Film-Tech Forum ARCHIVE: Camcorders

This is topic Camcorders in forum The Afterlife at Film-Tech Forum ARCHIVE.

To visit this topic, use this URL:
https://ft-forum.com/ft/cgi-bin/ubb/ultimatebb.cgi?ubb=get_topic;f=12;t=000031

Posted by Steve Kraus (Member # 476) on 01-09-2003, 02:50 PM:

I'm looking for a new one, probably mini-DV although that's not etched in stone. Which do you like or dislike and why?

Posted by Paul Linfesty (Member # 214) on 01-09-2003, 02:59 PM:

I'm curently shooting with the JVC GY-DV500. we were able to aquire it for not much more than a Canon XL-1, and with good filters added to the (interchangable) lens, the harshness of the image is softened to where the image can look as good as a much more expensive one. I prefer camcorders with manual settings and XLR inputs, which this unit has. The menu settings can be difficult, though, as you have to keep going through a number of sub-sets to get what you want. I also like the fact the zebra stripes can be changed to different ranges, depending on what I'm shooting.

Posted by Lionel Fouillen (Member # 1475) on 01-09-2003, 03:48 PM:

I bought the Canon MV500i this summer. My budget was low and I'm very satisfied with this model. So far I've used it with TDK tapes. Although there is only 1 CCD, the picture quality is very good. Sound is excellent but some people may find the motor noisy (personally I don't notice it when I use an external microphone).

The stabilizer is very efficient. Focus and shutter speed can be either automatically or manually adjusted. Both viewfinder and LCD screens are in color. Black/white and 16/9 photography are available. Digital zoom is '360' but I never use it and even turned it off, relying on the optical zoom: only '18' but this is already a big zoom. There is also a picture correction for filming surfaces with high reflected light, like snow or sand: I tested it and it works great.

You can also take still pictures which will be recorded during 5 seconds on the tape. For a few more bucks, model 530 (I think) allows taking stills on an included memory stick which makes them easier to import into a PC.

The only thing I don't like is the lens. It is not interchangeable and only allows the use of dedicated Canon filters and Tele/Wide add-ons. Now, as the saying goes, 'You get what you pay for' so if you want professional quality and flexibility, you may want to choose a more expensive and sophisticated model. But the Canon MV500i really offers a lot for what it costs...

When I was younger I had a Super-8mm Canon camera. Now I have a Canon camcorder and a Canon scanner connected to my PC. I realize I've always been extremely satisfied with Canon products.

Posted by Paul Mayer (Member # 355) on 01-09-2003, 05:24 PM:

This Paul will second the other Paul's comments about the JVC GY-DV500. I rented one about two years ago to record a friend's concert in Hollywood. Excellent pictures with the supplied (and interchangeable) Fujinon ENG-grade 18:1 zoom--much better pictures than the Canon XL-1. SMPTE time code on the tape (unfortunately not jamable, but it has BNC TC outputs), and continuously variable shutter speed (easy to visually sync up to video and computer displays). It's configured and balanced like an ENG camera so it does handheld work really well. But it's almost as big and heavy as an ENG camera--you will not be stealthy while carrying one, but you will get great pictures. Excellent price-to-performance ratio at the +/- $4000 (US) level.

Posted by Brad Miller (Member # 2) on 01-09-2003, 07:36 PM:

You need to buy Panasonic's AG-DVX100. It will run you about $3500ish. I am so positive that this is the camcorder that you will end up choosing after checking out everyone else's recommendations that I'll tell you right now that you don't even have to bother checking out the other options. [Wink]

It is a MiniDV, 3 CCD and shoots at 24P with a built in 3:2 for 60i NTSC output. Any camcorder that doesn't shoot at 24P will have that "video" look to it, hence my reasoning why I like this one and dislike the others.

Posted by Mark Gulbrandsen (Member # 72) on 01-10-2003, 12:01 AM:

I think a very highly tweeked RCA TK-45 color camera and Ampex Quad machine(in half size semi rig) will definately outperform any of those handycorders you guys are looking at......
I bought a Canon something or other DV camcorder and its been in the shop more times than there have been tape cassettes through it! I finally gave up on it........The display is nice though!
Mark

Posted by Steve Kraus (Member # 476) on 01-10-2003, 10:32 AM:

I haven't decided whether to take the plunge into "pro-sumer" land or just get something more basic in the $1-1.5K area. The logical question is what do I want to do with it and the answer is that I have no specific plans. My last video camera was a two piece portable Beta. Max not Cam!

Posted by Greg Mueller (Member # 17) on 01-10-2003, 01:26 PM:

I have a Sony VX1000. I works pretty well. It has three chips and firewire in/out. There are several 3 chip cameras on the market now and in choosing between them you might want to consider things like the cost of the batteries and chargers etc. I don't know about the other brands but Sony gets some pretty good dough for their stuff. DV tapes have come way down in the last couple of years. I get TDKs at Costco for pretty cheap now. They used to be about $25 each. I'd advise a rewinder gizmo too, so you don't put a lot of wear on the transport part of the camera

Posted by Bobby Henderson (Member # 840) on 01-10-2003, 05:37 PM:

I'm still sitting on the fence in terms of which camera setup to buy. The problem is not so much the cameras as it is other areas. The format war with many various recordable DVD types is a big obstacle. I want to be able to shoot, edit and burn to DVD --and have the DVDs work reliably in any standard DVD Video player. The current drives on the market don't produce a reliable enough DVD disc.

Panasonic's 24p camera would be at the top of my list on models to buy. But I do wish it could shoot in native 16:9 format. I'm wondering when such 3CCD video cameras will arrive.

Posted by Scott Norwood (Member # 30) on 01-10-2003, 06:09 PM:

The Sony HDCAM unit is pretty nice. It can shoot 24p or 60i and there is a modified version which can accept Panavision lenses. All versions accept matte boxes, follow-focus units, and other standard accessories. Native AR is 16x9. The whole thing is very lightweight, too; it weighs less than most standard Betacam units. The only little problem with it is the price, though. Well, that, and the fact that HDCAM will probably be obsolete in a couple of years. Otherwise, I can highly recommend it for home use (but not for feature film production). [Smile]

Posted by Daryl C. W. O'Shea (Member # 1303) on 01-10-2003, 06:12 PM:

Scott, what about feature video productions?

Posted by Greg Mueller (Member # 17) on 01-10-2003, 06:45 PM:

Bobby
I just started messin with non-lnear editing on the computer. I got an IEEE 1394 (firewire)Adaptec card and some real simple editing software for $45 !!! Course I had to buy a large hard drive as it takes about a gig of hard drive for 5 minutes of video. But it works! I can download DV in real time, edit it and dump it back to the camera. When this stuff first came out at the consumer level it cost a bundle. Now it's cheap! I'm going to install Adobe Premeire this weekend and start the learning curve.
The future is here! Whoopee!

[ 01-10-2003, 10:31 PM: Message edited by: Greg Mueller ]
[ 01-10-2003, 10:31 PM: Message edited by: Greg Mueller ]

[ 01-10-2003, 10:32 PM: Message edited by: Greg Mueller ]

Posted by Bill Carter (Member # 156) on 01-10-2003, 08:16 PM:

Hey Mark...

Have you got any good Ampex quads for sale? [Wink]

I'll pass on the TK45...
I've got Norelco PC-70's.

Posted by John Pytlak (Member # 331) on 01-10-2003, 10:08 PM:

I personally do not like the "look" of television shows shot with the Sony 900F HDCAM 24P camera. Much as they claimed to look as good as film, shows like "Max Bickford", "Titus", and "100 Centre Street" still betrayed their video origins: clipped highlights without detail, pasty fleshtones, lack of real sharpness, etc.

As far as feature films...maybe digital cameras will look better than film a long time in the future, and in a galaxy far, far away. [Roll Eyes]

I really like my Kodak DX3700 Digital Camera. It's very convenient and takes nice pictures. But for important stuff, I still shoot 35mm FILM. [Cool]

Posted by Tim Reed (Member # 137) on 01-11-2003, 12:20 AM:

quote:
But for important stuff, I still shoot 35mm FILM.

Me, too. I have a Mitchell BNCR, but it's a little tough to get those handheld shots! [Eek!]

Posted by Bobby Henderson (Member # 840) on 01-11-2003, 11:04 AM:

Greg,
I'm glad to hear you're happy with your Firewire card, camera and software. Consumer video editing is sure to be a "killer app" for driving a lot of new computer sales (that is if the boneheads at Intel and various PC companies will wake up and stop hyping the Internet instead). You'll want to get a copy of Adobe After Effects to go with your Premiere installation. After Effects is like having a very powerful animated version of Photoshop (and more).

What I'm wanting to do in video production is more on the "industrial" or semi-professional end, which the low cost MiniDV cameras and software don't quite address. If I can at least burn well-produced DVDs on my own that would help in getting the extra investment capital needed to get a full suite of equipment (at least two cameras, good sound gear, etc.).

But the DVD-R situation is really murky right now. A growing number of my graphics customers are asking about getting video work done and burned to DVD. There's a ton of potential there, especially with applications like Apple's Final Cut Pro and DVD Studio Pro. The hangup is I can't rightly charge customers the money I want if the DVDs themselves are going to have glitches. And if I want to get a sizeable bank loan for buying real professional level video gear and more powerful RAID-equipped workstations, they're going to want to see some good results up front.

Posted by Paul Linfesty (Member # 214) on 01-11-2003, 12:48 PM:

Can Premiere work well from a single hard drive based PC? My work system has seperate drives for video storage and applications, but I was interested in setting up a (less costly, i.e. cheap) system on my home computer.

Posted by Greg Mueller (Member # 17) on 01-11-2003, 01:01 PM:

My friend is bringing over a DVD he burned himself on his new HP DVD (USB) burner. We'll try his dvd out tonight on my Q50 player and see if it plays at my house.
I have a WD 120 gig HD that I'm using to store DV files on, it's the second drive on the system. So far so good. It will be real interesting to see how all this equipment and software does or doesn't work together, in the next week or so. My friend is going to let me borrow his DVD burner after I do the editing and we'll see how it all goes.
All this for tapes of the vacation...

Posted by Bobby Henderson (Member # 840) on 01-11-2003, 09:25 PM:

I think the problem with single, large IDE drives is an issue of wear and tear. At least that is my opinion. I've killed a few IDE drives as a result of editing giant-sized Photoshop layouts. Video streams of any significant length would pretty much make the same performance demands. Ordinary IDE drives are only made for casual computing.

I suppose one would be okay doing video edit/renderings in Premiere and After Effects to a single drive if that is all they are doing. It would be asking a bit much to have other junk happening in the background. RAID is much more reliable. You have greater data throughput, redundancy and the separate-but-linked hard discs are treated a bit more kindly. Most production houses equip their posting suites with RAID mainly from a time/dollars standpoint. You will get many more edits and renderings made to a RAID system in the same amount of time as a single IDE or single SCSI drive.

In time, either the computing industry will make RAID a standard item in new computers or improve the designs of single hard disc drives to withstand more brutal performance demands. NLE video is on the way, as is other things like much more demanding 3D gaming, video/audio playback and other sensory overload stuff. Hard discs are still in the dark ages in terms of design and need some drastic improvement to keep pace with changes happening in all other levels of hardware.

Posted by Paul Linfesty (Member # 214) on 01-11-2003, 10:06 PM:

Thanks, Bobby.

That was one of the things that bothered me with IT people at work claiming I didnt need all my hard drives at work because they knew people with editing systems on their home computers. WHat I REALLY want is a G-4 with Final Cut Pro. My new boss has asked why we don't have one! [Smile]

Posted by Greg Mueller (Member # 17) on 01-12-2003, 12:07 PM:

My friend came over with his home made DVD last night and we played it on my system. It worked flawlessly. It was like watching first generation mini-DV tape. I was mistaken when I said the HP DVD burner is an USB unit it's really a Firewire unit. We both feel it would be better to have an internal unit, for file transfer speed if nothing else. We're also confused about how they get two hours worth of movie on a single disk, as the best we can figure on is one hour.
We're both pretty happy with the prospects of this equipment.
Processor speed, large amounts of ram, a large HD and a fast display card will make the system...we think.
Probably a Motorola based system would be better than an Intel based system, but for the home, we're pretty impressed

Posted by David Stambaugh (Member # 1102) on 01-12-2003, 12:41 PM:

Most recent DVD releases seem to be dual-layer, which doubles their data capacity (and thus reduces the need for really severe MPEG compression). Current-generation writeable DVD media is single-layer only, so less capacity.

Posted by Greg Mueller (Member # 17) on 01-12-2003, 02:28 PM:

Thanks David. We were wondering if it were a hardware issue or a software one. I guess the future may not quite be here, but close

Posted by Bobby Henderson (Member # 840) on 01-12-2003, 03:57 PM:

Professional level DVD authoring software is going to provide more options to the person doing the encoding work. But even still, I cannot help but wonder if companies like Sony are not writing their own proprietary encoding programs and doing other software tweaks in getting the best balance of compression/image quality. Regular DVD authoring apps tend to give you a flat setting for a lot of what you're trying to encode. Well, that's my theory on why movies on DVD seem to fit a lot more data into the same space.

Posted by Steve Kraus (Member # 476) on 01-13-2003, 12:04 AM:

They're using variable bit rate encoding which is achieved with two or three passes over the material and perhap a bit of human input as well to create a bit stream that varies dynamically over the run of the program. Unless you can do that you won't be able to be as efficent.

I have a booklet on DVD mastering that a post house put out and that's how they describe the process.

Posted by Paul Linfesty (Member # 214) on 01-21-2003, 05:00 PM:

And coming soon to a consumer retailer near you:

Top Story
JVC Offers Consumer HDTV Camcorder
Sometime soon, at a camera store near you...consumer HD camcorders from JVC? That's right. A January 15th release from JVC Company of America (that's the consumer, not pro side of the company) spots the highly-capable camcorder as ideal for that everyday user -- or at least those that can afford those fancy home HD theater systems.

"Now the consumers that have invested in HD display devices can create their own HD content, worthy of the display it is being shown on," says Jerry Barbera, vice president, consumer video at JVC.

The camcorder was initially announced last August at CEATEC Japan, a consumer show. Expected to price under $3,000, the camcorder records both 720p and 480p in a native 16:9 format. The cassette holds specially formulated but otherwise standard miniDV tape. The 480i recording employs standard DV compression.

Playback at 480i integrates with 4:3 NTSC displays, but the camcorder also turns out 480p, 720p, and 1080i. JVC will offer Firewire and component video out for monitor hookup.

Nothing more specific was available at press time, but a JVC spokesman said a more detailed announcement is coming January 22nd, the day after this newsletter hits the wires. The camera, which comes out later this year, would be a boon to everyone who's bumped up against the limits of the 480 interlaced image.

This announcement is another example that JVC doesn't plan to take a back seat in the HD world to come. Last April, Cortland, New York-based Photon Vision Systems announced that JVC would integrate Photon's unique 8.3 million pixel CMOS QuadHDTV sensors into a hi res camera under development. The JVC Ultra High Definition TV camera, said Photon, would include three of the CMOS chips to deliver a resolution of 3840 x 2160 pixels.

Expect an interesting NAB 2003.