ullanta
Veteran
Well, my main thing to find out today was about the 4-channel audio. Who cares about poixel counts, sensitivity, 42" Plasma? I want 4 uncompressed channels.
Sadly, the news was personally disappointing to me... I'm not knocking the camera, for which I'm clearly not the target market... but real 4-channel audio would've sorta let me justify a purchase. Now, I don't think so.
Anyway, after getting very little information, someone actually let me read through the HVX manual in the Panny booth, and then I got sort of a confirmation from Jan.
Basically, the signal from the internal camera mic is recorded to channels 3 and 4. And, unfortunately, there doesn't seem to be a way to control gain for channels 3 and 4. Since the HVX has ALC - limiting, rather than a full AGC - I can't see how this would be very useful. Noone from Panasonic could even guess at what the "default" gain setting might be for these two channels.... alls I knows is that in most situations the signal would be either unusably low or banging too hard against the limiter.
I'm frankly a little confused - it seems the resources could have been better used. A setting, e.g., that allowed the XLRs to be used as line inputs, while using the gain controls for the internal mic would have been useful; and all the capability seems to be there. Or, of course, better yet, to use the Phono Jack inputs as line inputs on channel 3 and 4 (which can be done now, but only for audio dubbing in VCR mode).
I have a DVX100P, which I am very happy with, and though I would have preferred to have many of the improvements in the 100A, I never felt "gypped" as some here have. But I have now a tremendous fear that a future revision to the HVX would indeed remedy this sad audio situation... it seems like a very logical and fairly simple fix. And this thought alone is pretty much enough to keep my from buying the camera.
Again, I'm mostly in a specialty niche (Classical Music Live Recording) where these features are essential to me, and I understand that I'm not the target market, so I'm not faulting Panny on this decision... I'm just sad. Sniff. And sharing this, since I've been trying to get the audio details for months, and perhaps some other folks have also...
Sadly, the news was personally disappointing to me... I'm not knocking the camera, for which I'm clearly not the target market... but real 4-channel audio would've sorta let me justify a purchase. Now, I don't think so.
Anyway, after getting very little information, someone actually let me read through the HVX manual in the Panny booth, and then I got sort of a confirmation from Jan.
Basically, the signal from the internal camera mic is recorded to channels 3 and 4. And, unfortunately, there doesn't seem to be a way to control gain for channels 3 and 4. Since the HVX has ALC - limiting, rather than a full AGC - I can't see how this would be very useful. Noone from Panasonic could even guess at what the "default" gain setting might be for these two channels.... alls I knows is that in most situations the signal would be either unusably low or banging too hard against the limiter.
I'm frankly a little confused - it seems the resources could have been better used. A setting, e.g., that allowed the XLRs to be used as line inputs, while using the gain controls for the internal mic would have been useful; and all the capability seems to be there. Or, of course, better yet, to use the Phono Jack inputs as line inputs on channel 3 and 4 (which can be done now, but only for audio dubbing in VCR mode).
I have a DVX100P, which I am very happy with, and though I would have preferred to have many of the improvements in the 100A, I never felt "gypped" as some here have. But I have now a tremendous fear that a future revision to the HVX would indeed remedy this sad audio situation... it seems like a very logical and fairly simple fix. And this thought alone is pretty much enough to keep my from buying the camera.
Again, I'm mostly in a specialty niche (Classical Music Live Recording) where these features are essential to me, and I understand that I'm not the target market, so I'm not faulting Panny on this decision... I'm just sad. Sniff. And sharing this, since I've been trying to get the audio details for months, and perhaps some other folks have also...
