Hi there guys, I'm Chris Bowden with the Gate Group and we have fabulous new toys. One of the newest things we've just gotten in is the JVC HM100U camera and this thing is awesome. We wanted to take a quick minute and give you guys an overview of the camera and this is the case that we have it in. So I'll take the camera out of the case and I'll cover the basics of the camera. Now the camera comes with the remote and the batteries and all the other stuff. It comes disassembled but it'll take you 30 seconds to put it together. It's not really that big a deal. So this is the HM100U camera. Alright, so let's take a look at the camera. Now here's some cool things. The first thing that for us was the big changes. This is our first real professional level camera. We've had other professional cameras around here but they're all in teak so it's a night and day difference. This one is all digital. It shoots in full HD and I cannot say enough good things about this camera. It's fabulous. Now you should know, unlike most of the equipment that we use around here, we did not actually get this donated from JVC. They gave us a bit of a price cut on it and we thanked them for that. But beyond that, we paid for this and that's kind of a rare thing around here for us. We actually did pay several thousand dollars for these cameras. We bought two of them and if you have any questions about the video quality, well, camera number two is the one that we're shooting this on right now. So here's some basics of the camera. Let's take a look at it. Alright, on the front of the camera you've got the lens hood so we'll take that off a second. Now on the outside of the lens hood, right here you have a spot to mount a filter. This takes a 72 millimeter filter which is pretty big. You can find them at most camera stores. It's not that big a deal. The lens hood also contains the shutter system here for the lens cover and that's what the JVC cameras use instead of like the plastic clip on the lens cover and this way you can't lose it. So that's a good thing. This clips right on here with a simple band at mount and there's a smaller 49 millimeter filter. Actually it's a 46 millimeter filter on the inside and you can see we've got one on here just a simple UV filter. I recommend for anybody out there who has a camcorder that you know even if you just buy a consumer grade one most of them will take a filter. Get a standard UV filter which is a fancy way of saying piece of glass. That's all the UV filter is pretty much a window and it will help protect your lens from getting abuse on the front of it so that's always a good thing. And then you just line it up on the bayonet and give it a twist of about a third turn and it's set. The next thing back is this which this alone justifies us buying these cameras. It allows us to do manual focus and that is a wonderful thing. You cannot do manual focus on a lot of the consumer level of cameras and it's a nightmare because a lot of stuff that we do shots like this where I've got a busy background with a lot of white, faded and out of focus. You'll see this in a lot of our older videos and the hardest one for us is the high voltage physics stuff. Lightning bolts are a nightmare to try and shoot with auto focus. It just throws a huge wobbly. So now expect lots of new images of Gemini and Arturus and Project Mercury and all the other Tesla coils. So the next thing you'll see is the neutral density filter which is just a little switch. This is fabulous that they built it into the camera. It's great. As a rule it's real simple. If you're shooting outside flip it on. If you're shooting inside flip it off. There's more to it than that but this is enough just to get your hands around it. Something back is zoom or focus switch and if it's set up for focus or down for zoom depending on which one you have selected depends on which this does. This isn't just a manual focus ring. It can be used for manual zoom as well. There's actually three places to zoom on the camera. You can use this. You can use up here on the top, the hand hold toggle or on the inside of the viewfinder you can use the little knob here to zoom in or out. So that's kind of cool. There's a couple of user programmable buttons and you can make them do different things. It's just user one, user two. There's a third one hidden in here. Guaranteed that you'll probably never use the damn thing but it's in there. Down on the bottom you've got gain controls, white balance, your autofocus, manual focus switch, the full auto switch and that's pretty much it for the main controls for video. Up on top is the audio controls and this is a totally separate unit. You can take this off but it just hooks on with a simple thumb screw and one cable over here. This mounts the entire top audio and handle rig and this is another thing that changes video for us in a big way because it allows us to have actual XLR inputs. Now the camera has an onboard shotgun microphone which works really well especially for close in presentation stuff. In fact to give you an idea right now I'm using my wireless body pack mic but right now everything you're hearing is coming from the onboard camera microphone and I'm standing about 8-10 feet away from the camera right now across a very big echoey room and it works great. The onboard mics are great for close up talking head type things. If you want to get like a crowder something they can be a bit of a pain in the butt. They've got excellent rejection characteristics so the microphone is very sensitive to the front but very not sensitive to the back and sides. We've done some testing with it involving the steady cam in that and Mikey shuffles his feet and he's got big clumpy boots and the microphone doesn't pick up the boots or anything like that at all but it picked up me talking just fine so that test came out great. It's got a tally light on the front. There's another little tally light built into it but this one is the one that we always use. You can turn them on or off in different sightings in the menus. The other thing that'll let you do is you've got two XLR inputs here and you can switch what goes where, you can switch it for mic or line. It's got a built in 48 volt phantom power. It's got manual or automatic levels. It's got knobs for the levels and all that and there's a cold shoe up on top. There's another cold shoe down here but it gets taken up when you put the handle on so this way you've still got one to mount like a light or something like that on it. Now here's where we get into one of the coolest features of the HM100U. This little door down here because you'll notice there's nowhere on the camera to put a tape and this isn't one of those with a hard drive built inside. This camera shoots directly to these. SDHC Class 6 compact flashcards. They won't work with anything else that includes higher. You can't use like a Class 50 or a Class 10 or anything like that. Pretty sure a 50 doesn't exist yet but yeah. Only SDHC 6. It's very fussy like this but it's worth it. And SDH 6's are pretty ubiquitous right now. It'll take up to a 32 gigabyte and that's just fabulous. You just click them in there. It's got two slots for them and the way it works is this is A and this is B and there'll be a little light that comes on to tell you which card it's writing to and when it fills up the first card it starts writing to the second card and it's beautiful. It's a simple system and it makes working with the video a lot easier because you can pop the cards out of the camera or the way we do it on the back there's a USB plug and it's just a simple USB mini plug. You can plug this right into your computer and just copy the files right off. It records in the MOV format as well as MP4 formats. The MOV will let you drop video directly into like Final Cut Pro and it just magically works. Now there's a whole world of us out there that work in Windows and Linux based systems. So for the rest of us don't even try to use the damn MOV files. A lot of our other cameras work in MOV files like the little camera and stuff like that work in MOV files but they're JVC so they just had to throw one little bit of file weirdness in there just to annoy me I think and the MOV files are some WizBang format that I could not get to work in After Effects Adobe Premiere or Sony Vegas 9 or 8. So if you can find a way to do that by all means comment and let me know because I'd love to be using it but I couldn't get it to work. And I've got all the big codec packs I got the CCTP and I've got the Gordian nut and all that jazz I couldn't get to work. So maybe there's some hint to it JVC you guys you can make that better.