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A Star Turn
Anyone who read my review of the JVC GY-DV5000 in January 2003 will know that I was well impressed with this full size DV addition to the JVC range and will probably wonder what on earth JVC could do to make me love it more. So did I.
I was not expecting to be overwhelmed either by a massive leap in picture quality or by the addition of new features since, as I said in a later review of the DV500 hard disc recorder, tape based systems were a thing of the past, and the GY-DV5000 was near perfect anyway.
So why have JVC produced an up-rated and updated version of what they claim was one of their best selling lines? Isn’t tape dead or at least dying?
Well obviously JVC think there is plenty of life left in DV tape-based cameras yet. And having used the DV5100 for over a fortnight I really must agree. So how does the DV5100 compare with the DV5000 it replaces? What’s new? Well quite a few minor but welcome improvements. And one that will blow you away! First, the latter.
To find out more about the minor changes you really have to read the spec. Yes there are some welcome changes to the basic camera like the re-establishment of the two rear XLR audio sockets, and, yes, the overall design and colour scheme has improved. But an awful lot has gone on behind the scenes and to really see what you are getting for your money you have to look beneath the skin.
You will only know that the tape mechanism is a newly developed unit when you realise you aren’t getting head clog warnings in the viewfinder. Though no one was prepared to admit it, MiniDV suffered from head clogging problems that threatened to kill it off before it was established. JVC’s solution is to build in new active/mechanical head cleaners called sweeper heads that work automatically each time a tape is loaded.
In the time I had the camera with me and had run many, many tapes both full size and mini, I never once got a head clog message. And that’s the way it should be of course. Most of us using MiniDV will fondly remember the S-VHS days, when no-one had even heard of head cleaner tape. Head clog problems were that rare. It would be nice to think that JVC have been user-led to make this improvement, but whatever the reason it’s a great confidence booster knowing that you are unlikely to need a head cleaner, especially when you know it’s in a drawer at home. Head blocking can also be caused by working in low temperatures, so the DV5100 has a thermostat built in that automatically releases the tape from the heads when in pause mode.
Like the DV5000 before it the camera will accept both mini and full size DV tapes and will record onto DVCAM tapes too giving a maximum running time of four and a half hours.
Unlike its predecessor it boasts a new 24-bit digital signal processor and a new 12-bit analogue to digital converter to add to an already sophisticated and highly spec’ed unit. Signal to noise is 2dB better than the old 5000 and the ADS is claimed to improve clarity and colour accuracy whilst reducing signal degradation and eliminating smear and colour bleed. Wow! But can you see it up on the screen?
Well I was fortunate enough to find out recently when we were asked by Chevron Texaco to provide a live camera feed to a presentation mixer supplying five 52-inch plasma screens. With very little time to prepare for this event we had to hit the ground running and whilst the plasmas were being installed in a marquee the size of a rugby field, the DV5100 was rigged with an on board light a 7 inch monitor and rear controls. By the time that cabling and talk back were set up we had to go straight into a tech rehearsal with a camera none of us had seen until that day. A bit dumb really.
Auto everything.
With the camera on zero hours and therefore, we assumed, the factory presets on auto we were surprised that after only a quick white balance and colour bar check the pictures on the plasmas were so good. Well not just good, amazing would be closer to the truth. I have never seen my own stuff up that big before and was not really prepared for the quality the camera produced.
We were particularly concerned about skin tones as we were asked to keep our speaker in a big close up for most of the presentation. I know that the DV5100 like all DV cameras can suffer from melting skin and that the skin detail circuit is there to help you get it right, but we didn’t have the time to go down menu lane and so we went with what we had. Results were near perfect without any real need to delve into the menu system, but if you do need to, what a surprise you will have!
Menus: a word.
My position on menus instead of buttons and switches is well documented, but briefly I believe that menus, like most instruction manuals, have been devised by aliens or R&D nerds or alien R&D nerds as a form of torture for people of a certain age who like buttons and switches. A menu is great if you have lots of time and patience and are prepared to lose some hair in the process of learning a fairly useless skill. A menu is not any use if you suddenly find you need to switch to variable shutter because there’s a monitor in the picture that’s rolling.
Good news. The DV5100 has lots of buttons and switches and a clear and, dare I say it, user-friendly menu system. It really is a pleasure to use. Simple and intuitive. There is a new detail enhancement circuit with a choice of three edge detail positions and a colour matrix circuit with a choice of 5 overall colour warmth looks to give you proper control of colour balance. The menu is also where you switch between 4:3 and 16:9. And that deserves a few paragraphs to itself.
Going wide.
The plasma screens in our tent were of course widescreen i.e. 16:9 format and the picture from the camera being academy or 4:3 left two black stripes down the sides. Switching the screens to 16:9 simply made everything look very wide and fat, though it did fill the screen. Switching the camera to 16:9 created a widescreen picture but by cropping top and bottom: in other words letterboxing. This produced a double letterboxed picture on the plasmas and some very fat very wide people on screen!
The answer was in the menu. On the DV5100 there are three format choices not the usual two: - 4:3 standard, 16:9 letterboxed and an electronic version of the add-on anamorphic lens trick, 16:9 squeeze. As far as I know this is the only camera that has this facility and though mentioned almost casually in both the sales lit and the manual this astounding bit of technology gets very little mention. Let me explain.
The DV5100 is a three-chip camera and the chips or CCD’s are all half-inch chips. At the moment there are, I am told, no half inch 16:9 chips being made. This means that to create a 16:9 widescreen look most half-inch chip cameras resort to cropping the standard 4:3 picture to produce a letterboxed widescreen look-alike. This results in virtually a third of the chip’s precious pixels being used to create the interesting black bands seen top and bottom of the resulting picture. Bit of a waste really.
A short history lesson
If you screw an anamorphic lens on the front of your camera the picture you see in the viewfinder and is recorded to tape will be squeezed from either side giving a wider angle of view, tall thin people, trees and buildings but more importantly an image using all the available pixels. If you played the results back you would get what you saw in the viewfinder. So no gain there then. In cinema terms this is exactly what Cinemascope was. A squeezed image on a standard 35mm film which when projected using a similar add-on anamorphic lens produced a wide screen picture.
So how does this squeezed video image become a true 16:9 widescreen one? I don’t know, so I will simply assure you that it does do it, and produces stunning results that literally had us gasping.
Squeeze me.
We switched the camera to 16:9 (Squeezed) and fed the output signal to the widescreen plasmas, which by some application of alchemy knew what it was and displayed a full screen, 16:9 picture. This was nothing short of magic as the viewfinder and external monitor were both showing a squeezed picture. The plasma screens were also JVC’s so we assumed there was some sort of corporate trick going on. But we were wrong.
The recorded squeezed pictures were digitised into our Media 100 edit suite 4:3 programme time line and came in looking like the viewfinder image, squeezed from both sides in other words. But playing it into a Media 100 16:9 programme really caused a buzz. There was the expanded full screen 16:9 picture we had seen on the plasmas. Switching our output monitor to 16:9 confirmed that this was a full resolution full screen widescreen picture, not a cut down letterboxed version. This was where the aforementioned gasps took place. Somehow this camera is not only recording an Anamorphic image but is also allowing the resulting tape to fox a monitor into thinking it is real widescreen. Some trick that.
What else?
Hidden in the menu is a switch that lets you shoot hi-res mode which, though I can’t honestly say I tried out, I am assured produces an improved vertical resolution picture for shooting graphics, paintings and drawings and anything hat doesn’t move.
For encores the DV5100 also connects directly to the hard disc recorder DR-DV5000 now, without resorting to soldering irons and night classes in home electronics. It has all the usual professional features you would expect from a broadcast camera like colour bars and tone generator, full manual control of everything and full auto (except focus of course) for when you’re desperate, built in output for a radio mic (Very useful), a flip out 2.5” colour LCD display, black stretch and compress for fine control of shadows, variable scan for taming scan lines on monitors, user set zebra pattern, electronic stepped shutter speeds for reducing motion blur, four filters instead of the usual three. I could go on and on. The GY-DV5100 was a pleasure to use.
The real pleasure we got from this camera though was hearing the comments of our client, Chevron Texaco. Several times we were told by the events organisers and the refinery’s managers, that the quality of the presentation had exceeded their expectations. It had exceeded ours too. This was down to the GY-DV5100. Without a doubt the real star turn.
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