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JVC GY-HM700U Review

Aug 31, 2009 12:00 PM, By D.W. Leitner

JVC scales new heights of tapelessness.

Ordinarily I review cameras, not press releases. But JVC’s February press release announcing the “Compact Shoulder” GY-HM700U ProHD camcorder caught my eye in a number of ways.

“The new camera uniquely records directly to inexpensive SDHC memory cards in Apple’s QuickTime (.MOV) format for Final Cut Pro, and optionally to SxS media compatible with Sony’s XDCAM EX format. Recording in the editing system’s native format eliminates the time-consuming transfer step and dramatically speeds up the postproduction workflow, a major advancement for JVC and the industry.”

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“Dramatically” and “major” are spin, but if you read my review of JVC’s handheld GY-HM100U, which adopts the same strategy of wrapping Sony XDCAM EX compression as either MPEG-4 (.MP4) or QuickTime (.MOV) files, you know that I described the instant gratification of dragging and dropping QuickTime files into Final Cut Pro’s Browser window directly from a camcorder as “an absolute joy.”

Like forbidden fruit, once a Final Cut Pro user has tasted this ultimate convenience in transfer and NLE playback, it’s hard to go back. Pretty please—speaking as a user—might other camcorder manufacturers offer this breakthrough choice too?

JVC’s press release says that the GY-HM700 is “the industry’s first shoulder supported [italics mine] camcorder to store files on inexpensive SDHC memory cards,” then adds:

“SDHC cards are economical, highly reliable, and make possible a recording system that consumes up to 20 percent less power than tape- or HDD-based systems. The per-minute cost of SDHC memory is comparable to videotape. Moreover, SDHC media is the first practical solid-sate solution to physical archive.”

Three major claims. I’ll get to the issue of power consumption a little later, but to favorably compare the cost of consumer-priced SDHC memory to tape (which type of tape?), whether entirely the case yet or not, is crossing a new threshold in our industry’s headlong rush into solid-state media.

Moreover, describing cheap SDHC as an archival medium is breathtaking. Is it true? Perhaps JVC would like to spearhead an industry-wide discussion of this possibility. The question of archiving digital video files is not only timely but also critical to wider acceptance of file-based recording. It remains the major stumbling block to those producers wary of abandoning tape.

Continue the discussion on “Crosstalk” the Millimeter Forum.
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