Interestingly once I had loaded the footage off the JVC HM100 onto the video drive it worked as advertised straight onto the timeline without any rendering, now this is’nt the strange part but as I added various effects like “DV LOOKS” it took for ever to render and it also told me it was conforming Mpeg2 footage ? In the preferences it tells me the footage is XDCAM EX 1080 50i so what do I trust !
Do I hear a little vioce in my head… from my old boss Obewan Attkins “Look at the instructions…Phil, may the force be with you” At the end of the instruction book we are told…Video recording format : QT file format (Final Cut Pro) MP4 file format Video signals : 720p format MPEG-2 (8bit, 35/18.3 Mbps) 1080 format MPEG-2 (8bit, 35/25 Mbps).
So how did my HM700 review footage not give this grief, simple, I injested the footage through the AJA io HD and it transcoded it into ProRez. So a word of warning, JVC claim and they are 100% correct that your footage will indeed drop onto the Final Cut Pro timeline without the need for rendering but they don’t go on to tell you not to add any effects to your footage or it will take forever to render. I added a wide screen effect to the above 2 minutes and 47 seconds worth of footage and it took a good 20 minutes to render, appalling. Unless you ingest your footage via an AJA box or a Matrox box then beware of very long render times !
AJA don’t have the drivers ready yet for FCS-3 but Chuck informs me within another 2 weeks taking it to the first week in September.
The JVC HM100 was on the whole nice to use but it’s compactness fools you into a false sense of security and you tend to do a lot of hand held stuff when it would benefit from a tripod, so you end up with a lot of footage that is not as polished as it should be.
