Ed, been reading up on your fantasy, dreamy camcorder. You've made the leap from the JVC 500 to wanting 4:2:2 uncompressed digital, all the way up to 4:4:4 uncompressed, at 2K HD no less! Lusting away, Micheal Douglas is on his 2nd family with a lustfully beautiful Catherine Zeta Jones, who is more than 20 years younger than him. So that means when I'm in my 50's, Dark Angel's hottie, Jessica Alba, will be divorced just in time for me to marry her? Oh, maybe that tall, slinky, brown skinned kind-of-Asian-looking beauty in the over used teenage/immature overacted OB tampon commercial(model/actress Tamara Feldman, mother is part Cherokee/Mexican...father, must be Jewish), who does that bite the lower lip smile(done to perfection on an episode of Smallville, where she played a ridiculously silly caricature of a Native American...but I still want her, damn she's hot!) coquettish seductive look...maybe she'll be divorced and in her late 20's too....lust away.
Seriously, Ken Stone, who takes all of the digital photos of the lafcpug meetings, with a pro Nikon digicam; is older than I; but we both know of the famed f64 club, and that of Ansel Adams work. We both love super high resolution, super sharp images like that which images, the artistry of Ansel Adams, were recorded with 4 x 5 view cameras. You read about how Scott Billips used to visit in the area of Japan where the latest technological electronic toys of tomorrow are being produced/prototyped? You see that Billips used a Mac many years ago to make his own home made camcorder/hard drive system? But while it could be possible, Billips does not make such a camcorder now, when there are people with far greater engineering capabilities, as far as camcorder design/feasibility who can do the job much better. You want to put the cart before the wheel, in a manner of speaking; but I think the big guns over in Asia have these prototypes in developmental stages, and as soon as they see the "need" for producing such a device(allowing for newer technologies that allow for an "all in one" camcorder), we shall see them step in and squash like a bug, the smaller upstart companies now producing these very limited market high-end camcorders. I know, you want the $25,000 SD Panasonic everyone was drooling over at NAB 2003, to be a HD, and 2k, and 4:4:4...well that will probably happen in the not too distant future, either at NAB 2004 or 2005; if not sooner. Unless you have hundreds of thousands to spend on R&D, you'll probably spend much more time on this obsession, such that by the time something gets produced...it will be after the announcements by the "big guns" of Asia have beaten you to the starting line with a much more efficient, feature rich alternative. Reality time :)
But I admire your enthusiasm(and frustration/disgust with the costs of acquisition and post production...it's all coming down fast, just not fast enough for most of us on a budget, regardless of what our budget is). Just make sure you get your movie onto screen sometime in the not too distant future? Keep in mind what Marco Solorio says on his codec's comparison page where he discusses the beta (surely by next year it will be full 32bit capable?) version of bizjazz's 'Sheer'.....:
http://www.onerivermedia.com/codecs
Quality is cool,... Content is King!
Tamara Feldman, I lust for from afar, I want to get into her pants, she's incredible...or is she? She's a total guy magnet, could just be a self-centered, problematic woman with her own eccentricities and peculiarities that I just don't care for once I get to know her; perhaps she's really a self-absorbed bitch; instead of a thoughtful, sublime, considerate, selfless sweetie, complimentary to my own personality. Well content is king, and any o'l tall, slinky, Cherokee/Mexican/Jewish woman is fine for me; I'll want to get into her pants; if and only if she has a terrific personality...content is king. So will your homemade HD camcorder be of so many compromises, eccentricities/peculiarities, that it will always/must necessarily miss the spot. Notice how Billips liked the slightly less expensive Panasonic on his website compared to the Sony HD cam? Why? Because he gets his work all done faster, that of the feel, that total balance(content is king), every control where he wants it to be without having to think about it, not so complicated with a billion and one menus of arcane/difficult to setup adjustments... eccentricities/peculiarities.
As far as having enough affordable CPU power to edit such uncompressed HD material, I think it is more than speculation, more like a 'given' by next year. Bob Bonniol is one of those neigh sayers of Apple. They forever bring up the Motorola chip yield problems with the years old G4 chips that were stuck at 500Mhz. Get over that already, the current G4 DP 1.42Ghz is not as fast as the fastest Windows Intel/AMD workstation, but that's a moot point, they are 32bit CPUs. Mac OSX 10.3 coded named Panther is scheduled to ship sometime around this September. It is designed for the new 64bit CPU code named G5, which if rumors are correct, will be based on an IBM variation of one of their high-end chip architectures. While the Motorola and IBM jointly developed G3 chips are in the iBook, Motorola could not get their act together in time, and had publicly stated that they had only designed the G3 family to top out at 500Mhz. Today the iBook is shipping with IBM G3 chips at 900Mhz. The rumored IBM G5 chip is said to start at the low-end around 1.8Ghz. Whether or not Motorola or IBM produce the G5 chip, the G5 will have substantially more processing power being fully 64bit in nature, and if there be a 4 processor G5 desktop, you can be sure, and updated FCP will be coded to take advantage of that. Now Apple sales of their desktops are lagging, and they out of necessity, need to produce a G5 desktop long before next year's NAB 2004. Expect dual or quad processor G5 desktops by then at or above 2Ghz; enough to do that 32bit HD RT that FCP4(which maybe at FCP5 by next year) is already coded for. Pixar's multi-hundred Pentium rendering farm setup is for state of the art animation projects; got nothing to do with what we are talking about here. Unless Ed is planning to do his own, Monsters Inc. part III. Irrelevant and moot point to bring up Steve Job's other company's endeavors. Isn't Lawrence Livermore Labs. using multi-thousand Pentium setup to do simulated nuclear testing? What's that got to do with ability for a quality FCP codec to process simple uncompressed HD, maybe not 7-8 streams of video at once...NAB2005? Academy Award winner Walter Murch used a 4 desktop Apple G4 DP workflow system designed by Digital Film Tree, which cost an unheard of $100,000; to do the editing of the major $150 million studio release 'Cold Mountain'...those being only 1Ghz machines. Will you be able to tell the difference between the 35mm film editing between that movie and that done by Walter Murch on a much more expensive Avid setup for the 'English Patient'? Go see the movies and decide for yourself. Will Walter Murch edit; an HD digital movie shot with a DALSA 4K, on a G5/FCP5 setup next year...who knows?
But if Ed really wants to try and build a better bread box, perhaps simple CMOS chips should be reconsidered. New Fuji digicams have more 'film like' dual imaging chips. More accurate color(if you must use a film like gamma color setting//shift, then that is your choice in the camera setup menus), along with film resolution AND latitude/dynamic range....if you're going to the trouble of making the ultimate HD setup, correct? Fuji's 4th generation CCD's,
http://www.imaging-resource.com/NEWS/1043202460.html
I'm just wondering if the big boys over there in Asia, are already hard at work on these already? I mean, you haven't seen the flash memory camcorder in production yet, but a few of the prototypes were shown at NAB 2003. You haven't seen an OLED display, in a super thin notebook computer yet, but Toshiba already has a working prototype. Don't you think they already have working prototypes of something like you are discussing building now, which will take how many months of refinement, changes in design; before you have a working example? By the time you come out with your finished product using some of last year's(currently on the market) technology; Panasonic uses up to the minute technology, including array of higher capacity flash memory(which you have no access to quantity discount for another year); to build an affordable(well, $25,000-50,000 or so) version of what you are talking about?
