Brian's Brain

This month's issue of Wired Magazine contains a great article on how Robert Rodriguez made Sin City, in his home-based studio in the outskirts of Austin, Texas (take that, Hollywood!), thanks in no small part to the cost-effective horsepower of Linux- and AMD dual-Opteron-powered workstations and servers. The movie's subject matter is admittedly disturbing, but the 'film' (I use the term loosely, because it was an all-digital creation) is visually and otherwise stunning. If you're not too squeamish, I highly recommend a viewing; Wired's review is here.

I'm no Robert Rodriguez, and I'm highly confident I'll never be. But at the beginning of this year I decided to take the plunge into high definition video, once again playing my but-honey-I-need-it-for-work card. I acquired a barely- and gently-used JVC GR-HD1 HDV camcorder for the mind-boggling price of just slightly over $1,300. That's far less than a high-end standard-definition DV camcorder goes for! I confess I haven't used it much to date, primarily because I've been so busy with work travel and other distractions, but I've got a 9-day vacation to Maui planned beginning in a week and, if I can get my hands on a waterproof housing for it, I hope to take it snorkeling. Until I have hands-on observations to share, I recommend a read-through of Adam Wilt's excellent writeup, "HDV: A Hands-On Test Drive", from the May issue of DV Magazine.

When I bought the GR-HD1, Sony's HDR-FX1 was also shipping. Sony's HDV camcorders have been more enthusiastically received than their year-plus-older JVC predecessors, in part because the HDV infrastructure is more evolved now and in part because the Sony units look stronger, at least on paper. So why'd I go with the GR-HD1? Price, for one thing; the but-honey-I-need-it-for-work card doesn't have an infinite balance, after all, and I got the GR-HD1 for nearly one-third the price of its entry-level Sony equivalent.

The first-generation JVC cameras caught some flack for their use of a single image sensor (I wrote about it in a recent cover story and video guru Steve Mullen covered it in even more depth in his May, 2003 article for VideoSystems magazine, "CCD Counting, Still Needed?"), and for only supporting the 720-line high definition mode, not 1080i. In my situation, though, I see both of those qualities as advantages, not shortcomings. I don't envision doing much low-light work, And because JVC's GR-HD1 dispenses with the Sony HDR-FX1's three sensors, light-splitting prism and other electrical, mechanical and optical extras, it is much more compact in size and lighter in weight.

The progressive-scan images captured by the GR-HD1 also don't suffer from the temporal 'tearing' artifacts found with interlaced capture of fast-motion scenes. HDNet's Mark Cuban may think that "motion artifact are a non-issue", as he tried to convince the crowd at NAB earlier this week, but ABC and Fox disagree; both broadcasters have selected 720p as their HDTV format (CBS and NBC, conversely, are employing 1080i, thereby proving once again that there never is no one right answer that covers all possible situations). And whereas the Sony HDV cameras don't capture full 1920x1080 images (their horizontal resolution is only 1440 lines), the GR-HD1 supports the full 1280x720 resolution of HDTV's 720p mode.

See "Rodriguez Redux" for the rest of the story....