Sanyo 1920x1080 60p camcorders announced

[Nicky Campos]

Originally Posted by Paulo Teixeira

1/2.5" CMOS
http://us.sanyo.com/Dynamic/news/doc...ifications.pdf

Really? Isnt this bigger than the sensor used for Sony EX1?

[Paulo Teixeira]

The sensors of the EX1/EX3 is quoted as ½” which is bigger. Anyway, Even the cheep HD camcorders that costs $100 to $250 have sensors that are 1/2.5“.

[Kurth Bousman]

1/2.5" would be exactly halfway between 1/2" and 1/3" or .40" - at least it's not 1/6" like of lot of panys but I wouldn't be expecting alot of dof properties on larger sensors - that said , for the price , these cameras look very nice - let's see some samples and hope the bitrate gives some nice images

[John Hedgecoe]

At 24 Mb/s, that's almost double what the HD1010 does, so that is VERY good news. Question is, does it maintain that data rate at 1080p30 too? Or is it only for 1080p60.

As for the 0.4x wide angle lens.... yes it does vignette considerably at full wide, however if you zoom in to 1.2x, the vignetting disappears.

The 40.5mm thread means the 1010 accessories will work on the new 2000. That is also good news.

By the way, neither the HD1010, nor the 2000 when it comes out, can hold a candle to the Sony PMW-EX1. The EX1 is an absolutely amazing, and ground breaking, camera.

[John Wyatt]

Just had a quick look at the specs and wondered what size the stills are for the 12 fps sequential shooting facility? And is there a duration limit on how long you can shoot them for? Might have an application for us alternative imaging guys if favourable...

EDIT: sorry, just saw that sequential shooting: 4 mgp stills at 12 fps is only for a total of 15 photos, 8 mgp stills at 6 fps is only for a total of 9 photos. Oh well.

[Bill Koehler]

Originally Posted by John Hedgecoe

At 24 Mb/s, that's almost double what the HD1010 does, so that is VERY good news. Question is, does it maintain that data rate at 1080p30 too? Or is it only for 1080p60.

Reading the specification PDF referenced above, 1080p30 appears to correspond to Full-SHQ: 1920 x 1080 (30 fps/ 12Mbps)

[Paulo Teixeira]

And for 1920x1080 60i, it’s 16MBPS. Around the same as Sony’s.

[Colin Rootz]

Originally Posted by John Hedgecoe

By the way, neither the HD1010, nor the 2000 when it comes out, can hold a candle to the Sony PMW-EX1. The EX1 is an absolutely amazing, and ground breaking, camera.

Nice one John! LOL! You're exactly right though! I doubt Sanyo would have the balls to put any Xacti camera up against an EX1!

It [the HD2000] seems to be an interesting and fun camera:
-1080/60p @ 24Mb/s is cool
-External (2.5mm) mic input (Sennheiser MKE 400 whoo!)
-240fps and 600fps (web size :-P ) - interesting
-HDMI out - nice

EIS instead of OIS is a bummer, but you can't get everything, eh?

I'd love to be able to download some stills and video from it.

[Kurth Bousman]

Anyone know the resolution for the 240fps on the hd2000 ?

[Kurth Bousman]

answered my own question
>>The 240fps mode uses 448 x 336, and the 600fps mode 192 x 108, which isn't going to be tremendously useful most of the time. The video is then played back at 60fps, giving you 25 per cent and 10 per cent slow-mo respectively.<<

[John Hedgecoe]

I own the HD1010 (and the EX1), but I find the motion/compression artifacts to be horrendous on the 1010. I could do without the 1080p60 if only they would offer the 24Mbps at 1080p30.

There will be no advantage to 1080p60 over 1080p30 as the compression/motion artifacts will probably be comparable. Only you will have them in twice as many frames at p60.

The 1010 is a fun little camera and while I would like the improved stills capability, without an improvement in the video quality I will not be upgrading.

[Paulo Teixeira]

Originally Posted by Jack Zhang

No, the PS3 decoding AVC at 60p would lag at the 40-50 frames per second range.

I’ve played back a clip on my PS3 that I posted here http://www.dvinfo.net/conf/mpg4-sany...ml#post1014316 and it plays back extremely smoothly but there is just one problem, it takes around 43 to 44 seconds just to play back a 29 second clip. I’m pissed that it doesn’t play it at normal speed but at least I know how smooth the picture quality would look if you want to use this camera for slow motion shots at full HD resolution.

[Dave Haynie]

Originally Posted by Jack Zhang

No, the PS3 decoding AVC at 60p would lag at the 40-50 frames per second range. Unless there is a optimization of the Cell to use the SPUs during decoding, it's not possible today with all the decoding on the PPU. XviD however is the only codec able to play at 1920x1080 60p on the PS3 at 19mbps. (any higher bitrate and it would overload the buses)

The Sanyo 1080/60p AVC current confuses the PS3, so there's no telling if it could decode the video or not. You might possibly be overloading the SPUs, but I doubt it. There is no possible way 19Mb/s or 24Mb/s video is going to overload the PS3's buses.. this does decode full spec Blu-Ray video and audio, which means, up to 48Mb/s input audio/video bit stream from the BD (and usually, 8 PCM audio channels transcoded and sent out the PS3, at 6Mb/s or more).

Originally Posted by Jack Zhang

But I think a Nvidia GTX 2xx series GPU or a Core i7 at 3.2Ghz would do fine with AVC at 1080p60.

A nVidia GPU can't do the whole decoding, but it can certainly help. Here are some real benchmarks. Using the multithreaded Splash Lite player, on a Q9550 CPU (2.83MHz quad Core 2), playback on a nVidia 9600GTS video card onto a 1920x1200 digital screen, I get between 65% and 75% of the whole CPU being used for a perfect 60fps playback.

Moving to the Nero Showtime player, with video acceleration enabled (this is in XP, so if they're using the Windows APIs rather than nVidia's, this gets much better in Vista or Win7), the CPU usage drops to just below 50%.

On my laptop, which is running 64-bit Vista on a Core 2 Duo at 2.4GHz, nVidia 8600M GPU, and Showtime with GPU acceleration enabled, I'm using about 100% of the machine and keeping pretty damn close to 60fps, though not quite.

This is going to take more than one core on an i7, but shouldn't be a problem. If you have a decent GPU, you're probably only bothering one core.

The real problem is editing, since editors aren't currently doing much in the way of multithreaded or GPU accelerated rendering, at least during the interactive editing activities (most do multithreaded rendering for final render, some even tapping GPUs these days).

Originally Posted by Jack Zhang

A while back, I dreamed of a pro codec called AVCPRO that would record AVC to tape and be in 1080p60. It seems they've skipped tape alltogether.

The first problem.. everyone's demanding higher bitrates for AVC anyway. In theory, there's better than twice the encoding efficiency of MPEG-2, but move the resolution to 1920x1080 rather than 1440x1080, realize that we haven't had the same 15 years to get good at AVC encoding as we have with MPEG-2, that AVC is way complicated, and we're trying to get this encoding in realtime on a 4W electronic device, and we believe these extra bits are going to be useful. Sanyo's doing 1080/60p in a consumer device at 24Mb/s, but pros would certainly demand 50Mb/s or so.. at least if you're going to normal tape rates (eg, DVCpro50).

You got AVC-Intra and AVCCAM, both for solid-state storage. I don't think anyone's thinking much about tape anymore, and for pros, it's all solid-state. Given the falling prices in flash, this was inevitable. Plus, both consumers and pros are demanding different video modes... not tape friendly.

But I think the big problem with tape becomes infrastructure. When you create a thing like HDV, you're not just making a camcorder, you're creating a need for tape decks and anything else that might fit in a standard tape-based toolchain. With flash, it's just another file on computer media... if you can't read the contents of that file today, it's just a "simple matter of software" (as the hardware people say) before you do.