We're headed to Africa. Sunscreen? Check. GPS phone? Check. 1920x1080, 10-bit, 4:2:2, AVC-Intra P2 camcorder? Check.

Okay, that last part wasn't really the original plan, but when Panasonic found out that we were headed to Africa to gather footage for a wildlife filming training DVD, they offered a tantalizing morsel: how'd we like to shoot some of the footage on the brand-new HPX300? We already had our HPX170s packed, but the prospect of using the newest camera was too appealing so we made room, bought more luggage, checked our less-important bags, and headed out on the 24-hour plane flight to South Africa.

How did this all come about? For those who remember NAB 2008, I was doing a live blog from the Panasonic press conference, and some stunning HPX3000 footage came on-screen, elephants filmed by Dereck and Beverly Joubert. It was so magnificent that I typed then and there:

So, here we are 9 months later, and Kevin Railsback and I went to Africa. Only, it wasn't with an HPX3000 - it was an HPX300.

So what is an HPX300? Well, let's list the specs of the $48,000 HPX3000: a full 1920x1080 three-chip sensor block, recording to a full-raster 1920x1080 intraframe-only, 10-bit, 4:2:2 recording format (the stellar AVC-Intra format, certified Gold by Discovery HD), interchangeable lenses, full-size shoulder-mount form factor, high-def color viewfinder... hey, those also happen to be the specs for the (approximately) $10,000 HPX300 too! Now, there is of course a massive difference, and that's in chip size – the HPX3000 utilizes 2/3” CCDs, and the HPX300 uses 1/3” CMOS chips (branded “3MOS” by Panasonic).

The HPX300 is groundbreaking for a number of reasons. For example:

1. it's the first camera from Panasonic's Broadcast division that uses CMOS chips instead of CCD sensors.
2. it marks a much more affordable way to get the AVC-Intra recording format; prior to the HPX300, the cheapest AVC-Intra camcorder was the $30,000 HPX2000.
3. It's the first interchangeable-lens 1/3” HD camera from Panasonic, using the same bayonet lens mount as JVC's HD100/HD200 line and earlier 1/3” bayonet-mount standard-def Panasonic cameras.
4. And, it's the only 1920x1080 chipset in Panasonic's Broadcast lineup, short of the HPX3000 and VariCam HPX3700. The fact that it comes in with an estimated street price of well under $10,000 makes it one of the most significant new camera introductions that Panasonic has made since the original HVX200.

P2 ON THE ROAD

There are people who would question the practicality of using the P2 solid-state memory recording format to document a two-week trip in the wilds of Africa. To those people I would say: “Have you tried P2 lately?” It was effortless. P2's come a long way; there was no need for hauling around extra equipment or hiring dedicated P2 offloading personnel. The HPX300 and the HPX170 both have two card slots; we used two 32GB cards and a single 16GB card. It turned out to be far more than we needed. We shot 720pN on the HPX170, and 1080/24pN, 1080/60i, and 720/60P on the HPX300. Our days consisted of 7-hour game drives in the morning, followed by a four-hour rest period in the middle of the day (when the light was the worst and least-flattering, and all the animals were hunkered down in the shade anyway), followed by a four-hour game drive in the afternoon. We always had lots and lots of available recording time; we'd offload footage during the afternoon break. I brought six hard drives to store the footage; three 320GB drives and three 500GB drives. They took up about the same amount of space as a single Anton Bauer battery, and were more than enough space to hold two copies of all the footage we shot. Total cost? Under $600 for 2.5 terabytes of storage. Try that with tape! When we used P2 to document the 2007 Iditarod, each camera team was allocated eight 8GB P2 cards to use throughout the day. Now, just two years later, you can have that much storage capacity on one card, with no swapping or card management issues, and it's even easier than before.

THE HPG20 "P2 PORTABLE"

To help with offloading, clip management, and field clip review, Panasonic also loaned us a prototype of the dynamite new P2 Portable (HPG20). It's basically a do-everything P2 accessory that acts as a deck, a playback monitor, a slot reader, a live director's monitor, and a P2 offloading device. When used as an offloader, the P2 Portable supplies bus power to external USB hard disks so you don't need any additional equipment, you can just use the P2 Portable to power, control, and copy footage to (and from) hard disks. It's like an ultimate P2 Store with unlimited storage. It also acts as an AVC-Intra deck, including 10-bit HD-SDI output AND input! It uses cheap and common DVX/HVX batteries and a single battery powers the unit for hours and hours. I felt lukewarm about the HPG10 “P2 Gear” (the predecessor to this HPG20), but the HPG20 “P2 Portable” adds enough new features to make it a highly desirable piece of equipment; the HD-SDI input to AVC-Intra recording alone makes it well worth 5x the price.

Another way the Portable comes in handy is when dealing with large amounts of footage where much of it is largely irrelevant; for example, you might film twenty minutes of elephant footage waiting for that special moment when something happens (maybe a fight breaks out, etc.) With the P2 Portable you can extract portions of clips and create new clips from them, which leaves you free to delete all the wasted space used up by the footage where nothing was happening. We didn't take too much advantage of this capability but it was very nice to know it was there in case we ran short on hard disk space. After the safari, I used this feature extensively to isolate the “good bits” and export them to new clips in their original codec, making for a simple and easy “highlights reel” in original first-generation AVC-Intra quality.

THE HPX300

Back to the camera: the HPX300 is probably easiest summed up as “Panasonic's answer to Sony's EX3 (and EX1).” You want super-crisp CMOS chips, but with the famous “Panasonic mojo”? Here it is. But say you want a real full-size shoulder mount instead of a handheld (EX1) or pseudo-shoulder (EX3) camera? That's what the HPX300 is. It's huge, in fact – I was very surprised to see just how large the unit is. I was expecting this 1/3” camera to be comparable in size to JVC's 1/3” interchangeable-lens lineup, but instead the HPX300 is every bit as big as the HPX500 or other full-size camcorders. They're not playing around, this is a “real” camera. It also includes a high-def color viewfinder(!) and a Fujinon 17x lens in its suggested retail price.

There's a lot different about this camera. For one thing, it seems to straddle the line between Panasonic's “professional” cameras (the less-expensive AG lineup, such as the AG-HPX170 and AG-HPX500) and the “broadcast” cameras (the more-expensive AJ lineup, such as the AJ-HPX2000 and AJ-HPX3000). The menu settings and control offered over the image are mostly similar to the HPX500, but some operational changes make the camera act like its higher-end “AJ” brothers. It supports the venerable and ubiquitous DVCPRO-HD format but we primarily used it with the new AVC-Intra format (obviously; who wouldn't use D5-HD caliber 10-bit intraframe recording?)

AN HD COLOR VIEWFINDER

And The HPX500 and the XDCAM-HD cameras come with black-and-white, standard-definition viewfinders. The HPX300 includes a high-def color viewfinder. Now, while it has a color HD viewfinder, it's not quite the same as the viewfinder you'd find on, say, an HPX2700 – that viewfinder alone might cost several thousand dollars (Panasonic just introduced the CVF100G color LCoS viewfinder for the AJ cameras, it costs $8500 by itself!), whereas the LCoS viewfinder on the HPX300 is built into the camera. It rotates and slides left/right like a standard viewfinder but it's permanently cabled to the camera. You can't add or use a different viewfinder with the HPX300. There's not really any need to, as the view through the finder is exquisite, but AJ-series camera operators will note that the HPX300's viewfinder doesn't have separate brightness or peaking knobs/dials on it. Instead you control those functions through the camera's menu system. That's the tradeoff you have to make to get an HD color viewfinder on a camera in this price bracket. It's a small price to pay to have a real, high-def, LCoS viewfinder in full color.

The HPX300 supports four channels of audio recording, two through XLR ports on the rear of the unit, and a third through the mic input on the front; you can also get two channels from a slot-in wireless receiver which gives you four channels (two from the wireless, two from the XLR ports). This differs from the HPX500 which actually supplied four XLR ports. We didn't record any audio for our main shooting so audio performance wasn't evaluated here, other than to say that we do expect that the audio performance should be on par with the HPX500's excellent recordings since the HPX300 uses presumably similar hardware and records uncompressed 16-bit 48KHz audio tracks.

In addition to the viewfinder, there are two HD-SDI output terminals, streaming firewire output (when used in DVCPRO modes), and – get this – a high-def LCD panel. Finally! This is the first camera in Panasonic's broadcast lineup that features an actual high-def LCD, matching the EX1/EX3's LCD for extreme crispness. We traveled very light and didn't even take a monitor along with us; the LCD(with peaking and focus assist) and EVF are plenty adequate for getting razor sharp, super crisp footage. We also made occasional use of a laptop as a monitor (using Adobe's OnLocation software combined with the firewire streaming output) and used the P2 Viewer software or Calibrated's MXF plug-in on the Macbook Pro to review footage in full 1920x1080 glory.

Physically, the HPX300 looks and acts like any other full-size broadcast/ENG camcorder. There's nothing “prosumer” about this product. It uses Anton Bauer mount batteries (and is very power-efficient; a single Dionic 90 battery carried us through 90% of our shoot days by itself). It takes standard interchangeable lenses using the 1/3” bayonet mount, and can use any of the Fujinon or Canon lenses that are available already for the JVC 1/3” HDV cameras. However, it also supports the excellent CAC technology, so if you're shopping for inexpensive glass you'll definitely want to use a lens that supports CAC. CAC (Chromatic Aberration Compensation) is a technology first introduced on the HPX500 which allows the camera to dynamically correct out any purple/green fringing issues on the fly, rather than having the lens manufacturer physically correct them out through layers and layers of expensive coatings. This makes the lenses much less expensive, while avoiding the telltale nasty purple & green fringing that affects other low-cost lenses. The stock Fujinon 17x that comes with the HPX300 utilizes CAC and provides very clean, fringe-free footage; I briefly put the HPX300 up against an EX1 to shoot some charts and was surprised at how significantly cleaner the HPX300/Fujinon combination was, as compared to the amount of fringing and aberration present in the EX1. If you disabled the CAC feature, I doubt I could say the same, but with CAC enabled the HPX300/Fujinon showed decidedly less purple/green fringing.

Being able to use 1/3” lenses with an industry-standard mount is all well and good, but – there aren't too many to choose from. At least, not yet; Canon makes one lens and Fujinon makes about a half dozen. Now, the stock lens is actually quite good, it's sharp and it makes excellent use of the CAC technology. It is a true broadcast style lens with all that that entails, a slick motorized servo zoom and hard stops at infinity and minimum object distance, and real focus, iris and zoom rings (although, remember that you get the lens for free, and the downside of this lens is that it breathes quite noticeably). It has a decent range with a good wide angle of 4.5mm. Its telephoto is pretty good at 77mm, about equivalent to an HPX170 with a 1.6x teleconverter attached. But we wanted more, which is why we went and grabbed a Fujinon 1/3” to 2/3” bayonet adapter. This $700 product lets you mount any 2/3” bayonet lens to the HPX300, opening up the entire world of broadcast glass. You can use Zeiss DigiPrimes, you can use the Canon HJ or KJ lenses, you can get a PL adapter for film lenses... you can use just about any lens with this adapter. We were travelling light, so we could only make room for one additional lens, and since we're shooting wildlife we wanted telephoto reach, so we got the superb Canon KJ21x7.8 IRSE. This is a lens with a 21x zoom factor; it doesn't have much of a wide angle (zooming out to only 7.8mm, vs. the 4.5mm of the stock Fujinon) but it has massive telephoto reach; without the doubler it goes to 164mm; flip in the doubler and you get 328mm. Now, that may not sound like that much to experienced wildlife shooters who shoot on 35mm cameras, but keep in mind that's 328mm on a 1/3” camcorder: using the standard 7.2x multiplier factor, it means that this lens was the equivalent of about a 115mm-2400mm zoom on a 35mm still camera! It gave us incredible reach, about 4x closer than the stock lens.

For our location, we'd selected Kruger National Park in South Africa. South Africa is the most modern, civilized country on the African continent, and Kruger is a massive wonderful national park, with plenty of paved roads, reasonably well-maintained dirt roads, and nice accomodations that include electricity and air conditioning (very highly recommended if you're going to South Africa in January/February, the middle of their Summer!) Kruger's well known for the “Battle at Kruger” YouTube video, and the access to the animals is excellent – there are baboons roaming outside my window right now. We encountered herds of elephants and giraffe and wildebeest and impala and rhinoceroses crossing the road, close enough to touch (if you were fool enough to try!) We filmed dozens of species in their rawest natural habitat, within easy driving range. Make no mistake, there's nothing domesticated about these animals; this isn't a zoo. We did get charged by a bull elephant and it was downright harrowing! The animals here are straight-up wild, you don't feed them and they don't beg, and you are prohibited from getting out of your car or even opening up the doors (except in a few specified locations).

As such, we did almost all our shooting from inside the van, sticking the lens through a sliding window. We mounted the HPX170 to the van using a CineSaddle as a car mount, to get tracking shots walking along with some of the magnificent beasts we encountered near the roads. And we used the extreme telephoto of the Canon lens to capture critters from across rivers hundreds of yards away, including a smackdown between two big bull elephants in a river and a total slapfight among dozens of baboons.

These two cameras are as similar as can be, and as different as night and day. By “similar,” I mean the menu operations are quite comparable and the color and “feel” of the footage is similar; they can intercut well and the famous “mojo” is present in the footage. But the HPX300 is definitely considerably sharper and smoother. It delivered exactly what you'd expect from a 3-chip 1920x1080 sensor block recording to a 10-bit 1920x1080 recording format; there's no pre-filtering or resizing going on, and the results are startlingly crisp imagery. The HPX170 uses spatial offset technology with CCD sensors and delivers great 720p footage, but its 1080p footage wasn't quite up to the same sharpness level as the HPX300, especially in areas where the spatial offset doesn't work as efficiently (primarily when filming with lots of green leaves; in a scenario like that, spatial offset doesn't deliver as much of a resolution enhancement as it can when working with a more cosmopolitan scene which isn't composed of such a monochrome element as a primarily green leaf scene does). The HPX300 footage was also “smoother”; there's a texture to HPX170 footage that wasn't really present on the HPX300 footage. It has the “mojo” but it also has cleaner, slicker footage – as well as being sharper.

Is the HPX300 a “better” camera than the HPX170? Yes. Is the HPX170 a “better” camera than the HPX300? Yes. How can both of these statements be true? Because, as always, “better” is never an absolute – you always have to qualify it by saying “better for a specific purpose.” Unquestionably the HPX300 is sharper, crisper, clearer, with more telephoto reach and more manual control. But the HPX170 was so much quicker to set up and get the shot! Don't discount that factor. With the HPX300 you don't get autofocus, you don't have an “auto” switch, everything is manual (just the way we like it, normally). But when a bull elephant starts charging your second van, do you really want to move the tripod into position, set the camera on it, zoom in to manually focus, pop up the focus assist, zoom out, iris down, and THEN start shooting? The shot's may already gone by then, whereas with the HPX170 it was instantaneous and easy to get all sorts of shots that the larger HPX300 just wasn't best suited for. Yes, side-by-side the HPX300's shots would have been sharper, but sometimes the additional setup time meant we might miss a shot, whereas the HPX170 can go anywhere, instantly, use autofocus and auto modes and get any shot at any time. The HPX300 makes you work more; you will get more sharpness as a result of that work. We used the HPX170 as the primary camera for our wildlife training DVD, using it for interviews and behind-the-scenes, and we used the HPX300 as the primary wildlife footage camera. However, the HPX170 was used for wildlife shots too, especially in cases where the HPX300's size made it the less practical choice. When we encountered a lioness 15 feet off the road lounging in the grass, and wanting to get a low-level shot, I wanted to lower the HPX170 to the ground with a rope, whereas I never would have tried that with the HPX300. But when it came time to get footage of the bull elephants duking it out in the river, there was no question that the HPX300's telephoto made it the right camera for that shot.

The HPX300 uses a fully manually-controllable lens and that lens can be interchanged with other lenses. It is a full-size shoulder-mount unit, rather than a handycam form factor – that's a major advantage in many, many shooting scenarios. It has timecode input and output, genlock, and multiple SDI output ports. It's got a high-def LCD. It does many things better than the HPX170 (as it should, since it is a higher model in the lineup and carries a higher price tag). If I had to choose only one of these cameras... well, I don't know. I'm pretty glad I didn't have to; having both of them was the ideal situation. And if you're wanting to show up to a professional gig where the client may be concerned about the size of the camera, they'll have no qualms about seeing the HPX300 – I doubt very many clients could tell the difference between an HPX300 and an F900. It's certainly in an entirely different league in appearance from the compact shoulder mount size of the HD250 or the semi-shoulder mount of the XLH1 or EX3.

Comparing the 170 to the 300 is really kind of moot anyway. The 300 doesn't compete with the 170. The 170 is a handheld palmcorder, and the 300 is a full-size shoulder rig. The 300 should be compared against its true competition, such as the HPX500, the XDCAM-HD series, the JVC HD250, and (based on 1920x1080 CMOS chips alone) the XDCAM-EX cameras, the EX1 and EX3. And in those comparisons the HPX300 acquits itself incredibly well. It has the sharpness and crispness to match the others, at a lower price tag than almost all of them (MSRP and street prices aren't available to me yet, but my understanding is that it'll street in the same ballpark as the EX3). Only the EX1 is less expensive, and it doesn't have a shoulder mount form factor nor interchangeable lenses, so it's not really directly comparable. The HPX300 doesn't have quite as much menu control over the image as the others do, but it does have a host of features they don't, including:

1. 10-bit AVC-Intra recording, the highest-quality recording format ever put in a camcorder. There is simply no comparison between this and MPEG-2 at 19 or 35 megabits.
2. True shoulder-mount design. The EX1 and EX3 aren't, and the JVC is a mini-size camcorder.
3. 4 channels of audio. Only the HPX500 offers that, anywhere near this price bracket.
4. Wireless receiver slot – wonderful for ENG work.
5. LcoS EVF: way better than the EVF on any of the others; only the EX3's can compare, but that's only a semi-shoulder-mount system so even then it's not directly comparable.
6. The HPX300 has a separate HD LCD panel; with the EX3 the LCD panel is also the EVF. Only the EX1 also has a separate HD LCD panel, and it's comparable to the HPX300's.
7. Waveform and Vectorscope – none of the competition has these tools. The waveform is incredibly useful.

The footage speaks for itself. We organized this trip for acclaimed wildlife cinematographer Kevin J. Railsback to shoot the actual footage, and he created magic (as he always does). Railsback normally shoots with an HVX200 or HPX170, so the HPX300 was a bit of a departure for him. We both were delighted with the amazing clarity and the clean footage we were getting (we optimized the camera for low-noise footage by choosing the -3dB gain setting, combined with slightly higher detail coring and the BPRESS gamma curve). The shades in the skies are smooth and completely free of any banding, due to the 10-bit depth of the codec. We could instantly review any shot by popping up the thumbnails and playing it, or by plugging the P2 card into a laptop computer and using the P2 Viewer program. In the darkest low-light conditions some noise could crop up; I was able to get rid of most of it by using the menu controls. But in the same lighting conditions there would be noise on an EX1, EX3, or HPX170 too, and way more noise on an HD250 or HVX200. The HPX300 is as clean, noise-wise, as an EX1/EX3, but neither is as clean as a full 2/3” system would be.

Here are a few sample clips, uploaded to MotionBox and recompressed to H.264.

As for CMOS vs. CCD: the only way this camera could have come about is through the use of CMOS sensors. Manufacturers simply cannot cram so many pixels on such a small chip when using CCD technology; only CMOS can let you have a full 1920x1080 on a 1/3” progressive-scan chip. CMOS has an advantage in small-chip resolution (not so in big cameras; nearly all 2/3” cameras from the major manufacturers use CCD). But there's always a tradeoff; with that increased resolution on CMOS you also get the famous “rolling shutter” artifacts of skew, wobble, and partial exposure. I had hoped that a wildlife scenario would be one largely immune to rolling shutter artifacts, and it basically was, except that I didn't count on how the extreme telephoto end of the lens would contribute to wobble. When we were using the maximum zoom we had to stay absolutely stationary to avoid moving the camera at all, or the footage could take on a “rubbery”, “stretchy” look. All CMOS camcorders do, it's just part of the technology of the rolling shutter used by practically all commercially-available CMOS-based camcorders, and why I have been publicly tried to point out these characteristics of CMOS. Doesn't matter if you're using a Red, an EX1, an EX3, an Infinity, an HV30 or an HPX300, if you're using CMOS you're going to be subject to rolling shutter behavior. However, as I've always said, forewarned is forearmed. If you know what the characteristics are of each tool, you're prepared to use the right tool for the job. As such, there were some shots that were more practical with the HPX170, especially car-mounted tracking shots. The telephoto reach was great, but the longer the telephoto you used, the more skew you could see. If you need a camera where you will be doing extreme telephoto work and also need to pan and tilt, look into a CCD camera like the HPX500 instead, as a CMOS-based camera like an EX3 or HPX300 will have issues under those circumstances.

But if you want the sharpest, clearest footage possible at the 1/3” chip size, nothing compares to the HPX300. It basically matches the EX1/EX3 for sharpness, and blows away all other 1/3” competitors when it comes to crispness of footage. The res chart shows all 800 lines resolved horizontally, and 800 lines vertically, same as the EX1. I saw no substantial difference in resolution, although there is certainly a difference in the amount of chromatic aberration present. The CAC function works quite well in the stock Fujinon with the HPX300 (this res chart is an Ambi Combi backlit chart, shot in 1080 mode, using the stock Fujinon lens).

In terms of sensitivity this prototype was about 500 ISO, although we were using a prototype and all specifications are subject to change when the final product is released. At 500 ISO it was plenty sensitive enough for our daylight shots, and with three levels of internal ND filter present (2 stops, 4 stops, and 6 stops) we were able to keep the iris at the “sweet spot” of f/4 to f/5.6 all day long. As far as quality of footage goes, it was nothing short of breathtaking (as long as there was no CMOS wobble, of course). I'm sure the major manufacturers won't like me saying this, but – this is the real deal. This camera delivers “Discovery HD Theater” footage at under ~$9,000. If you spent more you'd get more; a 2/3” camera would be more sensitive and have less noise and more dynamic range, but the gap is narrowing significantly.

Now, for the part everyone wants to know about: as compared to the EX1 and EX3, my observations are that the HPX300 is as sharp as they are, and in general as sensitive as they are, and cleaner in chromatic aberrations. The 1/2” chips on the Sony products get you another ½ stop of sensitivity when using 1080/60i mode, and about ½ stop more dynamic range, and a very slightly shallower depth of field. There is a difference, but not a huge difference, between them in terms of imaging performance due to the 1/3” vs. 1/2” chips. In exchange, you get access to interchangeable lenses which the EX1 doesn't have, cheaper glass as compared to the EX3, the Panasonic color and “mojo” that have made the DVX/HVX/HPX170 so popular, and you get a wildly superior recording format in AVC-Intra.

The HPX300 also adds another new capability to the low-cost P2 lineup, which is the ability to use the proxy card. With the proxy card installed in slot #2, the camera can automatically generate low-resolution proxies for immediate offline editing or transmitting through a cell phone or the internet, and for archive purposes so you can keep low-res proxies on your local storage, and put the large high-def footage files in your deep storage.

Side note: it's a pretty amazing world we live in. I hadn't properly installed the AVC-Intra decoder on my laptop, so viewing footage wasn't possible the first day. There's not much in the way of internet service in the wilds of Africa, but there was some vodafone GPRS coverage available on my BlackBerry, so I sat in a van in the middle of the wilds of Africa, using a phone to surf to a website in Japan and download a codec, which I then transferred via USB to my laptop and installed. Who would have thought it, just five years ago?

So, long story short: P2 rocked the African landscape. We got footage that I'm extremely proud of, perhaps some of the best footage I've ever had the privilege to produce. The new HPX300 is a very worthy addition to the P2 family, and in many ways I think it's going to give the HPX500 a run for its money. In most ways I think I prefer the 1/3” HPX300 over the 2/3” HPX500, excepting only the CMOS issues. And if you want a CMOS camcorder, the AVC-Intra HPX300 provides a compelling alternative to the handheld MPEG-2 XDCAM-EX products.

We came a long way to get this footage, and P2 has come a long way too. With the new AVC-Intra format added to it, and everyone else stuck on MPEG-2, there's simply nothing else that compares.