Comparison footage of four cams

In my tests it looks like this:

1920x1080/25p
1 min 10 bit uncompressed 4:2:2 takes 7,72 GB
60 min/1 hour 463,2 GB

1920x1080/25p
1 min 8 bit uncompressed 4:2:2 takes 5,79 GB
60 min/1 hour 347,4 GB

1920x1080/25p
1 min DVCPRO HD 4:2:2 takes 706,46 MB
60 min/1 hour 42,3876 GB
 
True for 4:2:2 uncompressed, but 4:4:4 as you mentioned in the previous post will be close to the number I posted.

Still 1/2 terabytes per only 1HR of footage is a LOT of hard drive to say the least.

Just imagine having the extra space needed just to edit and render one hour of footage along with archiving.


Am I missing something here?
Well, besides a LOT of money to be able to afford the storage and hardware needed.

Steve
 
We are in HD and the system requirements to work with are also higher. Now I will quote Ben Waggoner who wrote:
"Frame Sizes:
HD source formats are almost always either 1920 x 1080 resolution or 1280 x 720 resolution. Note that a substantial difference exists between the 1080 and 720 standards. The 1920 x 1080 resolution contains 2.25 times more pixels than 1280 x 720 resolution at the same frame rate. This difference substantially increases requirements for processing 1080 content in terms of encoding time, decoding speed, and storage."

hdformats_framesize.gif


More about it

http://www.microsoft.com/windows/windowsmedia/howto/articles/UnderstandingHDFormats.aspx


SJUSER
--------------------

http://www.sanjinjukic.com/index_panasonicHD_P2.html
 
dolph2000 said:
But with thousends of tapes, I have thousends of hours storage. That would cost a lot to storage that on hard drives.
Click to expand...
Not if you're comparing DVCPRO-HD footage on tape, vs. DVCPRO-HD footage on hard disks. Hard drives cost less per minute to store footage than DVCPRO-HD tape does.
 
dolph2000 said:
Jeah jou're right. It's strange to set your mind to harddrives instead of years of tapes.
Click to expand...

And i think, as Barry pointed out, people are comparing apples to oranges. They say, "look at how much is has costed me to store all my DV footage on MiniDVtape! Practically nothing." But that's the thing, you were storing MiniDV stuff. This is DVCProHD. Even if it was possible to have a DVCProHD tape transport smashed into the camera somewhere and the price was the same as it is now (a complete fantasy obviously), I think we would be hearing complaints as to how expensive the DVCProHD tapes are.

It's just not fair to try and compare our familiar DV footage stored on MiniDV tapes to DVCProHD footage stored on P2 cards. If all we were doing was storing the same old MiniDV signal (DV25, right?) onto P2 cards and there was no tape transport then obviously we should be screaming. But for DVCProHD 100mbs footage. I'm thankful for the reuseable solid state P2 cards.
 
This is really important guys.. To realize the cost of a professional storage medium, DVCproHD and HDCam tames are very expensive, and for a feature your looking at least at $2000 in tape stock.. which is non-reusable.

With the P2 workflow, if your "backup" is going to DVD-R's, or external drives, it will be much much cheaper.
 
Jarred Land said:
This is really important guys.. To realize the cost of a professional storage medium, DVCproHD and HDCam tames are very expensive, and for a feature your looking at least at $2000 in tape stock.. which is non-reusable.
Click to expand...
Non-reusable tapes? Certainly for broadcast TV the economics are based on recycling tape stock, and that's as true now as it was in the days of 2" quad.

Now it's a bit more sophisticated, with expensive machines to physically check the cassette and tape and laser scan the surface to look for potential drop outs and damage, before bulk erasure. I and many of my colleagues positively prefer to use such stock, and my own experience has been that the only really serious tape problems I've ever had have been with brand new stock (admittedly only 3 tapes out of thousands). Such rogue tapes are obviously subsequently junked, as are any that the laser scans shows to have wear, such as have been left sitting stationary in an edit machine for a long time.

The expense of such machinery only makes it suitable for very large operations, but the service is offered by third parties to smaller organisations (even individuals) on a cost per tape basis. Worth it for reliability reasons, let alone cost, and for that matter environmental issues as well. In analogue days recycled tapes tended to have more small dropouts, though be more likely to be free of massive problems. In the case of digital, there doesn't seem to be any noticeable disadvantage, and the occasional 'rogues' get weeded out.
 
Jarred Land said:
anybody who would use recycled tapes to shoot a Feature film should be shot.
Click to expand...
PLEASE tell me you're joking!!! Please.........

Obviously feature films are much newer to tape than TV, but believe me for top end drama and all the way down it is well established in the broadcast industry that tape is recycled. As I say, MANY people consider it more reliable. The occasional (brand new) 'rogue' tape has previously been weeded out. Do you want to risk using one of those!?!

For a small operation with a pile of unboxed tapes stacked up by the radiator "recycling" may mean picking one up, blowing the dust off, and (hopefully) rewinding it before going out to the shoot. Hence the myth of "never use recycled tapes". In the broadcast industry, things are far more sophisticated, and a very quick Google search leads me to many references to firms which provide such a service to independants - http://www.tapesuk.co.uk/acatalog/Tape_Evaluation.html is just the first I came across.

Sure, shoot anyone whoose idea of recycling is blowing the dust off an old unboxed tape, but do it to anyone who uses professionally recycled tape and you'll reduce the size of the industry quite a lot........
 
it is well established in the broadcast industry that tape is recycled



This is a fact, to which any of you news shooters out there can testify. All of the TV News operations I ever worked for always recycled their tapes. News departments (and news directors) are notoriously cheap! However, one would think a feature would require a higher standard, but I'm just an old news guy chiming in here.
 
Paul Farmer said:
it is well established in the broadcast industry that tape is recycled

This is a fact, to which any of you news shooters out there can testify.
Click to expand...
Far more than just news.

To quote from the link I posted above: ".......the tape in inserted into their respective machine where it is run at high speed over two sapphire burnishing blades to gently break loose any unwanted oxide or dust particles. This helps prevent VCR head damage, the slightest particle, even as small as 0.04mm left on the tape surface could result in loss of signal from the recording head. In this respect evaluated tape is safer to use as it has been cleaned whereas new tape has not been put through this process. Then the tape is run over three sets ........."

A colleague told me today that one very major production he worked for insisted on both using new tape, and putting them through such a verification process. They would not take the risk of using new tape unchecked. My personal belief and experience is that properly checked and recycled tape is a guaranteed standard - unchecked new tape may have problems, albeit rarely.
 
Back in the days of BetaSP we'd reuse the tapes (ITV - Central News). We didn't use any fancy verification process though! When the engineers felt the tapes were exibiting too many dropouts they got ditched (or sold to HTV). It wasn't unheard of for tapes to make 10 passes through the camera (plus striping, plus edit playback). Such was the world of news!

Harddrive, is this verification just for Digibeta, or does it cover all tape formats?
 
Alex Leith said:
Harddrive, is this verification just for Digibeta, or does it cover all tape formats?
Click to expand...
I'm certainly aware of it being available for DVCam and DVCPro (and suspect miniDV as well), and various flavours of Beta - at least SP up through to Digibeta. Obviously not too much HDCam has relatively been used in Europe until recently, though that seems to be ramping up now. Google gave quite a few results for tape recycling, though I only referenced one, and that's in addition to all the broadcasters who have their own in house facilities.

Recycling tape in the early days was so widespread that so much got wiped for reuse that there are big gaps in archives. I believe a lot may have only survived because the tapes were cut edited, and tapes with physical splices were obviously not reusable - hence they may as well be put into library, to the benefit of archivists. (Cut editing survived to a very limited extent virtually to the end of quadruplex - very late 1970's.)

In quadruplex days it was normal for important studio recordings to be recorded on two separate machines. Partly for reliability reasons, both of tape and recorders, partly because two first generation copies were useful in three machine edit suites for mixes etc.

Moving on, 'recycling' then came to mean giving tapes a nominal lifetime of a given no of uses (I remember 5 being normal for U-matic where I worked then) . The revolution came with the ability to actually evaluate the tapes. Nowadays a tape may be junked after only one use (or even a brand new one!) if it shows faults, conversely a tape may still show no faults after ten, maybe even twenty uses. The point is that with verification a user KNOWS whether a tape is good or not, and that is why so many cameramen prefer them to brand new.

I really do believe the future lies with solid state though. For some, the 'future' may already be here, for others it will need the costs of memory to significantly drop to make it viable. Regarding all the 'backing up' comments, whilst for independent users the costs may solely be for equipment, media etc, for other operations it may be necessary to employ labour specifically for backing up purposes. In which case shooting to tape in the first place may still make economic sense for a while yet. HD may well prove a catalyst for change - if you have to requip for HD, may it be the time to look at a tape free solution at the same time?

Solid state's day will really have universally come when it can start to be seen as consumable. I think that's a few years away yet, but am pretty sure that the next year or two will start to see the beginning of the switch.
 
I am just thinking about the new upload. Is it making sense. I did it now in 720p that is better to present all cams but the result is like that you cannot see WHAT CAM IS BETTER. The difference is only in price. Believe it or not. With FX1 and Canon you can achieve a PERFECT 720p that can compare "shoulder to shoulder" to 720p from HVX200 and JVC HD100. If somebody is sure about his/her indie work has to have ALL OF THEM to achieve a different shooting options. No any low-cost HD camcorder will give you all what you want. You should choose one that could cover your needs. NO WINNERS.

SJUSER
--------------------

http://www.sanjinjukic.com/index_panasonicHD_P2.html
 
4 low budget HD cams - 720p test footage

The test is online from December 9, 2005.
This footage consists four 720p short clips
approximately 5-9 seconds of each from the following
low cost HD camcoders:


1. Sony FX1E (approx. €/$ 3.600),

2. Canon XL H1 (approx. €/$ 11.000)

3. Panasonic HVX200 (approx. €/$ 8-10.000)

4. JVC PRO HD100 (approx. €/$ 8.000)

Footage format: H.264
Color: Millions of color
Size: 1280x720 pixel
FPS: 24
Data Size: 41.7 MB
Data Rate: 9.88 mbits/sec
Duration: 00:00:35.10 sec

Footage credits:
1. Canon XL H1 - Kaku Ito
2. Panasonic HVX200 - Kaku Ito
3. Sony FX1E - Sanjin Jukic
4. JVC GY HD100 - DVInfoNet-Charles Papert*

* Shot done using P+S Technik Mini35 and the
JVC GY-HD100 with 27mm Cooke S4 lens.

THE BEST PLAYED AS A LOOP IN THE ACTUAL SIZE.

The sequence from the comparison
footage is not a scientific test or any accurate
analysis about the camcorders. It is just a simple
information that leads us to an answer on the often
consumer question: What could be possible
to get from each of the camcoder in 720p?
All basic files were recorded using the native codec
HDV 1080i or DVCPRO HD 720p.
Editing, downscaling and H.264 output done in
Apple Final Cut Pro 5.0.4 on Dual 2.0 Ghz PowerMac
with 4 GB SDRAM.
Also these are not the best clips from each cam.


Download:

http://www.sanjinjukic.com/index_4Cams_720p.html

SJUSER
--------------------

http://www.sanjinjukic.com/index_panasonicHD_P2.html
 
So I am back again on four footage variant that shows better image about a quality from the all four low-cost camcorders available at the moment of turn to 2006. Now in the 720p option is very hard and difficult to say which camcorder is better. Each camcorder has it's own pros and contras. Choose one that can cover your needs and a budget.

SJUSER
--------------------

http://www.sanjinjukic.com/index_panasonicHD_P2.html
 
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