The smallest 3-chip professional AVCHD camcorder
In December 2006 Panasonic launched the first professional AVCHD camcorder, the AG-HSC1, or as the booklet described it, “the world’s smallest 3-chip AVCHD camcorder with professional features”. Panasonic targeted “entry-level professionals”, who would find the camcorder “ideal for capturing natural, professional-level high definition recordings”.
The camcorder creates HD image from three 520Kpix CCDs thanks to a smart setup with pixel shift, but what are those professional features Panasonic alluded to? The camcorder has a 38.5-mm lens, a trio of ¼-inch CCD sensors, it compresses 1080i video into digital files using H.264 codec also known as AVC at either 6, 9 or 13 Mbit/s.
There is a tripod socket at the bottom, but no shoe on the top. A 3-inch flip-out LCD monitor is larger than usual, but there is no viewfinder. There is a microphone input, but no dedicated headphone output. White balance, exposure, focus and audio level can be set manually, but there is no XLR input, no HD-SDI output and there is no focus ring.
The lens is protected with integrated lens shutters and a sort of a tiny hood, which has a 43-mm thread for attachments. This hood is mostly decorative and can be removed, revealing another 43-mm thread on the main body.
Similar to HDV camcorders, the raster size is 1440×1080, and with AVC being about twice more efficient than MPEG-2, the image quality is comparable to HDV at only half the bitrate.
If you have read my earlier article about the Panasonic HDC-SD1, the first HD camcorder to record onto SD cards, you may experience déjà vu, as the two camcorders look very similar.
Indeed, the AG-HSC1 is identical to the HDC-SD1 in every detail but color, which is described in the booklet as “satin-finished metallic gray to prevent reflections”.
At the time of the release, both the consumer and the professional models support SD and SDHC cards up to 4GB, simply because 4GB was the largest capacity available at the time. At the highest bitrate such a card stores 40 minutes of video.
If you needed more recording time, you could either buy more cards — 4 GB cards were priced around $100-$150 in the middle of 2007 — or you could use the SD Media Storage supplied with the camcorder. The SD Media Storage was, basically, a 40GB hard disk drive in a custom housing, which had an SD card slot and two buttons on the top.
You would insert a card and press Copy to dump the content of a card onto the hard disk drive. Then you would clean and reuse the card for another 40 minutes of shooting.
The AG-HSC1U comes standard with a portable 40 GB media storage unit for off-loading content from the 4GB SDHC memory card. The 40 GB hard disk drive can hold the contents of ten 4 GB SDHC memory cards and has a built-in rechargeable battery. — from the brochure.
The SD Media Storage could run off batteries, but used different battery type than the camcorder itself. It could not copy videos from the hard disk drive back to a card. It used USB 2 for connecting to a computer — USB 3 was announced two years after the camcorder launched.
The SD Media Storage is hopelessly obsolete now, but the camcorder itself remains perfectly usable 18 years after its introduction. It supports SDHC cards to the fullest extent of the standard, accepting 32 GB cards that cost less than $10 and store 6 hours of video. Third-party batteries are available for just a fraction of the price of the original Panasonic battery packs.
Speaking about batteries, you can buy non-original batteries cheaply now, but they run out of juice in the same 40-something minutes as the original ones. What if you need to shoot for longer without interruptions? The camcorder cannot use a larger battery pack, because the battery is fully concealed. The answer is an external battery pack.
The official solution is the Panasonic VW-VH04 adapter. It consists of a dummy battery connected to a battery holder with a cable. A small battery cable cover in the camcorder’s battery cover can be moved away for the cable to pass through. You can use a battery that is twice or even four times more powerful than the standard battery. Carry the battery holder in a fanny pack and you will look like a pro!
My DIY solution is a generic 9V battery connected to the power adapter port. The voltage is slightly lower than nominal 9.3V, but the camcorder works just fine. With this setup I can get about 3 hours of uninterrupted shooting. The catch is that the camcorder expects stable power through the power adapter port; when the battery depletes, the camcorder turns off abruptly without closing the video file currently being recorded, which can cause the loss of the last recorded segment. The camcorder records in 4GB chunks, this is a limitation of FAT32 file system used on SD and SDHC cards.
By recording into digital files instead of on magnetic tape, the camcorder was on the forefront of tapeless computer-based HD shooting and editing when it was released. You can transfer video files from the camcorder either by connecting the camcorder to a computer via USB, or by removing the memory card and using an SD card reader. Files, dumped to the SD Media Storage device can be uploaded on a computer via USB as well.
In 2006 the concept of online streaming video was at its infancy, so Panasonic envisioned that the edited video could be delivered either on Blu-Ray disk in all its HD glory, or downscaled to standard definition on a DVD disc. Another option that Panasonic have not mentioned, was delivering on an AVCHD disc, which is HD content on a DVD disc. Such a disc is not playable on a DVD player, but can be played on a Blu-Ray disc player. By using DVDs you could save on the cost of the media. The AVCHD specification limits the bitrate for DVD discs to 18 Mbit/s, which is good for half an hour of high-quality HD video.
Unlike tape-based DV and HDV camcorders, the HSC1 does not have a Firewire port, but it does have an HDMI port in case you need uncompressed video stream for legacy workflow.
So, is this really a professional camcorder? Not by a long shot. I believe that Panasonic wanted to be first to release a professional AVCHD camcorder, but this is all Panasonic had available at the time. Panasonic was in such a hurry that the camcorder was released as “AVCHD”, not “AVCCAM” — the branding Panasonic created later for its professional AVCHD camcorders.
The AG-HSC1 lacks so many features that one would have a hard time putting it in a prosumer category, much less a professional one.
On another hand, it was just one of the two camcorder models available at the time, professional or not, that could record high definition video on relatively affordable solid-state media. The other was the HDC-SD1. 🔲
