people worried about P2 are people who don't shoot seriously anyway

[joshtownsend]

Obviously P2 and the HVX is way cheaper than shooting HD like they did in STAR WARS 2 and ONCE UPON A TIME IN MEXICO.

P2 cards and the hdv are only for shooting features, TV and commercials.

If you want to shoot features or shorts in HD 10 grand is a great deal for 2 p2 cards and the hvx. If you need more then 30-40 minutes of takes between set-ups, your doing somethig wrong. It takes at least 20 minutes to change set up's and by then your hd cards are dump onto two raid drive (one for back up).

If you were shooting 16mm or 30 mm youd have to wait even longer depending on the film mag size.

If you don't want to shoot HD movies or TV or commercials buy another camera. The JVC is nice except for the mpeg2 thing.

The folks who have problems with P2 cards and price are the ones that don't shoot much anyway and blame it on waiting for equiptment that 'looks like film' . That or they are folks hoping to use the cam for long shoots like event photography, documentaries and such. Something this camera isn't designed for.

If you wanna shoot HD and have real slow and fast motion like HD films that play in theaters nationwide, this camera will save you so much money even if you end up spend 5 grand on p2 cards

You casual shooters should stick with the SD format and maybe spend the extra on a mini 35 and lenses.

I'm getting a HDV when they come out. Until then I I'm going to continue shooting with the awesome dvx and make a festival quality short film and also DP a feature. All before the HVX even comes out.
How many of you are using the future release of the HDX and JVX HD cams as an excuse to put off shooting your own projects?

josh townsend
www.loyaltythemovie.com

[pacificstreet]

I thought the point of progress was that we didn't have to work with the restrictions that we currently have ?

Are short run mags something that "real" filmmakers actually genuinely want or is it just something that they have historically had to put up with ?

To give you an analogy, I don't see many professional photographers bemoaning the fact that the storage cards for their digital SLRs can hold more than 36 exposures.

I agree that people who want this camera want comparable image quality to six figure cameras and I can't see much wrong with that. Because they are on a budget from the very start, they tend to have to fulfill every role on a shoot. That doesn't make them any less of a filmmaker than a Hollywood director with a small army of people dedicated to every facet of the production process. When you are having to do everything, then not having the distraction of concerning yourself with anything other than what is happening in the viewfinder is a good thing.

The issue relatively short run time of P2 cards is not just about wanting to shoot lots of takes of the same scene but more to do with being able to shoot lots of takes of lots of scenes before having to have a time-out to backup to HD.

The issue of the cost of the P2 cards is to do with budget, of course, but also to do with the perceived "fairness" of the pricing compared to other media.

I think its a bit harsh to label anyone who has concerns about P2 as being a "casual" shooter. I think most are very serious shooters with tight financial constraints and those financial constraints are also related to time in terms of having to get the most usable footage out of every working day.

[Mediacre]

Obviously P2 and the HVX is way cheaper than shooting HD like they did in STAR WARS 2 and ONCE APUN A TIME IN MEXICO.

P2 cards and the hdv are only for shooting features, TV and commercials.

If you want to feature or shorts in HD 10 grand is a great deal for 2 p2 cards and the hvx. If you need more then 30-40 minutes of takes between set-ups, your doing somethig wrong. It takes at least 20 minutes to change set up's and by then your hd cards are dump onto two raid drive (one for back up).

If you were shooting 16mm or 30 mm youd have to wait even longer depending on the film mag size.

If you don't want to shoot HD movies or TV or commercials buy another camera. The JVC is nice except for the mpeg2 thing.

The folks who have problems with P2 cards and price are the ones that don't shoot much anyway and blame it on wairting for equiptment tha 'looks like film' that or folks hoping to use the cam for event photography, documentaries and such something this camera isn't designed for.

I you wanna shoot HD and have real slow and fast motion like HD films that play in theaters nationwide, this camera will save you so much money even if you end up spend 5 grand on p2 cards

You casual shooter stick with the SD format and maybe spend the extra on a mini 35 and lenses.

I'm getting a HDV when they come out. Until then I I'm going to continue shooting with the awesome dvx and make a festival quality short filmand DP a feature. All before the HVX even comes out.
How many of you are using the future release of the HDX and JVX HD cams as an excuse to put off shooting your own projects?

josh townsend
www.loyaltythemovie.com


Uh?

[Barry_Green]

The issue of the cost of the P2 cards is to do with budget, of course, but also to do with the perceived "fairness" of the pricing compared to other media.
And that, right there, capsulizes what is totally wrong about the whole attitude people are taking about the P2 concept.

P2 is not "media". It is not comparable to a blu-ray disc, or an HDV tape.

P2 is a container, a capsule, essentially equivalent to a film magazine. It is not the film itself. It is the magazine that holds the film.

So what is the "film" in this analogy? What is the actual "media"? It's whatever you copy the contents of that card onto. Most presumably a hard disk, but could be DVD-R, could be blu-ray discs, could be DLT tapes, could be whatever you want. For the foreseeable future, I predict we'll mostly be using hard disks, such as an off-the-shelf USB2 hard disk, or an ipod, something like that.

I think the argument would be so much easier to understand if people got the concept that you will not be buying multiple P2 cards. Sometimes I wish Panasonic never even introduced the idea of buying more cards, because I think it just confuses people. Save the idea of more cards until after the camera's released, once people get the concept and wrap their heads around this new way of working.

The way to view it is: Buy the camera bundle, at $9995 for the camera and 2 cards -- and that's it. No more cards. No more buying cards. No expensive cards. The camera becomes an all-in-one comprehensive solution. You can offload the cards or swap them out if you want, but they are not the media. They are not what you store your data on. They are more of a "buffer". And the bigger the cards become, the more buffer you get, but in the bundle they're offering it's already storing 40 minutes of 720/24p footage.

So you shoot for a while, and you offload your footage onto a hard disk (the "media"). That's a workflow system that will let you store your footage for substantially *LESS* than you could do with DVCPRO-HD tape, or HDCAM tape.

And if you don't want to do that, or need to shoot for longer record times? Just use the FireStore directly. Which, again, is not really "media", in that you don't hand that over to your client, it's not disposable, it's not what you archive. That's what "media" is for.

The FireStore is a temporary storage device, and yet people are going ga-ga over it in the DV world. You don't archive on a FireStore. You don't hand a FireStore over to your client. You use it to record in the field, as basically a big temporary buffer, and then you copy the footage off for editing or archiving. And then you erase the FireStore, and go back out in the field with it.

P2 is the same type of thing, only much more durable, much faster, more reliable, and bringing new capabilities that current disk-recording solutions can't match (such as 100-megabit 4:2:2 high-def video at 1080 resolution!) And, currently, with shorter record times. But it's the same mentality, the same content, the same workflow. And, with this camera, you can choose either.

A FireStore is not "media" in the way that a blu-ray disc would be considered media, or a tape would be considered media. And neither is a P2 card.

[stephenlnoe]

I tend to agree with Barry on this one. The whole philosophy is to become media-less. The time saved in transferring a file as opposed to capturing from tape has to be factored into the equation. If you get right down to the 'real' cost which includes hard cost (resources such as tape shells) and soft cost (time spent capturing) and money (actual outlay) then you'll see that for the HVX SD solution (DVCPro50) your ROI (return on investment) is in weeks.

If you look at it from the HD perspective then it changes the equation dramatically simply because P2 just does not support a big enough "drive" yet.

[Erik Olson]

Barry,

You've got some good points, but I'd like to take what you said somewhat further.

Let's say that P2 is indeed a temporary buffer, and that this buffer will be regularly emptied to accept new temporary material. Good plan. Now, look at the current pricepoint, and you will see why people are complaining.

I shot 36 hours and 16 hours of footage on my last two documentary projects, eventually dumping about 1/10th of that material into NLE for editing. We used non-chip 64 minute DVCam and 60 minute MiniDV stock, so let's assume an average price per tape of $10 over the shows.

So, $520 in raw stock later, we're still using tape essentially as a temporary buffer in the new NLE age, where the edits take place in the digital domain - not in an online or offline bay using deck to deck A/B edits.

Another bonus of the tape scenario, is that the footage is also "archived" for the near-term on the same buffer it was recorded. No need to worry over it for three to ten years - vault conditions considered.

Like shooting celluloid, where the negative from within the camera becomes a primary archiving tool, tape has inherent value in that the raw stock serves as its own storage solution. The Sony / Panavision Genesis and HD900 / 950 use tape-based acquisition with a street of roughly $1 per minute raw stock cost at present.

Now, all that said, it would seem that tape has a lot going for it - if you discount the hours of batching time vested to get that stock digitized. Everything you gain in lower buffer media cost, you lose through a clunky, slow process for getting the footage into your post-production workflow. The threads here and at Cinematography.com on Superman talk a bit about how cumbersome it is, and will be in the next few years, to batch and pipe entire feature films at full resolution - let alone vault them digitally for future use.

Even the most brittle and flammable nitrate stocks of the last century can be coddled and caressed into providing source material if needed, whereas digital storage, when corrupted or compromised or... whatever, is totally rendered useless.

I have faith that P2 costs will drop considerably, and that we might even have the option to store footage there down the road. For now, the major problem facing the P2 workflow is the wholesale full-resolution storage of hours of HD source material in a safe "offline" environment for future use.

e

[pacificstreet]

Barry,

I actually should have placed the inverted commas around the word media in that sentence.

The film magazine analogy is true to a certain point, except that there is a literal, if not conceptual, argument for saying it is both magazine and film. It is essentially a magazine with proprietary film in it and it is the cost of the "film" that is, at least to me, causing the issues because it doesn't stand good comparison with the cost of what is widely believed to be its component parts.

The point is to some extent moot because the change in workflow when you actually use this system means that you will almost certainly in reality require LESS cards than is commonly believed. Taking the $10K bundle with 2 cards, its still certainly more than a fair price for what you are getting. But the fact that they announced the camera at under $6K has brought the point home about the cost of the cards and, revolutionary or not, they are looking overpriced.

I am also involved in regular photography and have had the same workflow change in the past couple of years since the switch to digital SLRs. If I am covering motor sports, for instance, I take 2 cards and I cycle them between camera and a Disc Steno, which is a one-button device that backups from the card to CD-Rs. This enables me to carry on shooting all day long, as the backup of the card takes less time than it does for me to fill the other card.

By the same token though, I have other assignments where the pace is slower than motor sports and I can take my time, do a lot more post shot review and deletion and, as a consequence, require less immediate storage capability. For these assignments, the Disc Steno stays in the bag and I use two or three cards on their own.

Those two scenarios also illustrate the changeable nature of some of the video work that I do and with the HVX, I will be looking to work in exactly the same manner. By that, I mean I want to have the choice to either use a smaller number of cards with a backup device or a larger number of cards without having to backup in the field. From that standpoint, the price of the P2 cards becomes an issue. As I intend to buy multiple HVXs to replace my multiple DVXs, I also want a larger number of cards to provide that flexibility to more than one job that they will be used for on any given day.

I'm mindful of the fact that with my DVXs and a Firestore, I can insure against the drive failing by carrying emergency DV tapes. In most instances, I can also go and buy some to keep me going. Its the same with my photography, as media cards become ever more affordable I will eventually use the Disc Steno less and carry more cards. There is also a reasonable chance of being able to buy spare cards in an emergency if the Disc Steno fails too. With the cost and nature of the P2 cards, carrying spares or locating spares easily in the field aren't really options from day one, so it will cost me more than perhaps it should to work the way that I want to.

So, my point isn't about buying P2 cards like I currently buy DV tapes, just about having enough to match the way that I want to work.

I'm right behind the concept of P2 and I'm eagerly awaiting every benefit that it is going to bring but I want the price to be right so that EVERYONE will get behind it and reduce the cost per gig in the same way that we have seen with digital camera cards. If this also brings higher capacity cards around quicker so that we don't have to even think about the swap/backup methods then so much the better.

[PKraft]

This appears to be a classic hen-and-egg syndrom.
If the price of the P2 cards were further down, more people, so they say, would love to buy and use it.
On the other hand, the price would drop significantly, if more users would opt for P2 technology and thus buy and use more P2 cards.

Any solutions?

[araujofh]

And that, right there, capsulizes what is totally wrong about the whole attitude people are taking about the P2 concept.

P2 is not "media". It is not comparable to a blu-ray disc, or an HDV tape.

P2 is a container, a capsule, essentially equivalent to a film magazine. It is not the film itself. It is the magazine that holds the film.

So what is the "film" in this analogy? What is the actual "media"? It's whatever you copy the contents of that card onto. Most presumably a hard disk, but could be DVD-R, could be blu-ray discs, could be DLT tapes, could be whatever you want. For the foreseeable future, I predict we'll mostly be using hard disks, such as an off-the-shelf USB2 hard disk, or an ipod, something like that.

I think the argument would be so much easier to understand if people got the concept that you will not be buying multiple P2 cards. Sometimes I wish Panasonic never even introduced the idea of buying more cards, because I think it just confuses people. Save the idea of more cards until after the camera's released, once people get the concept and wrap their heads around this new way of working.

The way to view it is: Buy the camera bundle, at $9995 for the camera and 2 cards -- and that's it. No more cards. No more buying cards. No expensive cards. The camera becomes an all-in-one comprehensive solution. You can offload the cards or swap them out if you want, but they are not the media. They are not what you store your data on. They are more of a "buffer". And the bigger the cards become, the more buffer you get, but in the bundle they're offering it's already storing 40 minutes of 720/24p footage.

So you shoot for a while, and you offload your footage onto a hard disk (the "media"). That's a workflow system that will let you store your footage for substantially *LESS* than you could do with DVCPRO-HD tape, or HDCAM tape.

And if you don't want to do that, or need to shoot for longer record times? Just use the FireStore directly. Which, again, is not really "media", in that you don't hand that over to your client, it's not disposable, it's not what you archive. That's what "media" is for.

The FireStore is a temporary storage device, and yet people are going ga-ga over it in the DV world. You don't archive on a FireStore. You don't hand a FireStore over to your client. You use it to record in the field, as basically a big temporary buffer, and then you copy the footage off for editing or archiving. And then you erase the FireStore, and go back out in the field with it.

P2 is the same type of thing, only much more durable, much faster, more reliable, and bringing new capabilities that current disk-recording solutions can't match (such as 100-megabit 4:2:2 high-def video at 1080 resolution!) And, currently, with shorter record times. But it's the same mentality, the same content, the same workflow. And, with this camera, you can choose either.

A FireStore is not "media" in the way that a blu-ray disc would be considered media, or a tape would be considered media. And neither is a P2 card.

I second that.

Edit: This message was supposed to show up after Barry's message. What happened here? Maybe my browser is going nutts.

[Zim]

I don't think there is anything wrong with people wanting to be able to shoot longer and cheaper. Even real filmakers are on a budget, not just the causual shooter!!

and I think the market will solve that problem.

also only real photographers use cameras like Adam Ansel used. One picture.

[pacificstreet]

I tried the one picture approach but it was tricky for Motorsport because the talent just won't keep still enough ;)

Ansel Adams once said that "Sometimes I do get to places when God is ready to have somebody click the shutter". Myself and God never seem to be able synchronise that conveniently, so I tend to need more memory cards.

[stephenlnoe]

Hi,

What's been written in this thread about data loss is baloney. The same things can happen to film as to tapes as to hard drives. You can damage a hard drive but still get the info off of the drive. It cost, and it cost dearly but so does film restoration.

Magnetic has even taken the place of tape rotations in alot of backup facilities. Don't get me wrong, I know there is risk involved with archiving in magnetic (HDD) but the risk is less than almost any other format.

[joshtownsend]

FIrst off sorry about the drunken ramble I fixed the typo's

"I think its a bit harsh to label anyone who has concerns about P2 as being a "casual" shooter. I think most are very serious shooters with tight financial constraints and those financial constraints are also related to time in terms of having to get the most usable footage out of every working day."

I wasn't talking about them in particular. A varicam is 100,000 grand and media is still expensive. With the HVX you can spend 25 grand and have hours to shoot and you still get the HD. The P2 cards will go down like cell phones and DVD-r's did. That's the problem?

[ChuckS]

P2 is not video, nor is it film, it is data. If you look at working with P2 the same way that you do either of the other formats, you are missing part of the point of it. It is natural for people to try to figure out how to use P2 in the way that they use film or video and the early adapters of the technology will probably be quite successful at it. But there is a much larger systemic issue that I think the people who are trying to figure out how to use it are grappling with.

Instead of trying to fit this new technology into existing workflows we should be trying to figure out how to create a workflow that is uniquely P2, something that you won’t be able to accomplish with video or film even if you wanted too. P2 puts you into an IT environment immediately, so I believe that makes the problem of efficient workflow more of a computer science problem than a camera format problem. There are some really cool IT technologies out there that could be used to change the way we look at developing a whole new system of producing film.

The problem is that most of us aren’t looking at how we can do this differently; we are trying to figure out how we can integrate P2 into what we already have. There’s a lot of status-quo pressure to do that, Apple includes the DVCProHD codec with FCP so we [and them] can continue to work the way we always have – production in a box. For many that will be just fine. But for those who want the flexibility to really tell a better story, to allow others to collaboratively work with just the part of the bit stream they require, how and when they require it, the production in a box approach doesn’t really work.

For those of you who have experienced this limitation you might go hmmm, for those that haven’t you’re probably thinking this is bullshit, AVID, FCP or PPro [whatever your favorite NLE] it does everything I need. I’ve said this in another thread, P2 should be a great thing but they really screwed up the marketing and position of this new technology. We should not be debating the cost of the cards but rather the intrinsic value of the technology. Of coarse they could have quelled much of the concerns over this camera if they would have had a prototype at NAB which actually produced some pictures. Now they are going to have a real fight on their hands.

[thisiswells]

P2 is a container, a capsule, essentially equivalent to a film magazine. It is not the film itself. It is the magazine that holds the film.


The film magazine analogy is true to a certain point, except that there is a literal, if not conceptual, argument for saying it is both magazine and film. It is essentially a magazine with proprietary film in it and it is the cost of the "film" that is, at least to me, causing the issues because it doesn't stand good comparison with the cost of what is widely believed to be its component parts.



Let's say that P2 is indeed a temporary buffer, and that this buffer will be regularly emptied to accept new temporary material. I shot 36 hours and 16 hours of footage on my last two documentary projects, eventually dumping about 1/10th of that material into NLE for editing...(Snip)...$520 in raw stock later, we're still using tape essentially as a temporary buffer.

Guys, Guys, Guys. P2 is both a magazine and the film. Are we overlooking any factors of film and HD aquisition that could be revelant in light of the circumstances?

Magazine-to-film relationship is a good comparison in defense of the shorter-than-MiniDV runtimes with P2 cards in HD. However, the thing to remember is the price of processing and telecine of the film material. So, while you could say the inconvenience of a film is the same as P2, it will never be an even field because once you've shot the HD, you only need a place to store it. You don't have to process it and you don't have to convert it to HD tape for editing. So--everyone is accurate here that there is not a reasonable comparison between the two besides they all have short runtimes and are both more expensive to shoot than MiniDV. EDIT I suppose you could say that you have to transfer film to harddrives, too. It's just a whole lot more inconvenient and expensive to do so. DONE EDIT

As for the documentary type of shooter with sixty hours of footage... first of all that wouldn't even be possible with film, you know this. As far as HD aquisition, the longest DVCPRO-HD tape that will fit inside a camera only holds 46 minutes. As spam messaged thoughout this forum, 2-8GB P2 cards provide 40 minutes at 720p24, less at higher resolution or faster framerates.

I personally like the idea of the P2/HVX200 system and while it brings up serious workflow complications for me, since I primarily am a MiniDV shooter, it still offers about the same level of inconvenience as the other formats it stands to replace. Hope this perspective has been useful.

brian wells

[Erik Olson]

Chuck,

I agree that P2 might likely benefit from a fresh and unique workflow. I don't know what it is, and we don't have much to go on yet aside from the groundwork done at CBS in DVCPro P2.

Presently, there are benchmark items like Avid and all the other powerful NLE edit solutions, progressive-scan and 24 frame DV acquisition among others which have empowered independent filmmakers like no technologies before them. As content creators, we're living in a time where we effectively have the ability to "self-publish" movies with relatively small capital investment.

P2 is another piece of this puzzle, but should not necessarily upset the cart for its contribution. I, for one, don't want to entirely reinvent the way I work for P2.

For now, I see dropping P2 mags into a slot and duplicating the data to a standard drive for storage and subsequent use in editing. I'd also like to continue to use products like next-generation DVRack in the studio, when a tether doesn't inhibit workflow.

I think P2 will streamline processes already in-place rather than replace them.

e

[jonallen]

P2 is not video, nor is it film, it is data.
Wrong. P2 is video the same way that Firestore and any other digital-based recording system is. It's the simple fact that the memory is solid-state rather than having moving parts like a hard drive or tape system.
P2 is recorded with a certain type of codec & has a certain resolution, both of which are inherent to video.
I can take "video" with my digital camera, does the simple fact that it records to flash memory cards make it "not video"? of course not, it is still video, not very good video, but video none the less.
This is like saying when stuff at work is saved to the backup tape system, it is no longer data, simply because it is no longer "online" or on a HDD system.
By far the biggest problem for field & ENG production using this camera is that you have to lug around something to dump your cards to, and yes, that's a serious problem for people in run-and-gun situations. However, this does not make someone a "casual" shooter.

[Terry_Lasater]

I look forward to using P2 and the HVX later this year or early next.

One thing that amuses me is how it's convenient for "filmmakers" to say that Panasonic designed P2 to fit their workflow - comparing short record times of P2 to short durations of film magazines, etc.

Shortly after the release of the Panasonic SPX800 (which uses P2), I remember "newsies" on 2-Pop saying the short record times and acquisition methods lent themselves more to ENG type shooting.

Of course, I realize that the HVX is modeled after the DVX which was designed *more* for indie filmmakers than ENG-types, etc.

I just find it amusing that there are *some* peeps here who seem quick to adapt to the short record times of the initial P2 offerings and are taking the opportunity to let everyone else know that they are a "filmmaker" and that they don't give a $h#t about what anyone else's needs may be as only they have the right to use a camera. :insert rolling eye smiley here:

[dsleep]

Really good points by Stephen and Barry.

I am surprised the point of time/money savings of shooting P2 over tape. For me, the P2 cards will pay for themselves in short order.

As far as the reliability of hard drives, I worked on a series of long form (and I mean looooong) videos that we used a firestore system to record. We used off the shelf IDE drives to store (they were on tape, also)all of the material. We had several terabytes of data on hard drive that we were Fed Ex-ing back and forth with the people doing web compression for the project. So we were shipping these IDE drives out, getting them back, tossing them in a box, and storing them over the course of a year. With the exception of Firestore malfunctions onsite, we never had any problems with data loss/corruption, we never once had to refer back to the tapes.
Now, without tape I would want some kind of redundancy but there are many inexpensive options.
I am very psyched overall about not having to mess with tape.

[Barry_S]

***NOTICE***

I'm locking this thread because of the trolling/baiting nature of the of the original post. People are free to debate P2 or any other topic in an appropriately professional manner. When you post, please remember to be respectful of others that may not agree with you or have different needs than you. Thanks.

[Jarek Zabczynski]

P2 isn't the problem. Right now its the cost and storage capacity that making people think twice. If card we're available ow that could hold an hour of HD at the current price point I don't think anyone would be complaining. I for one will be looking into the HVX and the portable hard-disk recorders that will probably follow.