Three Weeks with the JVC GY-DV500, p. 5
Ergonomics
I
was concerned about the size of the camera, being so small compared
to my Betacam. I was pleasantly surprised to find it fill well
and balanced the way I like it, slightly back heavy, with an Anton
Bauer brick on the back. I like the back heavy balance as it's
far easier to pull down on the camera using just the weight of
my arm than push up all day long, which uses muscle power. Try
it and see if you don't agree.
The camera controls were well placed and easy to find by feel alone once I got used to it. The lens was a bit closer than I'm used to, but this became comfortable as well and made it easier to brace my shooting elbow into my middle-aged waist! The viewfinder needs a fore and aft adjustment and a longer side reach for those who wear larger headphones or use their left eye, but was workable both on the shoulder and on a tripod. The diopter adjustment didn't seem to have enough range for me, and my eyesight isn't that far off of 20/20. I have the normal age-related loss of close up vision but I had to wear my glasses, as there wasn't enough range for me. I know I'm nitpicking, but in reality, what you're reading in this subjective review is all I found wrong with this camera.
Overall, the camera was easy to set up, carry and mount. On the tripod, dolly and jib, I encountered no problems whatsoever with the camera's size, weight or balance. My second unit camera operator, Jay Allen, kept grinning every time he took the camera off the tripod to move to another shot....it wasn't as heavy as he's used to!
Performance
The
bottom line. The JVC camera worked very well....period. Our locations
involved exterior night scenes, bright day scenes under the Arizona
sun, interiors from a typical bar to a home with large windows
in two directions making lighting a constant problem and just
about everything in between. Colors were rich and stable, very
little cross-color bleeding or smearing, even under low light.
The low light capability was a pleasant surprise! There were plenty
of times I'd finish lighting a scene and look down at the lens
aperture and see it sitting at F4 or a F2.8-F4 split. Nice feeling...
1: We shot with one 300-watt light barn-doored off and covered with softspun in a very large bar and the low-light capability was as good as you would expect for 1/2" chips. The colors of the colored "mood" light around the bar were vivid and accurate. The skin tone of the extras were right on. I didn't see one streak or smear in any of our strange lighting situations.
2: We shot an exterior scene in front of a small store with one fluorescent tube lighting up the store's sign. We placed a 300-watt Arri across the parking lot (75 feet away - it was imitating a street light) and shot the scene with 4 actors having an argument. As our hero ran away waving his gun...it was interesting to be able to see him run in and out of shadows and still see detail and color on his clothes.
No gain or boost was used on any of our shots. To give you an idea of what this means, the previously mentioned bar scene was also shot with the XL1. And even with 12dB gain, the picture was deemed unusable. The JVC was pretty, again with no gain or boost used.
3: Another unusual scene was our hero running to an exterior phone booth...well, not really a phone booth, rather one of those cheap little phone stands that couldn't protect you from one raindrop much less a downpour, but I digress. I set out the battery powered lighting while the director blocked the shot. He came over to see how the scene was looking and said..."Looks Great...let's shoot it" The battery lights weren't even on. I turned them on and off for him....we laughingly agreed, and left them off and shot the scene. The tiny fluorescent lights in the phone "booth" were plenty for the gritty look we wanted. The rest of the parking lot was lit by streetlights.
In daylight situations, I do have an opinion here for JVC. I think the auto iris settings on some of the newer cameras are set a bit too hot. Let's face it: The DV format, being digital like DVCAM and DVCPRO, is still new a format and exhibits artifacts from exposure and other external situations. Now before you starting ranting on me let me rephrase that. I don't blame the formats. You can't -- it's just a recording format. But you can look at the cameras and see that many of the under $10K cameras just don't have the filtering of the higher-priced spread. Everyone has at least 700 lines of resolution and at least 60dB signal-to-noise ratio, so what separates the under $10K and those pushing $20K and on up? Well for one thing the filtering in the preamp circuits that eliminate the jaggies, the smears, keep the colors pure in extreme lighting, lower noise and allow so much more control over the picture quality.
Now back to my point. The JVC at auto iris in bright sun looks a bit like it's being overdriven. This is probably a simple factory adjustment, but that's the way we received the camera. Those who are not technically oriented may end up shooting like that and be disappointed. When I stopped the lens down a tad, the colors leaped out, the detail came back on the highlights and the picture looked very nice indeed. In bright sun, 1/2 to 3/4 of a stop was all it took to bring the JVC back to where I like it. Indoors, I would only use auto iris while I was setting up the lighting of a scene so I could watch my progress and allow the director and the boom operator to see what was happening at the same time. And since the camera's auto exposure is biased to favor the middle and lower middle of the picture, I would occasionally see loss of detail on highlights in the upper left/right quadrants of the scene. Since I always shoot with manual iris, this was a non-issue to me. And yes, there is an adjustment for the auto iris to stop it down -3. But I have a tendency to forget those type of settings and you wouldn't want your iris down -3 in a low light situation! So, I ran the camera in its most basic state.