HPX300 was great!

profnoxin

profnoxin

Well-known member
Just shot a web series for TheWB.com called 'The Lake'. The HPX was a blast to use and performed great for us in every way.

Flew the thing on a light weight jib, did handheld standing waist deep in the water, etc. etc. We used the wide angle Fujinon zooms that I believe were made for the JVC GY-HD110U or something like that and they were quite nice and not nearly as breathy as the stock lenses.

Birns and Sawyer provided us with the two camera packages and they did a great job for us.

Word to the wise - The HD-SDI ports seem like they're extremely tight, so I'd suggest using elbows for the connections and pigtails to the handle. We lost a half dozen video elbows in three weeks, which for me is unheard of. Also if you're using a zoom control, many of the light weight rod options get in the way of the connection on the wide angle zoom lens.

In the end, a joy to work with both as a D.P. and as an Operator. If you want to take a look at the footage you can either see it on my reel at jtalley.8m.com or at TheWB.com

Thanks and happy shooting!
 
Mate you've just made me glad I bought the camera... so all the stuff on your reel is the 300???

There is a look and feel to the 300 I think...

Excellent work...

Cheers
 
justin-

thanks for the post. just read your thoughts on the camera on back page of recent videography magazine.

as a dp for hire you often have access to rental house cameras. since i am a producer/shooter, i only rely on rental houses to fill an immediate need.

bottom line: would u spend your own money on the hpx300 or opt for a 1/2" chip like the ex1/ex3 or 2/3" chip such as the hpx500 or the higher end sony rigs?

again, thanks for the post and congrats on "the lake".

be well

rob katz
smalltalk productions
 
1. My reel is a mix of 35 (Moviecam and Arri), S/16 (Arri S/16SR or my own 16BolexPro) and HD/SD video on either the HPX300, HVX200 (Owner), DVX100 (Former Owner), JVC GY-HD110u, HPX3000 or F900. The lake is my only project on the HPX300.

2. We shot 24p for The Lake and for everything else on my reel as well. Oh, and we shot AVC-I 720p for card space reasons. I would have loved to shoot 1080 since in a metering test the camera came out quite a bit faster at 1080, but we had to think about post production drive space/data management.

3. I would not buy any of the EX cameras mostly because I'll never go back to shooting on a camera that's less than 100mps if I don't have to. I'm also very wary of cable based external hard drives unless they're of the utmost quality, and the way to get everything out of that camera that it can give is to do just that.
As for the 500... I think it's a great camera as well. It's built like a mac truck and you've got all the lenses in the world at your disposal. As an owner, my main concern with the 300 is that it breathes like crazy. Seriously. When I did my camera test and Jason Priestley (our director) and I were looking at the monitor we were horrified. Even at max wide on the zoom stick it breathes. Shooting for the web about the one thing that I couldn't accept was breathing in the lenses.
I've heard that Canon is about to or just did put out a really nice 1/3" zoom lens, which could solve all your worries.
Except for the fact that you have to know that there's an HPX550 or something of it's ilk lurking around the corner at 2/3" with AVC-I.

4. Does anyone from Panasonic or anyone out there know if it's possible to get the waveform/histogram to appear in the eyepiece on the 300? I never figured that one out on the show.
 
I have spoken with the midwest Panny rep and he said there will be no upgrade to the 500 because it would cannibalize sales from the 2700.

Do you have ay scene files you created for The Lake and would like to share?

Thanks,

Ned
 
Hey Justin,

Nice reel! Silly question, which shots on the reel are "The Lake"? For some reason www.thewb.com doesn't work in Canada!

Also, in regards to the breathing of the stock lens and ENG lenses in general, if you were to shoot a webseries like this again, and the HPX300 was "the camera" again, would you consider using something like the Letus 1/3" relay? I guess it wasn't on the market when you guys went into production earlier this year.

cheers

Edit: I found some footage elsewhere online. Looks good. I would never have guessed it was the 300.
 
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1. Just meant that it always seems to be the way with cameras. You purchase "the camera" one day, then the next day they drop something even more mind blowing on you.

2. I do have them, but I don't actually know how I would access them off of my SD cards... I will say they probably wouldn't be best for everyone. Several things that I do with the scene files are designed knowing that it's going to be heavily compressed later on... for instance in every test that I've done with web compression the footage looks better in the end if you turn the detail down on the camera... unless of course you're shooting with something like the Letus, which leads me to...

3. "would you consider using something like the Letus 1/3" relay?" - I'm going to speak out of both sides of my mouth on this one...
Yes - I used a 1/4 Tiffen SoftFX filter on nearly every frame of the show. The edge softening that occurs with the Letus would not have been detrimental to the look that I was trying to achieve. Would I have loved less depth of field? Yes. Always... but...
No - This shoot was extremely fast paced covering more pages per day and with a smaller crew than I'd ever want to say. Using eng style primes saved my bacon on many occasions because of the maddening clip at which we were moving. Both my 1st A.C. (Jen Woldrich) and my A camera operator (Cory B. Clay) were fantastic, but I think had I loaded them down with an adaptor and a set of primes, or even the support gear that goes along with a cinestyle zoom, I think we would have been stretched too thin. Now, if there were decent 1/3" DigiPrimes, that's another story altogether.
In the end I made the right choice for the show at hand because of our time/crew constraints, but given a different set of circumstances I probably would have chosen to use a lens adaptor or a camera with larger chips and a 2/3" B4 mount.
 
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