James Tocher is a digital cinematographer and owner of Digital Film Group – a Vancouver digital intermediate and film-out specialty company. DFG’s credits include The Corporation, Atanarjuat – The Fast Runner and La Peau Blanche. Tocher’s DOP credits include the digital movies Evirati, Croon and Noroc.

If there is one camera launching at NAB2005 that I am most excited to see, it’s the JVC GY-HD100U. I can proudly say that I personally had a hand in its design, as did quite a few other DOPs queried by JVC engineers and marketing experts during its conception.

A few years ago, the day when we could hold a 24-frames-per-second HD camera in the palm of our hands was just a dream. But hallelujah, it looks like that day has arrived! Show me a small HD camera with 24p capability for under $10,000, and you’ve got my attention. And while you’re at it, can you give us a lens that we can keep in focus? How about a manual lens with actual distance markings on it, like the kind we have used in the real world of moviemaking for, oh, 100 years?

The problem with a lot of these little ‘pro-sumer’ (I never liked that term) cameras is that you can put all the professional signal processing you want inside a camera, but that doesn’t mean it is ‘designed for professionals.’ From an ergonomic and practical point of view, most pro-sumer cameras are ultimately designed so that a child picking them up can switch them to ‘automatic’ and get an image onto tape.

Some camera-makers, such as JVC and Panasonic, are catering to a narrower market of more sophisticated semi-professional users in the ‘under $10,000’ range. It’s a price point that will ostracize the highest-end consumer, but the question remains as to whether it will allow manufacturers to put more effort into the practical design for the professional user. It looks like we’re about to find out.

Although JVC was the first to deliver a palm-sized HD camcorder with the JY-HD10U, it’s admittedly no more than a consumer camera – great for baby videos on your home plasma screen, but really not suitable for production, bereft as it is of any 24p capability.

Other drawbacks are its ‘fully automatic’ features, such as auto-focus (which drifts as you pan the camera) and image stabilizer (which softens the picture). These are especially detrimental if you are protecting for the possibility of an eventual blowup to film.

But the format of tape JVC came up with – HD on miniDV tape, or ‘HDV’ – turned out to be revolutionary, and practically all the camera makers have since jumped on board with this new low-cost HD tape format.

What makes HDV so incredible is the quality relative to the size of the data. The efficient MPEG-2 recording stream, although much more compressed than regular DV, can still be edited much like DV. The stream comes in via FireWire at around 25Mb/sec – just like DV – and yet the HD images can be played back in realtime on a PC.

For my tests, I used the latest version of Adobe Premiere Pro (v.1.5.1), incorporating the latest HDV upgrade, and flawlessly captured footage using my Compaq Centrino laptop. That was fun…

The GY-HD100U, meanwhile, not only offers HD and true 24p capture – it’s funky. It’s shoulder-mountable, yet palm-sized – kind of like a lot of lens with a little bit of camera hanging off the back. The lens is a real professional Fujinon manual lens, and the full-sized eyepiece is on the side of the camera – not at the back, thank you – to facilitate proper shoulder-mounted handheld. It also has a great flip-out LCD on the side for your cradle-hold shots.

The recording is done to a type of HDV tape format JVC is dubbing ‘ProHD.’ The camera also has three CCDs (1/3′ size) and a ‘native 16:9’ HD imager using the 720p pixel count of 1,280 x 720. It records at frame rates of 30p, 60i and of course, 24p.

When you look at the camera, you will feel it has a design aimed at making movies and dramatic productions – and when you realize the image resolution you are getting from its tiny package, you will go ‘Yeah…’

So, great! What’s the price point? JVC says under $10,000. Yeah, again.

Unfortunately, I couldn’t get my hands on it before NAB2005, but stay tuned, because I can’t wait to get something from this camera on film as soon as humanly possible!

-www.digitalfilmgroup.com

-www.jvc.ca