The Gadgets Page

JVC is first out of the gate with a hard disk based camcorder that records in the MPEG-2 format of DVD. No tape, no mini-DVDs, and up to 24 hours of recording at a time. But as everyone who buys a camcorder finds out, the devil is always in the details: How fast and easy is it to export the video and create a DVD, and how much is it really going to cost in extra peripherals and software to do it? We put this camera to the test.

Update: See our Follow up article with a more experienced take on this camcorder.

The trouble with Direct-to-DVD

Recording directly to DVD doesn’t work well. There’s nothing like recording your daughter’s first birthday on a direct-to-DVD camcorder only to have it fail to finalize because Sony wants to ensure that you can only use their specially pre-formatted DVD blanks. And, let’s face it—changing media every 30 minutes will ensure that you spend your time minding the camcorder instead of participating in the memorable events of your life. Even when it all works, it just doesn’t work that well.

But MiniDV tape has significant usability issues too—the media is relatively expensive, and creating DVDs either requires a console DVD burner with firewire input or a powerful computer, a lot of time for transcoding, and a bunch of software that isn’t particularly easy to use.

Because of these issues, most people simply never get around to making DVDs of their home videos.

JVC saw this problem and attempted to answer it with a line of camcorders that record in the digital format of DVD called MPEG-2, but they do it to a high capacity hard disk that is the equivalent of 8 full DVD disks. Basically, the camcorders can record all day without any media change, and the content is already encoded for burning to DVD.

Quality

The camcorder is lightweight and very small. Even so, it has all the standard camcorder features you’d expect, including a 25x optical zoom, a steadiness filter, and so forth.

Using the camera won’t require you to crack the manual if you’ve ever used a camcorder before—everything works exactly as you’d expect, and the camera is quite simple to operate. The hardware quality is good—we had no defects or problems with our unit, and it seems as about as rugged as any camcorder we’ve bought from a major Japanese electronics manufacturer. JVC is one of the biggest consumer electronics companies in the world, and the back the camera with a 1 year parts warranty (90 days labor). The camera does have a hard disk in it, however, so we expect it to be more fragile than a MiniDV camcorder.

The video quality isn’t quite as good as the same price-point Sony Handycams—brightness levels don’t adapt quite as fast and the autofocus is a bit slow. That said, it’s video stabilization is rock solid at typical zoom levels, and the quality of the optics is higher than the quality of the MPEG-2 compressor, which is all that they need to be.

Because everything that comes out of this camera is compressed, and because compression reduces quality, this is not a professional videographer’s camera. JVC knows that, and they’ve matched the camera with appropriately lower resolution CCDs. Similar models have 5 megapixel CCDs, but you won’t notice an improvement in the final video quality. The still shots are markedly better, but if you want to take still shots, you should get a good still shot camera.

The MPEG compression does get a little striated when you pan rapidly, but not as badly as Sony DVD camcorders. It’s actually the best real-time MPEG-2 compressor I’ve seen. The compression artifacts are visible on an HD television or computer screen, but not on a typical TV.

We did run into one serious problem while using the camera. After playing with it for a few minutes and importing some files on a Mac, We couldn’t mount the camera as a USB hard disk on a PC. When we opened the display to figure out why, the following error message was displayed:

“Video management file is broken to record/playback video. Recovery is required. Recover?” We clicked Yes (the only option), and the camera said that recovery succeeded. The sample video we’d recorded no longer appeared in the play menu because one of the files had disappeared. The problem happened again a short while later—this time deleting the actual video file. The issue seems to be associated with disconnecting the camera from the computer—even though we had properly ejected the camcorder drives before unplugging the USB cable.

Although the instructions don’t make it clear, it seems to be important that the camera is turned off before you connect or disconnect the USB cable. The instructions do mention that you should not delete or rename files on the camera except in the EXT_MOV folder. The camera’s firmware is apparently quite fragile about file names and the presence of the extra hidden folders that both the Windows and Macintosh operating systems create when you delete something.

Usability

You’ve shot a day’s worth of video. So how do you get a DVD out of the camera?

You’ve got three options:

1. Use a custom made DVD burner for the camera
2. Use a PC
3. Use a Mac

All three are difficult. The core problem is that the camera captures video and audio in MPEG-2 format, but it does not perform DVD authoring—the process of automatically adding chapters, titles, and DVD menus to allow direct creation of DVDs. It’s a feature the camera could badly use, because not producing a basic authored DVD folder (called a VIDEO_TS folder) means that you can’t just copy the files using any old DVD burning application for those times when you only want a basic DVD—you’ve always got to use a third party DVD authoring application, which means taking the time to copy the video files out of the camera and generally wasting at least 30 minutes of your life for every DVD you’re going to make.

Using the Camera with directly connected DVD recorder

To try to make things as easy as possible, JVC collaborated with Apacer to adapt one of their existing portable DVD burners to work with the Everio line of camcorders. Apparently, you simply connect the camera to the burner and go, but we couldn’t test it because the burner isn’t yet available in the U.S. We’ll post an update when we find one. No matter how well it works, expect it to cost around $400.

Using the Camera with a PC

Using a PC with the camera is relatively easy. You plug the camera into an available USB 2.0 port and two drives will appear—one representing the camera’s internal hard disk, and the other representing the SD card slot.

When you browse the camera’s hard disk, you’ll find your movies are stored in “.MOD” format, which is not a standard extension for MPEG-2 video format. They’re actually MPEG-2 files with Dolby Digital audio tracks, so they are compatible with most video applications that can open .MPG or .VOB files. In fact, when you run the included utilities, they rename the files with a .VOB extension to make them easy to handle.

After installing the PowerDVD Suite, you’ll have all the tools you need to edit, create and burn your DVDs, assuming that you have a DVD burner. The camera comes with PowerDirector for editing video, Power Producer for authoring and burning DVDs, and PowerDVD viewing DVDs. It’s all the software you need, and it’s pretty easy to use.

Tip: You can skip a step (Power Director) by renaming the video files in the camera with a .VOB extension before opening PowerProducer, which otherwise won’t be able to see them.

Mac Users beware…

While the camera comes with software for the Mac, the included Capty Edit EX doesn’t take you all the way to DVD—It’s actually a very good frame-by-frame editor, but frankly most people just want to burn DVDs. To do that with a Mac, you’ll need to put out another $60 to purchase CaptyDVD from Pixela, a Japanese MPEG-2 software house. This is the option I recommend. CaptyDVD is quite easy to use, and because the video does not need to be transcoded from the camera, burning happens pretty much at the speed of your DVD burner.

Otherwise, Mac users don’t have any good options. I tried the freeware authoring software Sizzle (http://mac.softpedia.com/get/Video/Sizzle-b.shtml), but It demultiplexed the video and audio streams and produced video that wouldn’t play on my computer or DVD player. Apple’s own iMovie and iDVD editing software require you to transcode to QuickTime and then back to MPEG-2—taking enormous amounts of time, loosing quality in the process, and eliminating the advantage of having the video pre-encoded in the first place. Plus, you will need to have paid $20 for Apple’s MPEG-2 decoder in order to import the Everio’s video files. The final thing I tried, using VirtualPC from Microsoft and simply using the PC tools to author the DVD, worked, but was unbearably slow.

Similar Models

The camera reviewed was the JVC Everio GZ-MG30U. The GZ-MG20U is the same camera with a 20GB hard disk. The GZ-MG40U and GZ-MG50U have 5 Megapixel CCDs and 20 and 30 GB hard disks respectively.

Conclusion and Recommendations

Recording directly to hard disk is a great idea. But this incarnation from JVC doesn’t solve the ease-of-use problem that plagues digital home video—at least, not until the Apacer AD330 directly connected DVD burner is actually available to purchase or bundle with the camera. If you have to involve a general purpose PC in order to function, you’re not going to win any ease-of-use awards. Also, JVC has to solve the USB disconnect causing errors and loosing data problem before we could recommend these cameras to anyone.

JVC could have made the camera better by authoring basic DVD titles directly in the camera, so that they could be exported and burned without using a complicated 3rd party application—or even better, directly output to any USB DVD burner. If a proprietary burner is required, it should be bundled with the camera. Bundling would be a lot more compelling to the average consumer and would allow for an “apples to apples” cost comparison with direct-to-DVD camcorders.

For people with a lot of computer experience who don’t mind the DVD authoring cycle, the JVC Everio’s could be compelling. For everyone else, well, keep holding your breath. We’ll report on the Apacer AD330 as soon as we can find one.

Update: See our Follow up article with a more experienced take on this camcorder.