Pros and cons from daily users / owners of the HPX500

Barry_Green said:
That said, disc acquisition is, IMO, an "interim" solution and solid state is the future.
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Absolutely, Bill Gates has even said that HD DVD and Blue Ray will be the "last" time we will see optical disks and that their future will be short lived.
 
Also to put solid state pricing in perspective, the new macbook air has an optional 64GB internal solid state hard-drive. Cost? $999USD. Not removable, and surely not as robust.

P2 is right in line with that kind of pricing. High performance solid state memory like P2 is not artificially expensive. It's just expensive in comparison to the cheap cards that get jammed in point and shoot cameras. It's also not in the same league.
 
And, "expensive" is relative and dependent on time. Nowadays 16GB for $900 seems expensive; tell that to people who paid $2750 for a 4GB card! They'll think 4x as much memory for 1/3 the price is downright cheap. :)

But the other great thing is that Moore's Law is on our side, and capacities should double and prices should halve every year. Which is why we should see 64GB cards this year, and 128GB cards next year, and by the end of next year we might be at $15 per gigabyte. And the year after, $7/gig (which would mean a 4GB card would be $30? In only three years? Maybe...)
 
Kit Hannah said:
But with the decreasing cost of hard drive storage, it WOULD be cheaper. You can get a 500GB hard drive for around $100 right now. How much will it cost in XDCAM discs for you to archive 500GB worth of info? Even at lets say $20 / disc (single layer 23.3GB), it would still cost $400 to archive that 500GB which is a $300 dollar difference, which will pay for the cost of P2 or SxS after about 60-80 discs. Everyone uses that comparison, but it's not really valid. Many companies will use that many discs in just a couple of months.

Example

200 XDCAM Discs cost you (at $20/disc) $4000.

a 32GB P2 card costs $1600, 5TB hard drive storage maybe costs $1000 - $2000

Solid state memory is much cheaper, plus you have less chance of something going wrong because of no moving parts.
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If you want to compare XDCAM storage to the HPX, you should compare the number of hours of video, not the number of GBs. Since the HDV codec is about 3 times more efficient than DVCProHD (35Mbps vs 100Mbps), you would need 3x more storage for the HPX, making the price difference a lot smaller between XDCAM discs and HDDs. Also, most operations would need to buy several P2 cards, not just the one in your comparison. Now add in the labor costs for backing up your data to HDDs, and it will be a long time before you reach price parity.

But I do own a P2 camera, and I agree that there are many advantages to using solid state memory. I guess my point from the original post is that there is a hidden cost to using P2 (or SxS) cards, and that is the cost of archiving. Many people don't consider this when they make a purchase. I was one of them. Now I have many TBs of hard drives sitting on the shelf.
 
Barry_Green said:
But the other great thing is that Moore's Law is on our side, and capacities should double and prices should halve every year.)
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Interesting topic - Moore's Law would also indicate that data storage demands will rise exponentially as well. It's not cost per GB that counts, it's cost per hour of footage. Whether it be 720, 1080, 2k, 4k , compressed/uncompressed, 50fps or 300fps (yes Casio has a 300fps stills camera on the way) or who knows what in 3 years time. In the pro market there will always be a premium to pay for new technology and I doubt these technologies will last as long as they used to. Im not just talking about P2 here, but I dont expect our HPX502 to last as long in the market as say a Digibeta or a DSR570. XDCAM disk certainly looks like a dead duck already because there is no way they can get any more than 50GB out of those disks. At least the 502 is expandable, currently we can get 128GB and more to come.

And if anybody thought that going tapeless was cheaper than tape, well it's not quite that simple. On big jobs Im spending about $800+ on Hard Drives - thats way more than I ever did on tape. It's just another cost we have to pass on to the client. On the plus side we dont have buy expensive decks, which is fine so long as you dont already have a couple of Digi's lying around and you dont have tell your accountant to write them off. Also we dont have to spend days ingesting footage.

From our perspective though, considering we started a new company 12 months ago and held off buying gear, the 502 couldnt have come at a better time.
 
Bachman said:
And if anybody thought that going tapeless was cheaper than tape, well it's not quite that simple. On big jobs Im spending about $800+ on Hard Drives - thats way more than I ever did on tape. It's just another cost we have to pass on to the client. On the plus side we dont have buy expensive decks, which is fine so long as you dont already have a couple of Digi's lying around and you dont have tell your accountant to write them off. Also we dont have to spend days ingesting footage.
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And see, if you really want to get picky, and everyone wants to factor in all of the added benefits, WHAT DOES YOUR TIME COST? If you have 2 cameras going with 5 hours of footage, P2 will be available to edit directly after, tape won't. And with XDCAM discs, you need to factor in either #1, cost of an XDCAM disc reader, or #2, cost for the time lost with the camera and the extra wear on the camera to ingest the discs.

It seems to me that the overall workflow of the P2 is much more efficient, thus saving money because of saving time. A lot of times, people forget to factor in time to the cost of things. I hear all these arguments for saying "XDCAM discs are cheaper", but pound for pound, if we were doing the same exact number of projects in the same conditions, one person with P2 and another with XDCAM discs, the P2 will win hands down in the long run due to time, which has been an argument all along with P2. Nobody ever said it was going to be cheaper at first, but everything else equal, P2 will save money in the long run.
 
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Yeah, what Kit said. :D

The hours I've saved not having to log and digitize tapes is more time I can spend on this forum, not working.

--SM
 
(but I dont expect our HPX502 to last as long in the market as say a Digibeta or a DSR570)

So true, it makes me realy sad sense dont even have an hpx or a dsr 500, just two lowly dsr 300s (the ones with out the fire wire!)
 
Andrew McMillan said:
(but I dont expect our HPX502 to last as long in the market as say a Digibeta or a DSR570)

So true, it makes me realy sad sense dont even have an hpx or a dsr 500, just two lowly dsr 300s (the ones with out the fire wire!)
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??? You dug up a 6 month old thread to post that? C'mon Andrew.....
 
I'm not seeing anything for the kind of work I do (documentaries) that beats the 500 for price and image... I will keep mine for a long time (I just GAVE my 10 year old DSR300 to the guy that maintains my computer)....

In the quest for image, marketing hype often gets in the way of objective observation... I like the picture I'm getting...

But, as I asked earlier in this post, why is this camera so damn heavy?
 
the DSR570 i oped wasn't that much lighter than the HPX500 remeber the DSR300 is only a tad bigger than the 250 and with B3 lenses
 
Bachman said:
P2 cards are expensive when you consider we need about 8 of them for a day shoot (16gb) Thats about 10 grand worth at current aussie prices for the 16gb, or 4 32gb at about $6,500. Its sometimes not practical for us to clear cards during a shoot because we are constantly on the move and often in a mining or construction site. Obviously there are some third party solutions to this which we are considering. I guess everyones situation is different though. If your only doing half or hour long shoots then there really is no problem.
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Actually I have seen guys shoot a 10 segment TV series on 8 4GB cards. And over the lifetime of the cards, they go down in price every time you use them. Its analogous to buying the tape budget for the camera at the beginning and not alog its lifetime. Then you will realize by the time you have hit the 1000th reuse you are down do $1.65 per card. Yes intitally they are expensive, but they are good for 100,000 read-write cycles.


I am a bit cynical about the whole card pricing, I could be wrong but I suspect Pana sells the camera as a bit of a loss leader. A bit like buying a great $50 printer but finding out the ink costs a fortune.
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Here you would be totally way off base. The cards are very expensive to manufacture.

It was one area that Sony tried to sway us on.
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They have the same issue on the SxS although I know why the P2 costs so much, I don't see the same build quality in the SxS though.


Still love the Camera and the format, just wish they would bring card prices down a tad.
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They are working on it.

Best,

Jan
 
Okay, the guy that started this post got a 500, I know because I bought the PortaBrace bag from him, which he didn't need - and it's an excellent bag, by-the-way, although not a carry-on... Thank you Kit.

I've shot a bunch with the 500 in the year since I bought it, I don't have any idea how many hours, but a lot, like hundreds.. I just completed a very footage-intensive feature length documentary (BOYHOOD SHADOWS), produced a dozen 10-15 minute docs and a slew of regional commercials for colleges and hospitals... I've also shot with the 200 during that same period (I bought it a few months after the 500 as a back-up).

P2 cards... I can not understand the issue people have with the cost.. yeah, at first (before I was using Panasonic) they weren't too appealing... but now, with the 16 and 32 and soon to be 64 cards, they are nearly essential... I have five 16s, and I've used every one at least 50 times with no problems whatsoever. I paid for them once and now I own them!

The camera... I got mine with the Fujinon lens and I am extremely pleased with the look I'm getting with 720/24pn - And the quality of the audio is superb. I don't do scopes or rez chart tests or post clips... I just shoot films - 24/7.

Let me put this in perspective - I have a masters in film from UCLA (many years ago) specializing in cinematography originally, then I changed to documentary when I photographed a doc about Caesar Chavez. I've shot hundreds of films - in actual FILM, mostly super16 (I owned one of the first super16 cameras on the west coast, an Eclair NPR) and I still own and occasionally use an Aaton super16 camera. I have nearly a hundred film festival awards, including 11 CINE Golden Eagles, so I'm not a "newby" by any stretch.

Comparing the HPX500 to a Panaflex Platinum? Well, it won't - But comparing it to super16, especially for documentaries, it is vastly superior... I hated video for over 20 years, but now, finally, I feel that I have a tool that is more than comparable and satisfies my needs - especially for the cost...

I still think it's too heavy though.
 
you gave a dsr 300 away :0 to a computer guy! * I hate you* Just kidding, no but really if anyone has one they'd interested in letting go for a good prive I'd be intersested.

I have two dsr 300's and they need a freaind for our studio, because they don't play that nice with my pd 170.
 
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