A Day with Will – JVC

The S14 outside of Aaron Cassan’s shop – Import Car Doctor. Ricky Chu and I were shooting some corporate work. This gave me the chance to try out some new gear – a JVC HM100u and a Letus 35 Extreme adapter with some Canon FD lenses. 

Thanks to Will Law, Aaron Cassan, Amanda, Nicole, Jimmy, and everyone else at DC Sports for their help.

The rear three quarter of my Nissan.

Import Car Doctors.

John Naderi’s built RSX chillin at Aaron’s

Ricky getting ready to do an oil change on a Lexus.

The JVC HM100u – shared focus and zoom ring- not the best controls.

View through the LCD.

Little known fact, I was an auto tech for a summer and did hundreds of oil changes- lube, oil, filter. Ricky adds.

The JVC records to affordable SD class 6 (and higher) cards. It writes quicktime files with the Sony EX XD Cam Codec- which uses MPEG Long GOP video codec. With the difference being that Sony cameras like the EX-1 and EX-3 write to MP4 files and need to be wrapped into quicktimes. While the JVC writes directly as a XD Cam Quicktime file. Saving some time on the import process. Final Cut Pro 6 also natively recognizes the XD codec so there is no rendering (until filters/plug ins are applied).

Grills. 

Another feature I liked about the JVC GY-HM100u is the CAM/MEDIA button which is a hard switch on the back of the EX series Sony cameras. The JVC transitions quickly between write/read/playback modes- while the Sony cameras stutter a bit and take noticeably longer. 

Overall after a couple of days shooting with the JVC- the camera is insanely light- almost too light. The controls, leave more manual rings and controls to be desired- independent zoom, aperture, and focus rings. Better designed menus. Aesthetically  and functionally they are lacking. I’m interested to shoot some motion shots with a higher shutter speed- to test the CCDs. The EX1 and EX3 suffer from CMOS- heavy pan and fast action clocking/sensor refreshing- similar to jello cam- on a CMOS based DSLR or Point n Shoot- where the image comes out distorted diagonally at speed- instead of blurring horizontally- which would be the case with film or the human eye. I’m looking forward to pushing the limits and build quality of the JVC GY-HM100u. More to come…