More HD101 clips now available from (H)DV Info Net
 

These are new -- thanks again to Scott Webster for submitting them.

Download the following clips to your local hard drive and rename them.

Be sure to rename the .tifx extension to .tif, the .wmvx extension to .wmv and the .m2v before viewing them.

http://www.hdvinfo.net/media/rocketn...hromaedge.tifx

and

http://www.hdvinfo.net/media/rocketn...fullvideo.wmvx
http://www.hdvinfo.net/media/rocketn...1bmxmpeg2.m2vx

This 27MB clip was shot with the JVC GY-HD101E in 720p30 with motion smooth on. Edited in FCP5, converted to .wmv with flip4mac. Once again shot in and around Auckland, New Zealand.

Thanks very much again Chris and Scott - especially for the high rez clips.

It was interesting to see the "smooth motion" effect, though I'm unclear who will find it useful.

Some experiment with shutter speeds and smooth motion might be revealing.

Overall, however, I'm wondering about the clipped highlights - I wonder if these clips are exposed in camera under 100 IRE - I would expect to see more highlight detail than these shots have revealed.

The images don't exactly make you want to run out and buy one. I frankly was (and still am) expecting more from this camera. I do have my eyes on a HVX200 pending how it actually turns out, but the removable lense options on this system are intriguing.

However, it does remind me still of HD10U footage, especially daylight scenes with a less than appealing color palette and highlight handling. I hoping this is more exposure/camera settings issue...

Scott, what do you and others who've seen the footage in person think so far?

The clip sure seems noisy. I wonder if the camera has a negative gain setting, that might help a little. I also wonder if the extra noise was introduced, intentionally, to reduce the appearance of macroblocks.

That's a very interesting thought and little disturbing. I'm not sure it would work though as seems like you would need a lot of noise but I don't know enough of the technical side to be sure.

I agree with Stephen. I really wanted to like this camera but so far it isn't really turning me on. I mean it seems to be ok but that is about it, just ok. I think the HC1 actually looks much better especially when you scale footage from the HC1 down to 1280x720.

The image from the HD100 really screams electronic video. I really hope there are some settings on the camera to make it look better.

My line of logic is that the noise might be added in the same way one might add noise to a color gradient to reduce the appearance of banding when working in a lower bit rate.

After watching these clips, I too must admit that I'm a little disapointed (I understand that, with different settings and operation this may change the quality) however I was expecting (and hoping) alot more from this cam.

Oh well time will tell.

Transferred another clip - this time a mov in the 720p30 codec which the footage was captured in. When a link to the material appears online please check if you have this codec on your machine. If you have final cut pro 5 then you should be all good.

cheers
- Matthew (who works with Scott)

Thx for the clips. My only hope is on 24p footage (720 24p was the only reason I ordered mine). Non of the footage so far has impressed me. I will be getting mine soon and will do some testing with the 24p settings!

Thanks Scott and Matthew for the native .m2v file.

I happen to think the footage looks pretty good. I imported it to FCP 5 and did some simple editing with it.

Matthew, I'm a bit confused though. I chose the 720P30 Easy Setup for a new project, imported the file and put it in the timeline but it needed to be rendered. Any suggestions as to what I set incorrectly?

On another note, I'm really impressed with the Mac Mini I bought a few months ago. I edit at home on it with FCP 5 and am excited to be editing HDV footage with it (your clip). Granted I can't view it on a video monitor or make an HDV DVD since I don't have DVD SP 4, but, I exported the clip as DV, encoded it with BitVice and made a DVD to watch the footage on my TV and it looks good.

At work I edit with a dual 2 gig G5 using FCP HD and an AJA IO for Beta SP so I won't be able to use your clip there but I'm excited to show my boss the clip, as we are considering getting the HD100.

A bit disapointing about the quality, I get mine tomorrow so well see how it preforms at 24p & 25p. But still from what I have seen I thought it could do better considering the camera is being used to shoot a movie as we speak. But they are proberly capturing the 60p frames.

Sean, you're getting yours tomorrow? Please see my thread at:

http://www.dvinfo.net/conf/showthread.php?t=48668

Thanks in advance,

Hi Dave

Matthew here (hijacking scotts login again). The reason it needs to be rendered is because it is not a native HDV 720p30 file. It is mpeg2, but not HDV...slightly different. I have however uploaded a "NATIVE" 720p30 MOV file to dvinfo and will probably appear online at some stage.

It will only work if you have the codec on your system.

Matt.

For sure, I may not get time untill the weekend to shoot something worth uploading.

sean

Dropouts?
 

Hey Scott, can you verify something on the original tapes? Are there dropouts in this footage?

There's a segment in the long .wmv at timecode 0:25:20 where the guy's just landed a jump, and he stays frozen for 12 frames... curious number, sounds like a 2-GOP dropout.

Then there's a section later 40:12, where the guy freezes in mid-jump. That freeze lasts for about 40 frames.

Are those dropouts on the tape? Or dropped frames when capturing? Or something new, some way that there are dropouts/freeze-ups when rendering out?

No, no, Its Matt not listening to me and 'being cool' with freeze frames!
he did take the freeze out of the m2 file at my request.
Bloody editors...(I'm at his mercy as I can't drive FCP)

Hi Matthew,

I thought the native HDV format was short GOP MPEG2. So isn't that what .m2t is, an MPEG2 transport stream?

Ahhh, thanks for mentioning that. I was about ready to kick my Imac G5 out the door for not being able to 'keep up' with the high data rate.

-gb-

Urg. I can't say I'm really impressed. Maybe it's the motion smoothing, or maybe it's the compression but it seems that the background really gets blurred in all of the pans. Some of the chroma seems really blown out, and there seems to be a lot of sharpening... or am I missing something? A lot of that could be the wmv compression as well, but most of the Z1/FX1 footage I've seen seemed a lot cleaner than this.

Either way, I'd like to see more footage - some really carefully composed closeups, some fast action footage (martial arts or something) etc. Hopefully someone can show us the best this camera can offer.

-Steve

I agree. And why is it that JVC isn't making their own footage with the camera? You'd think they would want to show to the world how good their product can be in the right hands with professional lighting and good production values. Come to think of it, have ANY camera manufacturers released their own professional footage as a demo of their camera? I remember the XL1 making-of video for that Camcorder commercial. That was cool. JVC would want people to see the camera at it's best, no? Or am I missing something?

were any of those video clips shot with auto iris? Not that this would mean anything but I sometimes work for a guy where I have to shoot with a JVC DV5000 camera and the auto iris sucks on the thing. Everytime it is used everything gets blown out and washed out. Of course this isn't so much the camera as it it the lens. In these types of cameras a lot more of the control is put into the lens as opposed to the camera itself. I know the JVC DV camera is using the lower end lens that comes with it standard. Perhaps the camera is great but the cheap $800.00 lens that comes with the HD100 just isn't good enough unless you really know how to use a manual lens. I would love to see another lens used on this thing.

Remember there has to be a reason why the other lens for the HD100 from JVC costs $10,000.00. It wouldn't cost that much more unless it was a lot better. If it is that much better of a lens to cost 10 times more then how crappy is the standard lens?

Oh by the way I also notice a small amount of noise on the JVC DV5000. This is either just the look of JVC or maybe it is from a lower quality lens.

I feel like a real plonker now. The original clip was timed to music - hell I was having fun. And Scott, you thought it was cool - admit it!

"I'm an editor not an intellectual." :)

Yes, HDV is a form of MPEG2. But if anyone out there knows how to make a straight mpeg2 video file in "exactly" the same way that HDV is encoded, please tell me.

This is why i've been confused as to why people wanted a straight mpeg2 file.

I brought the m2v file into Edition and took a look at it with the CX color corrector. Man what a small gamut. Of course the image's were mostly of the gray concrete but still. Anyway, I adjusted the clips for full broadcast spectrum and it brightened up nicely and the colors came out and the detail. There must be settings on the camera to adjust for the shot you want to get. Were the shots fully automatic or did you set some parameters on the manual side?

Smooth motion is probably to blame in terms of the blurred backgrounds...it's what it does - it's a fancy blur. The pink fluro on the bike does kick out a bit, we agree, and yes things are sharp because as we've said the camera is set to factory defaults. There are matrix, knee, blacks, white clip levels, etc which we could muck around with, and detail can be dropped into the negatives.

The reason we've left it on factory is because this is what you get out of the box - in a hire situation this is important to know because most of your clients arn't going to be adjusting the menu settings to any expert degree.

If it is requested we could change some settings for you. The camera is away today on a shoot so no chance to play at the moment.

If I do work with more footage in this manner I am reluctant to post any clips in other than the native 720p30 files (unless someone has details on making an mpeg2 file which is identical to the HDV stream) as analysis of further compressed files is pointless. But in doing so you would have to have the codec on your machine to view these properly.

Matthew,

Use PVAStrumento (http://www.afterdawn.com/software/vi...astrumento.cfm) to convert M2T streams into the MPEG video and audio without recompression.

Problem is he's on a Mac. I haven't seen any way yet to remove the Quicktime wrapper from HDV captures...or if it's even possible.

I think FCP does not leave the stream untouched...my guess is that it takes the raw data and re-encapsulates it so FCP can deal.

These particular clips have now been withdrawn, but we'll have others available soon. Many thanks to Scott Webster and Matthew Redmond for sharing this video.

I'd like to see these clips, could anyone who downloaded them be able to send to me?

Hi Phillip,

Since you're in Auckland, just contact Rocket Rentals -- they're the ones who shot those clips and I'm sure they can provide them to you directly (not to mention actually showing you the HD100 as well).

Yeah i should, im just being lazy sorry.
also i'm at work durring the hours they are open :(

Hmm just had a look on there website to email them and noticed they don't have the HD101 in there camera rentals page anymore (Perhaps they having to much fun with it eh)

Hi Phillip

The camera is no longer on the website because we have returned it, pending a replacement. http://www.dvinfo.net/conf/showthread.php?t=49538

Without knowing:

1) shutter-speed we can't judge Motion Filter. It must be 1/60th.

2) Without knowing aperature we can't judge sharpness. It can't be too far closed or too far open. Likely it should be kept at about f5.6 (+/- 1 stop) on a lens of this cost.

3) Without knowing the amount of zoom, we can't judge sharpness either. There may be only a certain range in which maximum sharpness (MTF) is acheived. Likewise, chromatic aberations may able to ne minimized by knowing the lens better. That takes time and skill.

4) Without knowing gain, we can't judge noise.

In short, it is nearly pointless to judge ANY camera based up this kind of "testing."

Moreover, comments about the color saturation are equally pointless. This is only the factory setting -- the way JVC likes color. If it looks like the HD10 from the factory that's no surprise. Clearly JVC likes a less saturated look -- which is why many of us love the HD10.

Comments about over-exposure have no value either with a camera that has settings that allow you to adjust the knee point and set either static or dynamic knee.

It's nice that Scott is taking his time to send us these--but they are not really clips upon which judgments can be made.

Moreover, no one in their right mind would just take a camera out of the box and shoot a movie with it. They would spend days adjusting the matrix and settings for the look they want.

And LOOK is subjective. For example: someone posts that it over exposes like the HD10 and they don't like that. I love it, because it gracefully over-exposes like film. It does not hard clip. The DP for ST Enterprise chose film over HD ONLY because film gracefully over exposed on pryro effects whereas HD did not.

The camera has a cheap lens. It may not have highly sensitive CCDs. That's why the camera person must know HOW to use the camera to get great results. This is not a point-and-shoot camcorder, yet some are looking -- and making judgements -- at clips shot as though it were.

Perhaps JVC needs to put a warning sticker on the box. "Caution do not use unless you have experience shooting film or HD -- or have an experienced DP." :)

Steve, I absolutely agree with you and I am glad the footage is not available for download.

Further to your points what also needs to be taken into account that both samples we provided were converted into quicktime and wmv files. Who knows what changes this also did to the footage.

May be Chris could set up a faq/template for submitting video to dvinfo, format and settings that must be recorded etc

An excellent idea, but this is something we would develop together as a community. You guys tell me how it should be, and I'll put it in place here.