HD For Indies

Martijn has sent in another report from the floor of IBC:

Mike,


Another day of scouring.....

Panasonic
Panasonic has not decided on the final CCD chip to be used in the HVX-200. Likely they will be HSP (High Sensitivity Picture) chips of 2.2 million pixels per chip. That would mean full HD quality 1920x1080. The camera has Firewire and USB ports. FireWire allows DV,DVCPRO50 and 100 to stream natively to an NLE or another deck. The USB port can be used to transfer recorded files from the P2 cards to a computer. Then the MXF protocol is used. The Firestore FS-100 HD recorder is now officially supported by Panasonic for use with the HVX-200.

Mike's Comments: (full res HD sensor - way to go Panasonic!!! Also, clarifies the FireWire/USB setup - FireWire for decklike behavior, USB 2.0 for IT based file transfer. Interesting. -mike)

Grass Valley/Thomson
This is the former Philips camera department. They presented a system called "Infinity" that concists of a camcorder, a media recorder and removable media drives. The good thing is that it's non-proprietary all the way. No proprietary codecs or media like Sony and Panasonic have, but open codecs and off the shelf media. The camera stores DV, MPEG and JPEG 2000 10 bit 4:2:2 compressed SD and HD to removable optical disks from Iomega and standard Compact Flash cards. The Iomega REV can hold up to 35 Gb of data per disk. The read/write rate is 120 mbps so the compression needs not to be so heavy as with Sony XDCam HD, which has a read/write capability of 35 mbps. The 2/3 inch camera will sell under $20K with MPEG encoding as a $7K option. The lens will be the most expensive part of this camera. A fully capable recorderdeck/media player for the REV media will cost $10K but there will also be a $400 drive to connect to a computer and transfer the footage direct to disk. Thomson could not show a working prototype yet, so the image quality cannot be evaluated. Initially 1000x700 pixel CCD's will be used with pixelshift to get HD resolution of 1080i or 720p. The first units will ship around NAB. At that time there might also be more info which NLE's are going to support the JPEG 2000 codec, which is embraced by some Hollywood studio's for HD distribution.

Mike's Comments:(this sounds really interesting - if the disk read/write rate is up to 120 megabits/sec, then the question is how much of that is the Infinity going to use for MPEG-2 and JPEG 2000 data rates. We've seen HDV work with 25 megabit MPEG-2 and seen how that can work on current faster computers. JPEG 2000, however, is MUCH MUCH MUCH more computationally demanding. Want to know how demanding? Convert a clip to JPEG2000 at a data rate similar to some other codec you use, and try to play it back (there is a QuickTime JPEG 2000 codec already). It will play very few frames per second as the processor freaks out trying to keep up. Until/unless Apple (or other vendors) do some serious code optimization, JPEG 2000 is not likely to be supported as a native editing codec in Final Cut Pro or other editing applications. I recently did some codec work under Windows XP, and we tried JPEG 2000 and had similar results - dreadfully low frame rates, even on 640x480 clips.

Sony
Some more details of the upcoming XDCam HD have emerged. The camera will support 1080i 50 and 60, as well as 1080p 24, 25 and 30, so one camera for the whole world. The CCD's are 1/2 inch with a 1440x1080 resolution. The camera will sell for $17K. The Canon 6.7x127 lens has autofocus and will sell for $5K. This lens has a cheap silver look. I hope Canon will get rid of that in the final version. The XD recording media have "XDCam HD" stickers on them, but according to the Sony rep they are just standard XDCam disks. The camera has analog component and composite video out, as well as a FireWire port that can be used to transfer files from the disk to a NLE using the MXF protocol. The XDCam HD studio player/recorder will sell for $20K. The Long GOP MPEG recording has a bitrate of 35 mbps max, but has the same structure as HDV. It is not known which NLE's will support this standard, but I think Sony's marketing power will take care of that.

Mike's Comments: Glad to hear it is 1/2 inch CCDs at this price point (as it should be). MXF via FireWire is very cool. 35 mbit XDCAM HD is better than 25 mbit HDV, but 40 or 45 would have made me happier in terms of differentiating the product for this price. 35mbit will be a new format to be supported. Keep in mind, presently XDCAM standard def requires a $500 MXF plugin in order to pull it in as data.

JVC
Apple still has no support in FCP for the 720 24p resolution of the GY-HD100U.

Mike's Comments: Feh. Dissapointing but only mildly surprising. Look to Lumiere HD and similar products to fix this for you.

-mike