$18,000 4k camera from JVC??

[Marc Wielage]

Sounds like a media managing nightmare. 4 cards per 1 frame. No thank you!

First thing I said. Totally gonzo. JVC has made some weird, weird products in the past, and I think this is another one of them. I could almost see a Codex Digital box as a recorder, but who knows how the standard is set up and what it uses for RAW...

 

[Peter Majtan]

Stop comparing it to RED. This is not a 4K Digital Cinema camera, this is UHD Video Camera. Two different market segments. For folks used to work with standard HD Video Cameras this actually might look lot more familiar then the RED architecture / design. I agree that the 4-card recording system is not the best idea (to be polite), but the form factor is great for those upgrading from their EX1's...

Just as RED never was and never will be a video camera - this is not meant to be digital cinema camera. The fixed lens version makes this point rather clear...

:sifone: Peter

 

[Ivan Kovax]

Stop comparing it to RED. This is not a 4K Digital Cinema camera, this is UHD Video Camera. Two different market segments. For folks used to work with standard HD Video Cameras this actually might look lot more familiar then the RED architecture / design. I agree that the 4-card recording system is not the best idea (to be polite), but the form factor is great for those upgrading from their EX1's...

Just as RED never was and never will be a video camera - this is not meant to be digital cinema camera. The fixed lens version makes this point rather clear...

:sifone: Peter

It is not about comparing it to Red, just the fact that this is camera is ergonomically a nightmare. As you mentioned 4x SD cards (???). Nikon-only lens mount option (???). And all for the low low price of $18,000 dollars. Pretty steep for an EX1 upgrade...

 

[Marc Wielage]

Stop comparing it to RED. This is not a 4K Digital Cinema camera, this is UHD Video Camera. Two different market segments. For folks used to work with standard HD Video Cameras this actually might look lot more familiar then the RED architecture / design. I agree that the 4-card recording system is not the best idea (to be polite), but the form factor is great for those upgrading from their EX1's...

Last time I checked, an EX-1 only cost about $4000. Big difference. For $18K, I expect a lot more than this. I don't think JVC can be serious about wanting to sell these to a real-world market.

 

[Adam Johnson]

This thing is an absolute joke. And goes to show the absolute incompetence within JVC. Honestly these guys are clueless. My buddy was in a meeting with them at NAB and he is late twenties like myself. They asked him, why don't you younger guys buy our stuff anymore? What can we do different? He simply said stop making the same obsolete technology. Look what Blackmagic, RED, Sony, and Canon are doing with big sensors. That's the name of the game nowadays. Small chips have their place, but big sensors, good 4k (not crappy h.264 or other half ass codecs) and RAW is where it's at. It's so easy to see this from the sidelines too!

 

[Peter Majtan]

Last time I checked, an EX-1 only cost about $4000. Big difference. For $18K, I expect a lot more than this. I don't think JVC can be serious about wanting to sell these to a real-world market.

The fixed-lens version of this (which is the one I refer to as upgrade from EX1 Ivan �&#56841 actually costs less then the EX1, FYI. The only downside is the 4-card setup.

But regardless, what I was trying to point out was the form-factor. Weird (or as some have pointed out - ugly) to us, but perfectly at home for the shoot-out-of-the-bag average video guy - which is IMHO the target crowd for JVC. For the 18K you get large(r) sensor and Nikon mount - but I agree, little too much for little too little... :reddevil:

:sifone: Peter

 

[Elvis B.M.]

Crazy JVC... At least you tried... :willy_nilly:

 

[Robert Ruffo New]

"the interchangeable model will record AVC/H.264 4K video at up to 60 fps onto four separate SDHC cards, each capturing an HD-sized quadrant ..."

LOL.

Exactly. And if one fails, you're screwed on all 4 - so 4X the failure rate on an already unreliable medium. JVC is so 10 years ago.

 

[Samir Patel]

"the interchangeable model will record AVC/H.264 4K video at up to 60 fps onto four separate SDHC cards, each capturing an HD-sized quadrant ..."

LOL.

This sounds like a disaster. How will the camera make sure to keep the encoding even across all the quadrants. What if the top right corner of the full 4k frame has widely different shading/color than the other quadrants? I would expect the H.264 would be differently aggressive in the encode.

 

[L. Langer]

JVC is also shipping 4K displays to go with these new 4K cameras. 4K @ 84-inches with 10-bit color at around $14K.

 

[Peter Majtan]

JVC is also shipping 4K displays to go with these new 4K cameras. 4K @ 84-inches with 10-bit color at around $14K.

Is that a 4x 42"-ers gaffer-taped together at $3.5K each?
(sorry, could not resist)

:sifone: Peter

 

[Jürgen Klenk]

You miss a point:

These four SD cards take HOURS of footage. You pop them in once and never touch them again. No DIT needed, no quadrant shuffling errors possible. Read out is from the cam via USB to ProRes 4K, perfectly stitched together automatically (Mac import software provided for free). They already did prove the concept with the 5 grand consumer version which is available for a while. To all of my knowledge, there was never footage popping up showing stitching problems. They seem to have cracked that one.

So - Nikon mount, weird sensor size and strange pricing are things to make fun of - but with the recording scheme you can shoot el cheapo Quad HD on next to free media for up to hours and hours without ever downloading! The footage even from the soccer mum version does not look bad at all. It's a niche cam, but inside that niche people may very well get extremely happy with this cam.

Quad HD H.264 long GoP will also arrive soon under the Sony XAVC family umbrella. This is on their road map. There is a market not only for huge raw files but also for the easy to handle opposite.

 

[Thor Melsted]

You miss a point:

These four SD cards take HOURS of footage.

Not quite. A 32GB card will take approximately 30 minutes at 144mbps. Even if that bandwidth is split across 4 cards, you're still only looking at 2 hours. Also, that USB download procedure... it sounds like you're talking about having to stop shooting when the cards fill up, hooking your $18,000 acquisition tool up to a computer via USB cable, and then waiting for 2 hours while 120 GB of data is transferred, transcoded and stitched??? What kind of bone-headed workflow is that? Or do they provide a 4 port SD card reader? And then you need to do your backups too.

This camera makes no sense to me. At all.

 

[Jürgen Klenk]

Not quite. A 32GB card will take approximately 30 minutes at 144mbps.

The 144 mbps data stream is splitted to four cards, reducing their performance needs by factor 4, each recording just 36 MBit/s H.264. So you get 2 hours on 32 GB cards and 4 hours total 4K recording time on still cheap 64 GB cards. That's something. Oh, it also takes the SDXC type - pop in 4x128 GB, that's 8 hours 4K shooting - continuous if you want - for whatever this may make sense. A week long 4K shoot out in the wild without touching the media and without schlepping a laptop around? Just you, the cam, some batteries and a charger? Doable.

Downloading trouble? Let's imagine a scenario. Say, you have to cover a sports event. Not for fast turn-around TV, but maybe for a sponsor who for whatever reason wants the footage to be shot in 4K (let's not pick at the minor difference to Quad HD here). You show up and shoot, shoot, shoot ... maybe switch the battery once, but nothing else. Perfect for the one-man band, no hassle at all with external audio or other stuff hanging around, no data wrangling while shooting, nothing. You are FREE. It's just like shooting with an EX1. After the event, you are heading home or to the hotel, connect the cam to your MacBook, start downloading to ProRes 4K (I heard, not know for sure, that this happens almost in real time on a newer fast Mac) and head for dinner with friends. Have a relaxed sleep, no night shift, no sweat after work. Back up also happens on the fly via Time Machine. Next morning, you just fire up fcp x and start editing right away your 4K ProRes which really flies. And flies. And flies. Like the Blackmagic Production Cam 4K ProRes will do. Is it raw? No. Is it close to RED image quality? No. Is it good enough for everything below features and glitzy commercials? I would expect as much.

I have never owned a JVC product since a U-matic three-machine edit suite I purchased from them as a greenhorn in the mid-eighties. This stuff was so flawed it almost sent my start up belly-up. This sticks for a lifetime. Having said that - if this JVC cam would have an S35 sensor and an active Canon mount, with a sub-10K price tag, I would regardless have a closer look. For those scenarios where other 4K cams are a PITA.

Of course, the JVC will be dead in the water - unless they slash pricing - as soon as Sony comes with its own offering, a compact XAVC long GoP 4K cam for the same market, with an equally low data rate. Using a single card, of course. Maybe joined by Panasonic who have their AVC Ultra counterpart, also including low data rate long GoP stuff. But this will happen in 2014, maybe 2015. Time enough for JVC to check out where their admittedly weird cam is leading them. Remember, they pioneered HD for the masses (with an equally weird 720p HDV camcorder) two years prior to Sony and Panasonic. These two did it right then and cashed in on the idea. History may repeat itself.

 

[Thor Melsted]

connect the cam to your MacBook, start downloading

This should NEVER happen. Most shooters have better things to do with their acquisition tools than tie them up during a download session.
And what happens if your shoot runs long? You're screwed. Booking a gig should not tie up your camera for double the time. That's ridiculous.
Let's say you have four 64GB cards, which gives you 4 hours total shooting. That means for 4 hours after your shoot, your camera will be tied up to a computer downloading footage. That's asinine. What's the point of using SD cards then? Just use internal storage. Besides, you should have the option of swapping out cards and then dumping each SD card's raw content without having to worry about transcoding. I'm sure you can. Nobody would release a camera without that option today. Anything else is unthinkable. I'm also left scratching my head as to why 4 SD cards would be a better option than a single SSD. Four 64GB cards give you 4 hours while a single 500GB SSD would give you nearly 8 hours and could easily handle the 144mbps bitrate several times over - and would cost you less. A decent 500GB SSD is about $250 these days, which is about the same as you'd pay for 4 64GB SD cards.

Last week I shot an all day seminar using 4 cameras, rolling for 7 hours out of the day. That's 28 hours of footage - which means if I'd shot with this JVC, not only would I have had to swap out sixteen 64GB cards during lunch or get 128GB cards to avoid the card swap, I then would have had have had to tie up one of the cameras for 28 hours converting the files into prores unless I also had 4 macs, allowing me to "only" tie up 4 cameras for 7 hours. That's unacceptable for any supposedly professional camera today.
With an SSD slot, I could have used one 500GB SSD per camera and rolled all day then shut down, packed up and dumped the SSDs to a RAID.

On top of everything, using 4 SD cards quadruples the risk of failure for each shot.

I don't think JVC has thought this through very well.

 

[Jürgen Klenk]

Who would use the JVC for your all-day multicam scenario? No one with a brain.

An SSD would make more sense, but I feel the cam is too small to house one.
Risk of card failure quadrupled is a point, though. JVC will learn if they find buyers or not.

 

[Thor Melsted]

Who would use the JVC for your all-day multicam scenario? No one with a brain.

I know you're new here, and English probably isn't your first language, but you'd do well to avoid being snide. I went to great lengths to not be rude about what you wrote even though I felt it was mostly nonsense, but rather tried to respond with facts and figures and comparisons to real life scenarios. But clearly, that's not something you're going to bother with.

So, have a nice day.

:attention9ha:

 

[Rob Castiglione]

There actually were stitching problems in the original version of this camera - j vc 100 which manivfested itself as a split scrern effect . I know. I had one of those cameras. It was eventually resolved.

 

[Bob Gundu]

If people complain about the RED workflow, then this camera should take that prize.

 

[L. Langer]

The problem with the RED cameras is that they were ahead of their time as far as what was needed to get the job done goes. Everything had to be figured out as time went on. The problem with JVC's 4K camcorders is that they are way out in left field and up on a hill to boot, so why bother with them?