This obviously also works for the other models I'm looking at--Canon and Panasonic don't have as good initial price cuts though. Pany is still $1299 list before discount, as is Canon HV20 at $1099. However, the HV10 would be about $800 with this coupon...best I've seen for that.

To the person that ordered it early, see if they will give you the additional discount (after the fact). I've found the store's mgrs are really accomodating for things like that.

That’s true, it is back to 1500. I don’t know why they increased it by 100 yesterday only to decrease it by 100 today.

I really wish I had the money right now because it truly is the right time to buy this camcorder but then again NAB is in several days although the point and shoot crowd doesn’t have to worry about that because you wont see any consumer camcorders.



The camcorder comes packaged with PowerDirector 5 NE Express
http://www.cyberlink.com/eng/press_room/view_1297.html

The last time I checked they replaced the $200 discount with a $100.00 discount.

Adjudicator

Looks like they jacked up the price on the spare battery--wasn't it about $45.00 before? Now it is $90.00.

Erik

New CC code extends the discount days...
 

Now they have issued a 3-day code (Sun-Tues) through their email promos so I have more time to linger over the JVC purchase :) If they will allow the discount to come off the Canon instead if I choose that one (at the time), I may bite.

I just tried a check-out and its $1499 not $1350. How do you get $1350??? Worse it is only available for shipping.

They have the option of a 15% restocking fee -- which makes it an expensive trial considering that from the sample videos posted (above) one can see it has very very low lattitude. Just like the HD1. But not progressive. (:

CC now have it in stock locally...but...
 

I hope if you were in the market you bit over the weekend, cause they have now pulled the $200 savings. It is now in stock at my store so going to check it out tonight--hopefully they have the Canon to see as well.

Update: They do...and the store still has it at $1499. So you could match the 10% in the store for one more day.

Not to worry, there will be discounts glore. Try B&H.

JVC Everio HD GZ-HD7 quick report and question.
 

Got my JVC GZ-HD7 yesterday and bought it sight unseen solely based on all the tech specs and after handling the HV10 and HV20 and seriously considered them. I run Nikon cameras and have some time on higher end systems like the Canon XL-H1 and JVC GY-HD100U and wanted something small that would be easier to haul around and if damaged, wouldn't be quite as big a deal as one of the big ones. While I was impressed with what the canon could do, when I held it, it felt light and cheap to me. Again, I'm sure its a wonderful camera I just liked the 3 CCD option on the JVC more and was willing to pay a few bucks more for the 3 CCD. Also has the black & white with blue focus assist feature just like the GY-HD100U and that has come in very useful in the past.

I love the new JVC GZ-HD7! Actually suprised me! The workflow with the hard drive will take some getting used to, but once the plugin for quicktime/Final Cut Pro/Imovie was installed on the Mac, I was VERY VERY impressed with the 1920x1080 picture that showed up on screen even just dumping the TOD file onto a folder then opening it up in Imovie which comes on every new Mac. The Everio HD will hold 5 hours (yes, 5 full hours) of FULL HD 1920x1080 on it's 60 gig drive. Plenty of space.

I did a quick 11 second clip in "full HD" mode (1920x1080) and plugged HDMI directly to a Sony XBR Grand Wega 60" and voila, as promised, incredible detail and ABSOLUTELY VIBRANT COLOR. Couldn't be happier.Left everything set to auto, didn't make a single custom setting change at all. Exported it as a full HD Quicktime file and OH MY GOSH, 146 meg quicktime file for 11 second clip......wow, that's a lot of data. Obviously compresses entirely differently on the camera or using Apple 422 codec, but THAT'S A LOT OF DATA!

Now, here's the issue. I run the latest Final Cut Studio Production Suite and for some reason, cannot get the TOD file to import into Final Cut Studio....errors out every time. I'm sure I'm not doing something correctly, but for the life of me can't figure out what. Probably something to do with the preferances in setting up a new sequence, but again, not sure.

Anyone else with this same camera and Final Cut Studio have any solutions?

Do you know if you can edit it intermixed with HDV?

In my case I edit with Avid Xpress HD, and I don't know if the HD7 codec is already provided for.

Hi, all. I handle PR for JVC here in the U.S. Here are some links to help with editing HD7 footage with a Mac:

Tutorials for both Windows & Apple:
http://software.transdigital.co.jp/p...eng/index.html

MAC FAQ:
http://software.transdigital.co.jp/p...g/mac_faq.html

And if you're using Windows:
Windows FAQ:
http://software.transdigital.co.jp/p...g/win_faq.html

Can you tell me how I can edit HD7 footage with a PC, particularly with Avid Xpress?

Copy to your PC HD and change the .TOD file extension to .M2T and import into Avid. Works on Liquid.

I found a thread on the Avid forums on this camcorder. I am looking at it as a "B roll" for weddings with my hd110. De interlacing is my biggest concern tho. My issue is mixing 720p with 1080i on a 720p timeline.

Ian

Clever, very clever. Now at least I can start thinking it might work. Thanks

Do you have the URL for that forum. Is it here on DV Info?

In my case I would be mixing with 1080i, so maybe that's less of a problem.

It would be a B or C camera for me too. But it's affordable and has 3 CCDs, instead of the Sony A1, which it's HDV semi-pro and has just one CMOS.

It's not much better than their HDV consumer models, which BTW I will be testing one type of soon: the Sony HC7, PAL version. On a job I am involved in, shooting with Z1 @ 1080/50i for transferring to 35mm later on, we would be using the HC7 to capture to Mac. And the director will be handling it during shooting as his "personal angle camera".

Getting back to the JVC HD7, it looks as a potentially very interesting camera, which can go insconspicuous on many situations. But I have to see how it mixes in with the Z1.

GZ-HD7 output
 

There's one thing I hadn't seen until now: how do you connect the HD7 to the PC to download HD from the internal HDD?

From what I have just seen at the specs, there is no 1394 interface or any other type to make a digital download from. There's HDMI, but I don't know how to interface that with a computer.

Does anyone know how to solve that quiz?

If you look at this JVC spec. page and scroll down, you will see USB 2.0 listed.

http://www.jvc.com/product.jsp?model...hId=141&page=3

According the to the FAQ above, I should do the following to edit with FCP:

I know the AIC suffers a slight loss in resolution, but what about a straight conversion to .mov? I'm assuming they will be full 1920x1080 60i video files that can be edited as as regular HD or HDV files.

what frame rates can this camera handle?

60i only which is unfortunate considering it has progressive CCDs. Since Sony and Panasonic are replacing their non tape camcorders quickly, I think JVC should replace the HD7 with one that has progressive modes and a better stabilizer.

JVC serious about Mac support or not?
 

Does anyone know if JVC is serious about Mac support for this camera or not? I was so annoyed to find out that their QuickTime plugin won't play the TOD files in real time on my brand-spanking-new MacBook Pro (and very disappointed in JVC's tech support response telling me that my system might not meet the minimum requirements). It was really annoying to have to transcode from the TOD format to HDV (or AIC) in iMovie at something like 4 times *longer* than real time. I think that the Japanese company that JVC contracted with to write the QT plugging probably didn't do any type of code optimization at all to take advantage of the Mac's GPU features.

I really want to like this camera (and keep it) but it's got to be better integrated with my Mac workflow. Right now the JVC/Transdigital claim that this is supported under iMovie and FCP rings pretty darn hollow.

JVC GZ-HD7 impressions
 

So I spent 10 days with the JVC GZ-HD7 shooting in Southern California and I have to say that I really like this camera. I like the feel of the camera in my hand, I like the ability to offload all my day's shooting via USB to my MacBook Pro just as if I were copying files from a hard disk (well, I guess I am), I like the ability to review anything that I've shot in the field while I'm in the field without having to worry about which tape the shots are on or winding the tape back and forth to get to where I want to be.

I bought three extra high-capacity batteries (JVC BNVF823US, the "4 hour" batteries) and two stand-alone chargers (JVC BN-VF8) and I never ran out of battery power since I am religious about charging all my batteries after each day's shooting.

Some down sides to the camera - if you stack on too many filters - I had a UV filter and then a circular polarizer - you will see the edges of the filters in the image, and if you then put a hood on the stack, you wind up with an image that looks like a cheap porn video (not that I would know what a cheap porn video looks like of course, and no offense to those of you that shoot and edit cheap porn videos ;-). My solution was to get a 46mm to 77mm adapter ring, put a 77mm circular polarizer on that, and then put a 77mm round hood on the end of that whole mess. Even so, I can't fully extend the hood without seeing part of it in the image. I have read where someone has actually gone to some 80mm+ ring and hood in order to resolve this problem.

Another thing I noticed about my camera, not sure if it's a common design of all units, is that the lens and/or sensor seem to be mounted off-center WRT the filter - what I mean is, if you were to shoot a straight line out of the center of the camera's lens, it would not go through the center of the attached filter, but rather go slightly to the left of center. This is severe enough such that it affects the size of step-up ring/filter/lens hood, since anything much smaller than 77mm caused the filter/hood to block the right side of the image. I've asked JVC about this, let's see what they have to say.

Finally, I'm back in my studio now and I'm converting all the TOD files so that I can edit them in FCP. I'm also making SD NTSC DV versions so that my daughter can start playing with iMovie to learn how to edit (let's see who comes up with the better program ;-) I was struggling with the JVC/TransDigital "QuickTime Component" that is really a big POS - first of all, it would not allow smooth playback of TOD files on my MacBook Pro, and JVC told me that I should "check my system" since it might not be adequate to play HD files (my MacBook Pro exceeds all of their published requirements, so piffle on JVC). I also had a problem doing batch conversion of TOD files to AIC and DV formats. I wrote a simple Automator workflow that would prompt me for a list of files and then feed them to QuickTime to do the conversion. I noticed that when I played back the converted files, the first two seconds of audio would repeat, but not the video! This caused the audio and video to get out of syn with each other. Manually converting a TOD file using QT worked fine. I finally was able to reproduce the problem by adding just two files to my list to be converted, and the audio problem manifested in the converted files. I think that this is caused by a bug in the JVC/TransDigital code, but I'm not sure, and I've also sent that bug report into JVC.

So, quickly getting tired and frustrated with crappy software, I read up on the net about using VLC and MPEG Streamclip (both are free, and both are on Apple's site, or you can Google for them). These two work together perfectly - I pass in a list of TOD files to VLC and tell it to do a batch convert of the encapsulating container to MPEG TS format - that is very fast, since it's just changing the container info, not actually doing any re-rendering or any other heavy lifting. I then feed the list of TS files into MPEG Streamclip and tell it to do a batch convert to whatever format I want. The MacBook Pro grinds away doing the transcoding while I do other work, and the resulting files not only work properly, they also look great - a lot better than the results I got when using the JVC/TransDigital and QT combination. As an added plus, VLC is able to play the TOD files without any problems, so that lends even less credence to JVC's assertion that my system isn't "adequate" to play TOD/HiDef files. Why do companies have to lie instead of just saying "I don't know". Ugh!

So, after all this, I've got a bunch of really nice looking files that I can now take into FCP and mangle with my creative energies ;-) More on the FCP story next week.

mike

Mike,

I am glad you like the JVC GZHD7; it is impression that this camcorder is not good compare to others. But it is been almost three months since I am using it; I bought it first day when it was launched.

I am really happy with the performance, I have captured some really good footage with this camcorder, I have posted in this forum also, and maybe you have gone through it.

Frankly speaking I would have bought Canon HV20 if it would have been with hard-disk that is the only reason I went for JVC, I wanted to buy HDD based camcorder, and otherwise I really like Canon HV20, the OIS system in Canon HV20 works better than JVC GZHD7. And I agree that OIS on JVC is very less effective, that is the only worst part of this beauty!

Canon has two good features one is 24p recording which gives you cinema look videos, and second is it can convert you old analogue tapes in digital format. To me Canon HV20 video looks brighter than JVC, but I like JVC's performance. JVC GZHD produce rich colour and some times I feel it looks to me over saturated!

You told you have captured some good vides, if you willing to show your works to others than it would be good, I would appreciate if you upload you videos here in this forum.

You can upload them at www.megaupload.com they allow you to upload one file up to 500MB.

Thanks,
Kaushik

Has anyone compared image quality from this camera with HDV cameras? I'm quite curious to see if they can be intermixed.

The main problems I see on the Canon H20, when compared with this camera, is its sole CMOS sensor (instead of 3 CCDs), too few manual controls (focus and exposure) and no mic input. As such it seems only interesting for home videos.

In that sense, the Sony HC7 at least has manual controls, even if only 1 CMOS too.

Thanks. :-)

Not to stray off topic, but I just want to correct you there. The HV20 has manual focus, manual exposure, AND a mic input.

Have you actually seen footage from an HV20? What does it really matter with the 1 CMOS especially when its picture is much beter than the 3CCD HC7 (subjective I know but tell that to the majority of reviewers)? It has more manual controls than what you mentioned. Home videos??? Your joking right?? Most of your award winning SLR photo cams use 1CMOS and thier pictures are amazing.

You can't really compare CMOS and CCD in the same way. They are two totally different animals in how they gather light.

Is the upcoming RED camera 1CMOS or 3CMOS? Just curious.

.TOD to Quicktime
 

I was able to use quicktime to make a playable quicktime but the fields were all munged together making an unwatchable mess of my footage.

The VLC>MpegStreamclip solution worked for me.

Lets get back to the topic, now that the HD3 has also been released where should we place this new channel?