Crazy discussions at dv.com

jeffyjones said:
And it's funny that Kevin Smith would dive into the digital world, because I saw him on an interview on the former TechTV's Screensavers about two years ago, and the host (Patrick Norton) asked him if he planned to experiment more with digital the way Robert Rodriguez had been doing. Smith simply said, "It's called a film for a reason." I suppose he changed his mind. :)
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He changed his mind after the DVX came out. He was speaking at the HVX launch event in L.A. and said that they did a behind-the-scenes documentary on one of his films on the DVX, and after seeing that he really started to pay attention. He said he was looking at the HVX the way a fat man looks at a ham.
 
No one is talking about the most important issue, the people who the HVX200 and its P2 workflow are aimed at. Of course the thing's viable, just as tape, film, XDCAM and HD recorders are viable. Each one of those recording mediums brings with it a workflow and that workflow imposes requirments on how the job gets done.
Let's take shooting 35mm, it costs and there's lots of risks involved, all it takes is a little bit of light and a roll is ruined, a bit of grit in the gate and you're stuffed. But you have a group of people on the shoot whose job it is to prevent these things from happening, they make certain everything is logged, gates cleaned etc. They are paid to do nothing else, they don't check framing or lighting, they don't make creative decisions either, they've usually got the type of brain that'd be lousy at that anyway, no insult to them either, thank goodness they're there.
Now an idie filmaker is (we hope) a creative type, they've got a great idea that they're passionate about, the last thing on their mind is humdrum things like logging and keeping track of things, I know, I've done work for a few and it's total chaos, bits of media everywhere, audio on DV tape, vision on DVD and music as an email attachment....somewhere.
Where am I going with this, I guess I worry about the mindset of the indie film maker and how it sits with the rigorous attention to detail that the P2 workflow requires. I'm not talking about guys like Barry, he's got the experience to know what working with each type of media requires. It eouldn't faze me either, I've got the sort of brain that does methodical almost to the point of obsessive but then again there isn't a creative cell in my body.
Then again after the few recent messes created by the creative amongst us that I've sorted out, having them forced to get organised would make for a welcome change for me.
Sorry for my long, rambling and perhaps irrelevant post, perhaps though it might get a few comments from the creative bods, can you really cope with this, does it liberate your creatvity or hamper it, surely that's the issue at hand.
 
robrovsvd,

I have the creative muddled mind you are talking about....

and I say bring it on,

I'll adapt, the bottom line here is I want my footage to look beautiful and stand up to super16/35mm.... if the HVX can do that for me, (and I'm not talking about specs and stats here or pulldowns because really, I have no idea what that means, at the moment) AND I'm not saying for sure that the camera CAN match super16 because frankly I dont know enough about the camera, I've seen some awesome stuff and some stuff that I can better on a DVX.

But anyway, If the camera can make my work stand up to what I see on MTV and withstand blowups to 35mm then frankly I will cross hell or high water to adapt to it's needs.

I dunno maybe that sounds stupid...But I cant afford Varicam right now.
 
I think the biggest change from dv workflow to hvx workflow is that the balance of costs have changed. With hvx initial costs are a bit higher (5k camera, 5k p2, 5k for offloading and archiving storage), but the camera's part of the costs is smaller than before.
 
AshG said:
While the sentiment has been harsh over at DV.com you need to check your facts, percentage wise much more of that community is made up of working professionals...
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If that's true, I sure can't tell. Some of the more recent threads are absolutely silly.

Cost and workflow certainly to be the two biggest discussion points, more so than anything about quality. Cost will continue to drop (and if you buy from a dealer you know nobody is paying $6k for the camera), and workflow just requires adaptation. Film has a horrible and expensive workflow, and people still use it.

I think I've said it a dozen times today... We don't edit with tape, so why should we shoot with it?
 
One of the reasons P2 is jumped upon so much is that it is an easy target. I jump on it myself, but I'm not going to go into my rant mode here. One of the big reasons is because whenever the shortcomings of P2 come up, a multitude of workarounds are given. It is these work arounds that cause the problems. After all, if you need a hard drive to record to, why not get a camera that does has a drive as part of the camera? If backup to Blu-Ray is suggested by Panny, why not use a camera that records to Blu-Ray to begin with?

If the camera is working for you thats great. But I think the concerns of many people are legitimate. The way to argue the case for P2 is to use it and show us examples of where it has worked really well for you and the reasons why.

Regarding the BBC, they are seemingly running it as a trial. They haven't actually invested in P2. Incidentally, the BBC did not buy XDCAM, but they do rent it from Gearhouse to use in programs such as Top Gear. The reasons why the BBC did not replace their DSR500's and 570's with XD was twofold AFAIK. The first is that they have a policy to not buy any new SD equipment. The second is that the XD doesn't have the multi camera capabilities of the 500 series. A big no-no for the BBC.

They do accept IMX50 as programme masters though.

The BBC is always evaluating all new equipment that comes onto the market. I know that they were trying to encourage one-man-band operation with smaller cameras and FCP in a VJ style model that has come in for some flack. This could be part of the same experiment. Tapeless operation for the Olympics makes sense, especially when a lot of the opposition is using something similar.
 
We don´t edit with P2 so why should we shoot with it? You need to download it to disks and the time it takes to download is the same as to digitize the tape. Even more as you want a backup. No argument.
 
xray said:
We don´t edit with P2 so why should we shoot with it? You need to download it to disks and the time it takes to download is the same as to digitize the tape. Even more as you want a backup. No argument.
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I'll respectfully disagree. Each shot is a clip that transfers up to 5 -6 times faster than real time. When I logged my P2 footage..it was MUCH MUCH faster than logging/capturing from tape.
 
When you dump to the P2 store and verify it it is real time or longer (up to 2x).
Same as capturing tape. Then your footage must be dumped to a hard disk and you need to back up that data to a DLT type tape device.
 
havent used P2 store..either transfered to HD over camera or transfred P2 cards on laptop. Still much faster than realtime. Also, transcoding mxf into QT with FCP averaged over 5X realtime on my system for the edit.
 
That's the thing I like about tapeless storage, things are downloaded faster than realtime. During Christmas 2004, I decided to put all of my family's old Christmas home videos onto DVD's. We had stuff all the way back to the Betamax format and luckily we have a living player still, as well as the camera which wouldn't be all that bad if you didn't need high powered lights just to see somebody's outline at least. So, I had to download all of those tapes to my Plextor ConvertX and watch each one in realtime from Betamax to Video 8 to VHS-C to MiniDV. Yeah, it took me a week to do but I did it. However, if I could have just downloaded everything as fast as the P2 cards could, I would have been done in a couple of days (hey, we a lot of video ya know). P2 is a step in the right direction and I don't see why anyone would want to fight that.
 
jeffyjones said:
Cost and workflow certainly to be the two biggest discussion points, more so than anything about quality. Cost will continue to drop (and if you buy from a dealer you know nobody is paying $6k for the camera), and workflow just requires adaptation. Film has a horrible and expensive workflow, and people still use it.

I think I've said it a dozen times today... We don't edit with tape, so why should we shoot with it?
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Cost are a factor, as related to the workflow, if you spent a lot you can buy lots of 8 Gig cards and shoot happy, buy speedy raids and the first bluray recorder etc. If money is no problem any workflow can be fixed.

P2 is based on SD memorycards used by many (phones, digital camera) and they don´t need more then 1 Gig. So you see the 4 Gig SD cards being very expensive. If the demand rises, prices go down.

P2 is Panasonic only, meaning low demand and high prices. So cost are going down slowly, and big P2 cards are entering slowly.
 
I went with the Canon XL-H1, so for now won't have to worry (or celebrate!) the effects of P2 workflow. P2 certainly wasn't the reason for me *not* to get the HVX.

I will say that the less organized you are, the scarier P2 becomes in terms of backing up your footage. Right now, for tape, it's quite easy -- pop the tape, flip the write enable slider, label it, capture, then put the tape in a safe place. This gives your footage a fairly good backup right out of the gate without much hassle.

My concern about P2 is that backups now enter the domain of the IT world, where many many people suck at it, being lulled into a false sense of security due to the rarity of failures. On top of that, we're talking about awkwardly large amounts of data that need to be backed up.

If/when I end up with P2 or other non-tape workflow, I think the best would be having the raw data land on writable DVD right away. If I were to let things slide a day or two, I may well end up with footage not backed up anywhere, or a real mess in figuring out what's backed up and what's not. Having (for reasons related to my own organization failures) to create the backup at the time of transfer obviates some of the advantages of tapeless, but not all. Having the camera write straight to a blu-ray disk, would for me be the best of both worlds.

In these early days where many new HVX owners will be "playing" with the camera as they learn it, they will be generating lots of throw-away footage where the biggest downside of P2 (namely IT backup requirements) won't be felt so much.

It will be interesting to see how workflows adapt to various usage models over the next year. For me, the key would be optical storage of some kind that matches the size of my P2 cards. Right now 4GB matches nicely with writable DVD. Once blu-ray or writable HD-dvd comes out, then backing up the 8 and 16 gig cards will be a piece of cake as well.

Also, discussing the problems and solutions that P2 workflow introduces isn't "crazy talk", but worrying about the 100,000 limit on write cycles certainly is!
 
The evolution of media

The evolution of media

xray said:
We don´t edit with P2 so why should we shoot with it?
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But you don't shoot with P2 either... you shoot with data. That's what this is all about: Manipulating data versus an intermediate physical medium. I realize that the difference there is subtle, but it is an important one.

In fact, I'd go as far as to say that this is part of an even bigger discussion about the generation, use and distribution of media in general. We tend to think of physical objects like books, CD's, DVD's and the like as the way to acquire something, hold it and use it. That's a paradigm that has been with us for thousands of years, as long as written communication has been practiced.

But the world is evolving, quickly now, to a networked one. We can get information in the form of zeros and ones instantly from all over the place. The constraint at the moment is bandwidth, so we're somewhat limited to text (the Web) and audio (iTunes, podcasts, etc.), but it's a temporary arrangement. There will be more bandwidth sooner than later.

In 1998, the business-to-business media company I worked for was old school: magazines and trade shows. But the chief Internet guy thought, "Wouldn't it be cool if we did a Web-based application to manage e-mail, contacts, etc. for our customers? You know, CRM?" The execs thought it was a stupid idea. Who is going to ever use software that they don't have on their own computer?

That company has since been de-listed from the NYSE, and Salesforce.com made millions in its IPO. Do you see what I'm getting at here?

Yes, the costs of the P2 workflow and subsequent storage might be a little high (though when compared to HD tape formats, not counting HDV, they're really not), but it's an evolutionary first step. While we sit here and debate this, someone is already thinking about how to get rid of the intermediate P2 storage entirely and beam the data back to the truck's server, or over wireless broadband, or some other network we haven't thought of yet. Canon is doing this today with Wi-Fi and their SLR cameras.

So what do I do for a living? I worked in some form of broadcast from about 1990 to 1999, and I was an early adopter of DVCPRO (and might have gone to DVCAM had it come out sooner). I used to love Media 100. Since 1999, I've been working as a programmer in various Web spaces, but I've always watched video carefully. I ordered an HVX and I may never do anything with it that will make me money. But given my strange career, I obviously see a convergence that was talked about a decade ago, and I want to be a part of it.

In the end, I think the concern we all have is to tell a story or communicate in the most efficient and robust way possible. For all of the quirks, I think that the subject of this forum is a very big step in the right direction toward reaching that goal.
 
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All of this is valid. From my perspective the biggest difficulties arise when you try to institute this (P2) technology or ANY new technology into a large organization which has established protocols for dealing with data. Look at the push that happened over the last several years towards a "paperless" office. Now, does anyone see a paperless office? We use much less paper than we used to, but it took us years to get a fraction of the way there and were a six person shop. Can you imagine what it would be like to make say Citigroup a paperless office - it's not gonna happen.

This doesn't mean that tape will be here forever, it wont. But Hudson asked about what concerns others might have about P2. Well if it's a small shop, probably not too many. However, if you're ESPN it might be huge. NOT because P2 wont work, but because everything you do, everything you own (from a media management perspective) all your established procedures are geared towards working in a completely different manner. To change over is far more than just recording to a different format, you have to change the entire corporate culture regarding media acquisition. You have to change how you capture data, how you offload it, how you edit it, how you deliver it, how you store it short term and how you archive it long term. And you have to do this for many systems used by many individuals. You need new policies, new training, new software, new hardware. You also have to coordinate these changes amongst your affiliate partners, get approval from parent corps... It just becomes a big, expensive task, like turning an aircraft carrier steaming ahead. Sure it can be done, but it's not nearly as simply as turning a PT boat. Ever see what a Fortune 500 company goes through just to change their letterhead? It's hundreds of thousands (if not millions) of dollars, and they ain't spending it all on printing. They're buracracies! That's why you see a group like the BBC, who is obviously excited by the technology, moving so slowly with it and evaluating it carefully. The cost of the cameras or the P2 media have got to be the last of their concerns, but rather they probably want to make sure that if they switch everything over, they wont have to switch again in a few short years. It's like hiring someone (and John you're an entrepreneur like me so I know you know this). It's not their salary that you really worry about, it's the cost of acquiring them, training them, putting together their benefit package and retaining them that gets expensive. That's why we pay people more and more. One person might say, well if they want that much just fire them and hire someone else, but you know what the real costs are. Same thing here I think. But again, as always, I could be wrong.

I think the concerns over the PT workflow - at least the valid ones - are coming from this crowd. For guys like you (Hudson) and me, it's really a non issue.
 
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xray said:
We don´t edit with P2 so why should we shoot with it? You need to download it to disks and the time it takes to download is the same as to digitize the tape. Even more as you want a backup. No argument.
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Sorry but there's a huge argument.

First, yes you can edit with P2. If you're shooting TV commercials or news and aiming for quick turnaround you can edit straight off the card and finish the piece much quicker than any way else.

Second, downloading to computer is nowhere near the same as digitizing with tape. It depends on what format you're shooting in, and what your hardware situation is like. If you're using a fast system with a RAID, you can offload footage at a rate of 6.4x realtime on up to 25.6x realtime.

Third, digitizing with tape puts the time and effort up-front, before you can finish your project. Using P2 moves the effort of backup/archive to the end of the project, when you're done and your deadline is met and your invoice is sent.
 
Barry_Green said:
... or two-time Cannes winner and Independent Spirit Award winner and Sundance winner Kevin Smith, ...
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Not sure what you're referring to with Kevin Smith. He shot Clerks 2 on film, and the online video journal on DVX100A. In one of the latest clips in the online journal called "digital vs. film" he says he can't wait for digital to fully catch up with film so he can utilize it. His producer goes on to say he thinks digital is useful if you're using heavy effects shots but is lacking in picture quality if not.

What was it you were referring to? (curious, not challenging)
 
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