White Paper 034 Addendum 40: Menu settings for Thomson/GV DMC1000 “Infinity” camcorder

Alan Roberts

Abstract

A one-day assessment was made on a sample of the DMC1000, Infinity camcorder (serial number 1FRMR), a multi-standard HDTV cam-corder with a Canon HA17x7.6 HD lens. It is a novel camera in many respects, and is the first HD cam-corder made under the Grass Valley name by Thomson. Physically, it resembles many other camcorders, the familiar digibeta size and layout, but it has a large lcd side panel with touchscreen controls for menu control, and records to a Rev-Pro hard drive and/or Compact Flash cards. It has excellent connectivity, including a standard HDMI connector for the viewfinder, and USB client and host connectors for downloading content from the recording media. Remote control is possible through a PDA application. It also has many features which make it suitable for multi-camera use in studio or location shooting. Although production models may well differ slightly from this sample, a full manual was available. Much of the content of this document is taken directly from that manual since there was insufficient time to test many of the innovatory features.

Power consumption is 45 watts, a little high by modern standards, 49 watts when recording to RevPro. However, the power management and cooling system keep the camera cool to the touch, and acceptably quiet acoustically.

The camera has 3 full resolution (1920x1080) cmos sensors and is switchable between HDTV (at both 1080i/25 and 720p/50-line standards) and SDTV (625/50 and 525/59.94). It records to the selected medium in various forms: HD can be JPEG2000 (wavelets) 10-bit full resolution 4:2:2 at 100, 75 or 50Mb/s, or MPEG2 (i-frame only, 8-bit, 4:2:0 but full resolution) at 80 or 60Mb/s; SD can be DV25 (8-bit 4:2:0 for 625/50, 4:1:1 for 525.59.94), or JPEG2000 at 50, 50 or 30Mb/s, or MPEG2 at 50, 40 or 30Mb/s. MPEG2 compression requires an extra card to be fitted, it is not normally part of the camera. For these tests, there was not enough time to test all these formats, but previous tests, informal and unpublished, had already confirmed that the JPEG2000 compression did not limit the resolution or introduce any unwanted spatial aliasing.

The Rev-Pro recording drives are at present only 35MB each, but a larger 70MB version is promised “soon”. The Compact Flash sockets will accept Type I and Type II cards.

In this version, it was not possible to switch the camera to a film-look mode with progressive scanning at 25Hz, this is promised for a future revision of the camera. Also, it was not possible to examine the gamma curves in detail because the sawtooth test signal did not work as expected, therefore assessments were done using a Macbeth Colour Checker test chart. As a result, no recommendation can be made for a film-look setup yet. Also, the colour matrix selection is very strange, offering many matrices, none of which is calculated to optimise this camera. Nevertheless, colour performance was good although not exceptional, and when the gamma correction and knee were adjusted to capture about 2 stops of overexposure, the results were quite pleasing. However, noise levels were disturbingly high.

Noise performance was poor. Spatial aliases were visible in the 720 and SD pictures, but not to an excessive degree. Evidence for this is presented at the end of this document.

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