JVC GY-HD250 Studio Configuration Question
 

I am considering a set of HD250's in a three-camera studio config in a house of worship -- wondering if anyone has used these in this way and your thoughts.

Also, I've seen the 'studio' set-up done in two ways: using the studio adapter (KA-H250) with 26-pin multicore to CCU along with an HD-SDI. However, I'm also aware of people simply using the remote control unit (RM-LP55U) with RS-232 extension.

Has anyone used or seen either of these used in either of these configs? Opinions on the ladder set-up? It seems unorthodox to me, but if it is truly doable, it would certainly be more economical.

Thanks.

Hi Justin,

I have customers doing both. Going with the RM-LP55 idea works to some extent. However you loose many of the functions that the 26 pin multicore gives you, such as remote power, tally, and intercom. Plus, if you don't use the multicore, then you have to run separate cables for genlock, video, tally, intercom, power, and the small CCU.

It comes down to ease and cleanness of the installation using 26 pin versus lots more cables (and more labor installing those cables), and lower hardware cost.

In other words, don't do it! Power cables can get unplugged. Any live video system without tally is unacceptable, especially with volunteers who are slightly less clear on the concept of "camera 2 is live." And you may think you can get away with your existing intercom infrastructure, but there's a point where there's just too much comm traffic and you're struggling to get yourself heard without stepping on people. Believe me, I've been there with all of these things.

On a side note, HD in a church? I shudder to think of the cost of the HD video infrastructure you're going to need. Our SD-SDI system was bad enough and standard def is downright CHEAP compared to what a proper HD system will need. Your switcher alone will cost more than our cameras. Heck, we couldn't even afford to completely do it the "right" way, we've got some serious duct tape I'd like to get rid of.

Actually HD multi-cam systems for a church are very affordable now. For example, with the GY-HD250 camera, you can do a full-blown studio config. for around $20,000. (This is what a decent SD church camera cost just 2 years ago.) And, there are now several small HD production switchers on the market for under $15,000 - one is even under $8,000. And, there are high-output native HD projectors available for less than $10,000.

So, a multi-camera HD I-Mag (Image Magnification) system for a church can now be built in a church for about the same cost as a SD was just a few years ago.

I don't know about the original poster, but in our case, we do a lot more than simple Imag.

I knew the HD250 studio rig was cheaper than our SD cameras (quick question, is it possible to use an HD250 handheld with the studio rig?), but I honestly didn't know there were affordable HD production switchers out there. The only gear I know about are the products from big guys like Grass Valley, Sony and Ross that are priced for people with more money than we have. We're using a 2 M/E Echolab switcher in our control room, which is about as cheap as you can go SDI and still do what we need to do with it.

Now what about HD character generators and recording/playback? We have to be able to put up worship lyrics, titles for speakers and sermon notes. We also need the ability to play video announcements, record a master and iso record all of our cameras for when we're shooting concert DVDs (The Mark David Williams DVD "Christmas This Year" was shot by us). We got this done reasonably inexpensively because there's tons of prosumer gear that can handle SDI, but I just haven't seen the same thing happening in HD. Even the BR-HD50U doesn't do HDSDI.

I suppose you could do character generation and video playback in SD and upconvert, but recording in HD is an absolute must.

The studio configuration is very cheap for what it is I believe. These images and this functionality - if you would have predicted that a few years ago - everyone would have said you're crazy.

Using it handheld? With a serious steadicam it is possible...

I do agree, HD250's an amazing deal for what you get. If you're building an HD production rig HD250 would definitely be the cheapest way to do it. If only the rest of the HD production chain could be priced accordingly.

As for a steadicam, I think buying a steadicam would offset the savings you'd get from using HD250s in the first place. =D

But I'll take that as a "no" that you can't handhold the HD250 studio rig?

Well, it would be pricy, but the only way to use it handheld connected to the studio-adapter. Perhaps a medium-sized steadicam for about 10,000 would do the trick and that would probably be in the budget of the rest of the setup. And you have steadicam images - that's quite a bonus...

Just handheld will be very difficult indeed - with 2 people operating it, perhaps? Or a dolly under the tripod? Taking that cam out of the adapter? plenty of options...

If I had a choice between a solid HD infrastructure consisting of studio cams only, or a full SD setup with tape iso's and graphics, I would take the HD setup. The HD setup can be built up later as the budget allows, but you want to start with the best base possible. Basic HD switchers are very affordable right now. The 250 in a studio config is one of the best HD options available to any house of worship right now.

Ben

To do hand-held with full CCU control is possible, but would require you to build up a custom cable harness. You would need several cables bundles together - video, genlock, intercom, and CAT 5 for the CCU extender. You would also need to power the camera with a battery.

Well - that's an option too, but I suppose you mean without the studio-adapter, Carl?

Correct. Not possible to shoulder-mount with the studio sled.

I do consulting for churches and TV ministries and I was waiting for JVC to come out with an HD CCU. Is that coming at all?

Oh, if you guys are in texas you should see a great HD system at work. Go to Joel Osteen's Lakewood Church in Houston. I don't think that many TV stations have a system like that. Just call them first to arrange a tour, they are super nice people, but you're talking about a 16,000 seats church.

Hi Doug,

I'm familiar with Lakewood Church, and they do have an incredible facility.

Next week at NAB, we will find out more about some new products that are on the horizon.

Regards,

That's great I guess I'll see you there.

As much as that makes sense to you and I, trying to convince the people in charge of the money who don't know a thing about video is another thing entirely.

"I want some money to upgrade our production facilities"
"Why? Is your equipment breaking down? I thought it was brand new, we only just got it."
"No, I just want the ability to do more with our video."
"But it looks fine the way it is."
"Yes, but I want to make it better."
"Well, the congregation is used to it this way and I don't think they will respond well to changes..."

Maybe it's better at other churches, who knows, but whenever I try to improve anything I'm told to maintain the status-quo. If I hadn't built it the right way in the first place (well, mostly the right way, there's some technological duct tape here and there), I'd be screwed.

It's also my experience that any technical system that starts small and slowly gains little additions here and there tends to turn into a horrible Frankenstein creature over time. You get inconsistencies and poor documentation of your signal flow and nasty workarounds caused by bad design decisions that didn't affect anything at the time they were implemented but are now causing headaches. You really should redo from scratch every time you upgrade your facilities, which can get tiring, or design them in the first place with a rock solid plan for exactly how you're going to upgrade. Otherwise you get stuff like "Why are cameras 1-4 on the left side of the switcher, but camera 5's here in the middle?" "Because input 5 is our graphics machine and swapping the inputs would mean rebuilding all of our switcher presets."

Hmm, would it be possible to run regular CCZ cable most of the way and just build a custom fantail to attach at the camera end of the run? Having to fabricate an entire custom cable is... Unappealing to say the least. Custom cables don't tend to wrap very well, which is very important for a handheld camera cable. CCZ is hard enough to wrap.

Only if you've got a decent steadicam operator who's willing to volunteer their time. This is a church, remember. =D

Anyway, best tool for the situation really... Both handheld and steadicam get shots that the other can't. Steadicam sucks at sports, for example (yes, I know MNF uses one, but it's honestly not that great of a look compared to everything else they have). Given a choice between them I'd take handheld for most of the stuff I do, though if I could have the option of both that would be the best.

Wow, great stuff. As far as going multicore vs. handheld CCU's, it seems my instinct on that has been confirmed. Additionally, without actually using one, I wonder if there is any value (whether physically or psychologically) for the camera operator to use the multicore adapter on the GYHD250: i.e. closer weight and balance to that of a traditional studio camera?

As for going HD in House of Worship, I understand the initial aversion to it; it is "God's Money" after all. Initially, the plan was to have an SD, 16:9 workflow that could then be upgraded to HD in the future. As we began doing more research though, it became clear that the HD financial and technical obstacles have quickly dissipated in the last 12 months alone; not to mention many anticipate NAB this weekend to shed even more.

There are actually quite a few options for affordable switching from Panasonic, Edirol/Roland, FOR-A even Grass Valley. There is still the catch of recording/archiving in HD -- but I think this is a problem that will fix itself in time. How many people do you know with HD playback available to them at home? (SIDENOTE: It's funny how CES now seems to be driving NAB rather than the other way around.)

As people begin to make the switch to Digital in the next couple of years, which in the U.S. will be [nearly] synonymous to a switch to HD (or at least 480p+), there will be a growing expectation of that everywhere they go: malls, restaurants, theaters, bars and even at church.

You'd need to add a LOT of weight to get anywhere near the weight of a traditional studio camera. A standard studio lens alone weighs about 50 pounds. It's probably the highest cost-per-pound of video gear that I've ever personally held over a hundred foot drop. =D

I'm practical about the need to spend money to further the ministry, but at the same time money is tight and I'd rather get the most capable setup I can for the money they're giving me. Even a lot of broadcast TV is still SD nowadays, so I see no reason to rush with the HD transition as long as I have something that will at least upconvert well. (i.e. 16x9 capable)

I've personally used the Grass Valley Kayak, their current budget offering, though my opinion of it was colored by the fact that I was using it in a professional truck where it was missing many key features for that environment. It would probably be fine in a church, though the pricing would prolly be a little over the top. I remember installing a 1 M/E SD Kayak in a cable access truck and that ran $30k, and it would probably be significantly more for a 2 M/E HD version.

We need 2 M/Es because we cut separate feeds for our imag projection and for the in-house TVs and internet. We do it so we can show the people watching cable TV and the internet the musical performances instead of having them stare at worship lyrics the whole time. If all we did was imag we'd only actually need one camera, maybe two.

I take one look at Edirol gear and laugh. The panel configuration is just awful. I couldn't imagine using that every week and trying to put out a serious show. Maybe it works for VJs who are used to turntable gear, but for a guy used to broadcast production switchers... Lawl, just lawl.

I've used Panasonic's old MX-50 in various high school and government access control rooms here and there. It's alright, but I hope they've added proper flip-flop mixing because having to keep looking down to figure out whether the A or B bus is live is REALLY ANNOYING.

The FOR-A stuff actually looks nice, their 2-M/E switcher looks like it far exceeds the capabilities of our current 2 M/E Echolab Nova. I wonder how the price compares though, I'm going to guess it's somewhere in the realm of what Ross is charging for their stuff.

Is Camplex An Option?
 

Carl,

Thank you for contributing to this topic. I kind of found it accidentally through a search on the RM-LP55U remote. I, too, am looking at upgrading my church's video equipment in the next year or two. We're currently using a VT[4] with two Sony cameras/CCUs and a Canon XL2 as a stage camera. It's working OK and our volunteers are learning the process so it's allright for now, but I long to do something so much better.

I'm curious if the CP-301C/HD from Camplex would be an option for using an HD250 as a handheld camera with a CCU. I've seen the HD250 up close with the sled on the back and I liked that it could be done, but I've thought that it wouldn't be possible to use it handheld. It seemed to me, though, that the sled took the CCU cable and split it out into component, power and genlock cables instead of plugging directly into the back of the camera. Am I correct in this? Would it be possible to buy/have built a breakout cable from the Camplex's CCU cable output to the separate cables the HD250 needs? Obviously it would add more expense, but it seems like it would be a nice option for someone using HD250s on tripods with the CCU sled to be able to have the same camera handheld.

Thanks.

How's VT working out for you? We've got one ourselves but there's no way you will ever convince me to actually run a show off it. We use it for video playback and graphics and feed it into our production switcher, but even then I would have rather spent the money on a hardware DDR and a GenCG (it's cheaper than Chyron for a VERY good reason).

Stephan,

VT is working out OK for us. It's not without its problems, but it is nice to have all the tools it provides all in one package. I've been using Video Toaster systems since probably about '92 or '93 when they were on the Amiga platform so I'm very accustomed to Newtek.

We've gone through several different setup configurations since we purchased our first VT system at this current church (I used the Amiga one and an earlier version of the Windows VT at another church in Alaska before I moved down here). We've gone from using it as our primary switcher, replacing a Panasonic MX50/Videonics MX-1 combination to using it only to key graphics and play videos through a Grass Valley 100 switcher, to using it as our primary switcher again with a Grass Valley 200 as an additional switcher (because there was some sort of problem with the 100 according to our former video director). Now I'm in charge of sound, lights and video again and I'm trying to get us to be able to use the GVG 200 as our primary switcher with the VT only being used for graphics overlays and video playback/recording again.

I've been thinking about how cool it would be to have the new SDI switcher for the VT and use some of the JVC or Canon cameras that are more affordable but have SDI and built-in genlock. Right now we don't have enough TBC/Frame Syncs to sync all our external sources which is why I'm so dependent on the VT right now.

Speaking of genlocking, can anyone give me any tips or point me to a place online that would show me how to genlock sources to the GVG 200 switcher? Each of the program-preview-M/E busses has to be timed separately and I don't know enough about it. The switcher has never been timed properly and now that I'm in charge again I need to make things work right.

I agree about having separate hardware devices. When everything is dependent on one computer it's pretty scary. I've been looking at the Broadcast Pix systems lately. In fact I tried to stretch our budget far enough to get one when we purchased the VT system about 3 years ago, but it was going to be about twice what the VT system cost and they just wouldn't go for it. It's growing up quite a bit now. There's a lot of redundancy built in plus it's a true hardware switcher unlike the VT where all the switching is done in software which induces a good amount of latency. That's my other big problem with the VT. Unless you can get the timing just right (and some have been able to, but not us for some reason) you have very perceptible latency - something like 6 frames if you're projecting IMAG (because of the projector's inherent latency, too). Not fun.

My fingers hurt from typing now. I'm going to finish my breakfast and start my work day.

Broadcast Pix looks like a good system, I'd much rather use it over VT, they actually paid attention to things like operator workflow and failsafes for software crashes. It's designed as a live production environment, unlike the VT which seems to be designed as a post production environment with some live production features kind of added after the fact.

Newtek's coming out with an SDI BOB for the VT that will let you hook up more digital sources.

One way you can make a couple TBCs work for more sources is to make the inputs routable. Yeah, makes it a LOT harder to TD your show. Oh well. What you do is put all your untimed sources into a pushbutton switcher, with the output of that going into your TBC. If you've got more than one TBC, get a small routing switcher, or several pushbutton switchers where you loop the inputs through from one to the next.

Since you're back in the analog age, you should know that even being genlocked isn't always enough. For your sources that are genlocked you really need to get yourself a waveform monitor and vectorscope and tweak the technical adjustments to get them into exact sync. After you do that they should stay where they are.

A rep at NAB last week said that JVC is in fact releasing a HD CCU this Fall. Instead of using the HDSDI signal from the camera, it essentially allows the component output of the CCU to carry an HD signal.

Stephan,

I agree that the Broadcast Pix system really is designed for fail-safe use. I'm beginning to uderstand the importance of that more and more. The VT system actually was designed as a live and post sytem. The original Amiga based Video Toaster was a 4 input switcher with built-in framestore and CG. As computers got faster they added the ability to play back video clips (early version of a DDR) as well as adding non-linear editing (Flyer).

I will admit that version 1 Video Toaster on the PC (yes they were still calling it Video Toaster then) was only able to edit (with Speed Razor). Version 2 brought all the switching, keying, CD, DDR, etc., to the system, so in a sense it wasn't originally designed for switching, but I believe the intent was there all along. In fact a lot of people on the various VT discussion forums complain that Newtek spends too much time/resources making VT a live switching system and not enough time focusing on the post production capabilities. I am looking forward to working with Speed Edit as the new editor when VT[5] comes out because I like some of the capabilities in the current VT Edit and Speed Razor seems to add a lot more (plus it can be run on a separate machine, too), but it won't take me away from my favorite - Vegas!

Thanks for the hint on using a switcher in-line before the TBC. I've done things like that before and it sure is a pain. My problem is right now that I have a lot of volunteers who don't eat/drink/sleep/daydream about video production like I do so i have to make everything as easy as possible for them. I'll be doing some things pretty soon that should get me a little more money for my department and a few more TBCs are definitely on my list.

I know about making the adjustments with a waveform monitor & vectorscope. I don't have as much practical experience doing it myself since the times I've worked in a place where it was a necessity someone else has been doing the engineering, but I know enough about it to get me where I'm going. VT does have a waveform monitors & vectorscop built-in. I know they're not Tektronix but it should suffice.