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pookie_old

pookie_old

Veteran
"At Panasonic's press conference today, they announced a major price drop in P2 cards down to $1,700 for a 8 GB card. Panasonic P2 (professional plug-in) cards constitute a solid state memory format which Panasonic introduced in 2003 as their next step non-tape based format for video, especially for high definition video. Panasonic P2 records a DVCPRO50/DVCPRO/DV signal to a PCMICA sized card. The PCMICA card is actually an array of secure digital cards designed to work incredibly fast, recording the large amounts of data. Previously, a 4 GB P2 card, capable of recording 4 minutes of HD video cost about $1,700."

At $1700 +- for a P2 card, giving 8 minutes of recording time, it's amusing to read the "discussions" of the format here. The only present user's of the technology are the news services who need the footage immediatly, and can afford the support equipment.
For the users here, I find it unlikely that any would find the limitations or price something acceptable, or realistic. A usable setup to shoot to a P2, camera, card, reader, editing setup.....over $10,000.
This camera, if you want to use it as it is meant to be used, is not a "prosumer" camera like the DVX is, and while the lure of HD is attractive to many, few actually have any need for shooting in HD. How many people have HD tv's in the market's you're shooting for? If you shoot wedding's in HD, do you think the bride is going to be happy having everyone see thing's as sharp as HD show's thing's....think about it......they don't want to see themselves in HD with every flaw sharp and defined. It goes for most shot's, HD is simply not realistic, and yes I've shot HD and yes HD is very nice, but it's used far less than you'd think, and only for selective shoots.

Wrong bandwagon to be so eager to jump on, and you may find yourself severely limited.
 
In their PDF brochure, Panasonic is estimating that they will have 128 GB P2 cards available sometime in 2008. I'm guessing they will beat that date and if Panasonic licences out the P2 technology to third party manufacturers, they will no doubt beat that date and even substantially lower the cost of the cards.

I disagree with your perspective Pookie, but I see your point. Myself, I'm tired of the limitations of SD footage and cannot wait to push the HD envelope. It can't come soon enough.
 
I have to agree that DVX SD is really good, but it's not that good. SD on a screen 60 + inches goes soft, too soft, and large screens are becoming more common. While I agree no bride wants her pimples to show, a promist filter should cure that HD issue.

Shooting HD now will preserve today's work for tomorrow's market. All DVD films will soon be re-digitized and new HD DVDs will become the norm in our homes. I think of the camera as a business tool as well as an artistic tool. Soon our work will need to meet the new HD standard that everyone will become accustomed to. Given this will probably take a decade to fully implement I would still like my work to have the best legs possible for producing revenue.

Given that, todays SD work could have some competitive trouble. The last thing we want to be stuck with is for people to say is, "ick, that looks too fuzzy" and not have a way out of it.

The P2 thing I believe might turn out like the history of hard drives. Around 10 years ago a 3 gig hard drive cost around $4 to 5,000. What's a 300 gig cost today? $150-200-250. Hopefully P2 will be somewhat like that and follow Moore's law.

As for me, I want HD Rack with my laptop passing the data through to these 300 gig Hard drives. I don't mind the 25' firewire for much of my work. A P2 holding up to as little as 10 minutes will work well for narrative production if they can be loaded up with data, transferred and erased for more recording. After all, 1,000' 35mm rolls are good for about 10 minutes of shots and that hasn't stopped movie production yet, though it is a hassle.
 
To me, Mini-DV SD sucks for wide shots where there is a lot of information (like a landscape.) HD would solve this problem. And if you can't afford P2, then buy a hard drive solution, or simply shoot on MiniDV until you can afford to shoot on HD.
 
So what's the skinny? Do we really need the expensive P2 cards or can we use firewire HDDs like Firestore or Lacie? It seems it keeps changing.
 
Played with HDVX200 @ NAB and......

Played with HDVX200 @ NAB and......

...of course it makes great pictures, and has a lot of the features that we love from the DVX100, but to me, the biggest downfall is that it records HD only on the P2 cards. I see this as limiting. Rich (at the booth) said "it's not unlike film guys who get 8 minutes of footage on a reel of film and have to change it". To me (and my company shoots film as well) this is a big disadvantage. I had asked if the larger capcity cards would be out by the time the camera shipped...no solid answer yet. To me it doesn't make sense to invest in the camera with the 8 gig P2 cards if a 64 gig card might be out in the near future.
 
Well, there are no pictures available yet, so while we assume it will make great pictures (no reason not to), we haven’t actually seen them.

The camera will be available without cards for an MSRP of $5995, which means the street price will probably be $5500 fairly soon after introduction. I highly doubt 64GB P2 cards will be available in the “near future,” given the development timeline presented at the show, but you still aren’t forced to buy any cards right away. It seems as though it will be able to stream full-res HD through the USB port, so you have options.

But to add an HD tape mechanism would make it an entirely different class of camera. It would add another $2K or so to the price and HD tapes run $100 apiece (and generally used once?). P2 is a paradigm shift, no question, but a digital world demands such a shift. Tape is 20th century.
 
So is there a way to record HD footage with this camera without P2 cards? Can you shoot right into a laptop for storage? And how much footage can a laptop hold at a time?
 
content is king, not pixel resolution. When HD was first being demoed the only footage was boring but beautiful shots of flowers etc., this would be shown side by side with a Hollywood movie in EP VHS, most passer-bys would watch the grainy movie. Point being, HD won't make you a good filmmaker, and SD won't hamper a brilliant film. If you are already a brilliant filmmaker and can afford to make the jump to the next level then go for it, if you are just starting out this is a great time because hopefully this new camera will be viable until it dies, there will always be something new, better but hopefully the HD standards won't change that fast, after all they haven't even been fully implimented yet.

I think basing a camera around a data card is brilliant forward thinking, even if those cards do not have adequate run times yet. I have owned cameras in three different analogue tape formats plus mini-dv. DV has been the most compatable so far, not in the ability to hand over tapes, but to hand over clips in data format, quicktime or avi on colaborative projects. A data dvd can hold roughly 20 minutes of dv footage. This will be less with HD, but still adequate for commercials, music videos etc. Or to hand off shots to your buddy who does special effects or title graphics etc. I am happy to say goodbye to incompatable tape formats, if manufacturers wont agree on a standard that will last for the life of the product then good-bye tape. I can store data in whatever format I choose, then worry about delivery when the project is done.
 
What about the image quality of HD downrezzed to SD? Lately when watching shows like Survivor or American Idol it seems like the colors and detail just pop off my satandard def $300 6 year old 25" Sharp. Cooking shows on the Food Channel also, you can't tell me that HD doesn't make a difference when it gets through all of the pipeline compression before it gets to my viewing platform, can you? Sure it would be blissfully awesome on a Hi-Def or Plasma/LCD but SD tv's don't exactly eliminate the HD advantage, maybe soften and wipe out the detail but not cancell out the benifits.
 
STORYTELLER32 said:
So is there a way to record HD footage with this camera without P2 cards? Can you shoot right into a laptop for storage? And how much footage can a laptop hold at a time?
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Yes, you could record directly to your laptop (assuming your laptop is fast enough). You'll get 1 minute per gigabyte, so hook up a cheap $200 300-gb external drive and you'll have at least five hours of storage online.
 
Jubal28 said:
But to add an HD tape mechanism would make it an entirely different class of camera. It would add another $2K or so to the price and HD tapes run $100 apiece (and generally used once?). P2 is a paradigm shift, no question, but a digital world demands such a shift. Tape is 20th century.
Click to expand...
You're missing a zero there, David. To add a DVCPRO-HD tape mechanism would mean to add another $20,000 to the price, not $2,000.
 
Glenn_Gipson said:
To me, Mini-DV SD sucks for wide shots where there is a lot of information (like a landscape.) HD would solve this problem.
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Funny one. This is why film still clearly rules.

Oh to see movies that are CRAFTED again... wouldn't that be a change!?

This camera might be great and all but I'm surely not going to pay money to watch a movie made with one on a big screen. Save those projects for people who truly know what it is to make a movie in the first place.

It's still just video guys... just with more lines.
 
Barry_Green said:
Yes, you could record directly to your laptop (assuming your laptop is fast enough). You'll get 1 minute per gigabyte, so hook up a cheap $200 300-gb external drive and you'll have at least five hours of storage online.
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True enough Barry, but would you trust all your footage to a laptop HD?

This is the problem, the all on one solution, with tape, you have a backup, record in 15, 30 or 60 minute chunks, a five hour shoot (not a realistic option with P2 cards) on tape 5 tapes, if one is "bad", you still have 4 hours of fotage to work with. The all on one solution, if something goes wrong, all gone.

The technology isn't ready yet, regardless of Panasonics spin. The reason the P2 cards are so small now is because the news services only shoot in short bursts, and the footage needs to get back to the studio ASAP. A one minute shoot is more than enough for a report on the 5 o'clock news, they've got at least 45 seconds to toss out.

Is the format the HVX200 is sporting realistic... no.
Is the format an attenpt to one-up the competition... yes.

You're braver than me, or the associates I've spoken to about the HVX200, it's not ready yet, but Panasonic "had" to produce it.... and that's too bad.
 
CineCell, you've got it...

"Oh to see movies that are CRAFTED again... wouldn't that be a change!? "

Ain't that the truth.....

It's the video generation having no understanding of film, filming or film making.

Gimme a camera dude, uh, which end do I look through......
 
pookie said:
The technology isn't ready yet, regardless of Panasonics spin.
You're braver than me, or the associates I've spoken to about the HVX200, it's not ready yet, but Panasonic "had" to produce it.... and that's too bad.
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By that reasoning – it’s too expensive and too brief, therefore, it should not be done – very little technical progress would ever be made. Early adopters pay more and get less. That’s how it is with all technology.

Thankfully, those conclusions were not dispositive for those who shelled out the cash for early VCRs, for early DVD players (what?! You have to flip over the disc after an hour??), for early computers . . . because if technology has to wait for someone specific’s high-bar definition of “ready,” not much would ever develop.

(In the 1930s, airplanes were crude, slow, loud, dirty, only capable of short hops, non-pressurized, usually not heated -- by every modern sense, entirely unsuitable for passenger travel. Oddly enough, there were many passenger airlines.)
 
pookie said:
Is the format the HVX200 is sporting realistic... no.
Click to expand...

i disagree, from a reliability standpoint. there are many things that can go wrong on a shoot for your footage to be lost. you are just replacing a tape malfunction (whichever that is) with a possible HD crash. i see no reason with a RAID why you couldn't set up some type of redundancy, recording the same footage to two hard drives.

even if not, the advantages of getting passed the digitizing stage alone is worth the small risk of having a HD crash. it's not like tapes are malfunction-proof.

the format of this camera is realistic imo.
 
Three of my MiniDV Tapes have broken doors (they're stuck tight and it's not adhesive) and not from misuse... Any ideas how to play them back? I also have two tapes that were jammed and the tape itself is torn apart. Does anyone fix these things?
 
pookie said:
This is the problem, the all on one solution, with tape, you have a backup, record in 15, 30 or 60 minute chunks, a five hour shoot (not a realistic option with P2 cards) on tape 5 tapes, if one is "bad", you still have 4 hours of fotage to work with. The all on one solution, if something goes wrong, all gone.
Click to expand...
It's not quite all or nothing if you do it right. You can configure several identical drives in RAID 1, which is "mirroring". So you buy four 300GB drives, stripe then in RAID 1, and record to that. If three of the four drives fail, the fourth drive still contains a complete "mirror" of the video. Realistically, you could do a two drive RAID 1 and feel pretty good about your backup. The other advantage of RAID 1 is that reading back from the drives is sped up by a factor equal to the number of drives in the RAID 1. Since each drive has identical data, it is possible to read in parallel. Think editing here - many operations in NLEs like FCP are limited by how fast you can read data from disk. Mac OS X supports RAID 1 arrays in software out of the box, so your only cost past the laptop is the drives and enclosures.

BTW, first post here. This is a great resource for learning about the HVX-200. Thanks for the all the inside dirt!

_arock
 
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