Thomson Grass Valley INFINITY - Review |
It has been a long time coming and looks like it is worth the wait. The Infinity Series Digital Media Camcorder DMC 1000 is delivering what it promised almost three years ago at its unveiling.
But, in the meantime, amid the wide range of new cameras available Infinity has been lost in the noise of other new product releases. It has some remarkable features but three years on and still not fully enabled, has the Infinity missed the boat?
At its unveiling Grass Valley promised a solid state camera with a price of under £25k with the ability to record 10 bit JPEG 2000, in a MXF wrapper, to removable and cheap hard drive media. At the time the price was lower than any other three chip CCD camera.
I suggested, at the time, that Grass Valley could only make a three chip camera if CMOS sensors were used. Not surprisingly the production model sports CMOS sensors, which cost less to manufacture. The protracted development of Infinity is said to have been caused by the desire to wait for the less expensive Xensium sensor. Hitting the right price point is essential in today’s market but the camera’s price point is less of a selling point now than it was three years ago.
Personally I still favour CCDs as the benchmark for image quality. CMOS has its advantages namely higher frame rates and lower power consumption. Grass Valley say their sensor has less noise than CCD, we will defer judgement on that claim for the time being. The sensor was designed in-house and in collaboration with Thomson Technology’s Silicon Components division. In 2006 it won the Jean-Pierre Noblanc Award for the most innovative product. (A full evaluation of the sensor will be undertaken in a future issue.)
The Infinity uses Compact Flash and Rev Pro media. Rev is available in 35GB and 70GB capacity. They are robust looking drives that are more durable than the early Iomega Zip media and of course much faster.
Considered by some to be a dying technology, removable hard drives, at this moment in time, offer far larger capacity than CF cards at a fraction of the price. It will be some time before compact flash cards reach the Rev hard drive price/performance.
Primarily designed for news in the USA, the media is cheap enough for corporate or production clients to take away, thus removing the need for in the field cloning of data.
The camera also sports two compact flash slots. Ejection of CF and Rev media is by depressing a small button under the flap that covers both drive slots. There is a delay while the media un-mounts and it is possible to close the flap before the Rev Pro media ejects where it then jams itself on the flap preventing it from opening. Fortunately there is room to push the media back into the slot with a pen. These teething issues are usually solved as more cameras are used in the field.
There is a wide choice of recording options. Frame rates for the early cameras are limited (no 24 or 25p) but the addition of 720 60p has its place for slow motion work. I’m sure the 720p is designed for US networks transmitting at 60p, but on this side of the pond we trade the drop in resolution for the benefits of slowing down 60fps to 25fps in post.
It also does 1080 60i as well as PAL and NTSC in DV25. Not forgetting JPEG 2000 in 50/75 and 100Mbs in 10 bit 4:2:2. An optional board enables MPEG 2 in 4:2:0 SD and HD 60-80 Mb/s ‘I’ frame. So this choice of data rates provides a means of trading recording quality for endurance. Viewfinder is a monochrome CRT and the connector type is HDMI.
The camera sports the usual audio and video connectors with a welcome addition of a HD-SDI input so the camera can act as a stand alone HD recorder. This is quite a useful feature in a HD camcorder.
The BNC connectors are cleverly recessed and covered with rubber flaps. There is an internal slot for a radio microphone. An integrated zoom rocker on the handle is a welcome addition and like the flip out screen something borrowed from prosumer cameras.
Menu and VRT control is via a small ‘coolie hat’ button or via touch screen display that doubles as a monitor. It would be handy too for the user to programme the user interface on the touch screen monitor. I found the play rewind icons too small and there is no visible change when selected.
I do miss ‘real’ buttons for VTR control where tactile response is relied upon rather than visual identification. I’m told that the touch screen can be removed and replaced in minutes in case of damage. Taking spare screen may be a good idea for those working in the wild or war zones.
The camera has a good range of camera processing controls that were easy to understand and find using the touch screen or the viewfinder.
A wireless remote camera control is promised, the LCP 400 which enables control of the camera whilst shooting including audio levels. Metadata can be entered and recorded on the fly and the LCP can transfer data to suitably equipped newsrooms via cell phone. A single motorised filter wheel is deemed good enough for a lot of work, but lack of colour correction filter wheel puts more pressure on internal gain or post manipulation to correct colour. Since CMOS is not the most noise free of sensors (GV will disagree with me ) I think any EFP version of the camera should have a second filter wheel with colour correction filters to maintain an even balance between colour channels.
The optical block exhibits the familiar vertical colour fringing of many 2/3 inch cameras (but has been greatly reduced with the 1500 and F23 Sony cameras)
Sensitivity of the CMOS sensors at f8 2000 lux is less than other cameras and is to be expected in the quest of keeping noise levels down.
At its launch there was particular concern over the reliability of data recorded on a hard drive when the camera was in motion. Grass Valley have all but solved this issue with a very powerful buffer that stores images until the drive has recovered from vibration or shock.
A clever on-screen bar indicates remaining capacity of the buffer. We took the Infinity for a spin in a helicopter and in the back of a vehicle. In both situations the camera was stabilised with gyros but occasionally a severe bump would make the bar light up, but within a few seconds the drive had recovered and the images were being recorded direct to drive.
In fact one would have to rapidly tap the camera with some force for about 45 seconds for the buffer to become full. I can’t image a situation where a camera would be subjected to such vibration. The buffer is a wow! feature that is also included in the DVR.
One must be careful not pull a battery off the camera without first switching off because they’re may be a few seconds of recording that need to be downloaded to the drive from the buffer. As with all of the hard disk cameras one should treat it like a computer in this respect.
Evaluation of JPEG 2000 recording will appear in a later issue as more editing software becomes available. However playback quality of recorded images via HD-SDI had no visible additional artefacts when compared with the same image recorded via HD-SDI to a Kona card and FCP.
Whilst the Infinity scores highly in being at the forefront of development in many aspects it is left behind by it’s size. By today’s standards it feels and looks a little overweight.
This is also true of the DMR, Digital Media Recorder, the companion player/editor. We had a prototype available for evaluation.
Three years ago the design was very slick, but now it looks and feels too big and given that it will be transported by air as excess baggage although not too heavy perhaps could be half the size because there is no tape drive to accommodate.
It does sport AES inputs and outputs has integrated mains supply as well as 12 Volt input and like the camera USB, firewire and Ethernet connections. It has a touch screen similar to the camera as well as buttons and a jog controller. After such a wait I was expecting the camera and the player to be more fully featured. Cloning between units, transferring data between compact flash and hard drive and more frame rates are promised. These days if there is an IT connection one assumes that if connected to a computer the drive will appear on the desktop. This is yet to be enabled.
As the end user has such a wide choice of non tape based options from competitors, I hope GV don’t delay too long in enabling all the bells and whistles to make the most of their excellent work thus far.