Inexpensive hi-def woes

Come on now, this is getting tiresome.

The pro argument in the P2 case is as arbitrary as the against argument, but is also stated as fact. If you can't see that, maybe you should follow a debating class. That **** about trolling, and people being close minded is an "argumentum ad hominem"

As AshG already said: The change back to a film workflow isn't necessarily a good thing. Not all people regard the bottleneck of loading film positive. There is hardly anything factual (yet) about the superiority of the P2 workflow, it is as subjective as anything in this thread.

And the dominance of HDD based sound recording is also as much BS. Most people i know still use DAT, and i'm talking seasoned professionals doing more then weddings and events, but high-profile corporates, brandfilms and commercials.

For the last time, i'm all for this approach, but get some perspective people. You might be leading people on to buying into a camera that later on might not be the right system for them. As P2 capacity keeps on growing (and price keeps on going down, naturally) it is becoming more and more a attractive solution, but i give Panasonic 1-2 years to make some serious headway.

Don't underestimate the capital behind the competition.
 
JTmoney said:
Why can't you simply put the HVX200 in loop record with 2 8gig P2 cards? In film that equals a ton of time for Just about any shot! Now why do I say loop record? Tworeasons. One....You go through a lot of preparation for that one shot! So take after take you want to get it right! Now lets take the pressure off everyone on the set. Go into loop record relax. This will change the way you work with your actors. At this point there is no cost in tape or film. No brake to change film or tape, no rush....Simply press stop when you nail that perfect shot, I also think if you take the pressure off your actors you may get a better performance. Down load P2 card and your off to the next shot faster then ever! Second..Endless shoot time in loop
record with out cost in tape or film! Only thing saved is that perfect shot. No waste!
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Interesting concept. I don't know how I think about that yet. But I do know that you've just given me an idea to put on the HVX wish list for any future updates (the ability to trim a clip in-camera). If we had that, I think your loop-record idea would be absolutely brilliant.

Loop Record takes the two cards' unshot areas and allocates them into one continuous buffer. You hit "record", and it continues to loop and loop until you hit "stop", at which point it writes out the current content of the buffer as a clip. Now, if you had 16 minutes of storage (i.e., two 8gb cards at 1080/24) and you shot your one-minute scene thirty times, and finally got the one you wanted, you could hit "stop" and it would write out that scene (plus the prior 15 minutes). That all works as you suggest, and would be fine, but -- what if you wanted to go for "one more take"? That might be a problem because if you want to save the take you like, you'd want to offload at that point, and unless you've got spare cards, that means downtime. Now, if they let us truncate clips, you could save that one minute or whatever, and go immediately back into loop record. That would be phenomenal.

But then again, you could almost accomplish the same thing if you devoted yourself to just deleting useless takes as you go; every time the director calls "cut" you'd get a "keep" or "nuke" call from the script super, soundman and director, and if they all say "nuke" you could delete it and recover that space, waiting for the "keeper"...

I'm sure I'm over looking something with this scenario.....Feel free to point it out
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I don't think you're overlooking anything. It would work. It opens up a whole new workflow option for those who are more comfortable with free-flow workflow, waiting for "the one". Thanks for bringing it up in the discussion!
 
Just out out of curiosity (and perhaps to demonstrate my delerious ignorance):

Do you always know which take is "the one"? Do you never in, e.g., the editing process find a need to use one that you might have considered sub-par on the set?

Mind you, I like the idea of the looping and stop when "right", but I wonder how big a downside is losing the earlier takes...

'Course, you guys probably use shot lists and storyboards and all that and thus have a clue of what you really want ;-)
 
Barry_Green said:
I do know that you've just given me an idea to put on the HVX wish list for any future updates (the ability to trim a clip in-camera).
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How funny, I was actually just thinking about this very same idea today! Even independent of the "loop" feature, I think having the ability to trim clips in-camera would be a really fantastic thing to add. If you could set in and out points for clips (and throw away the unwanted parts), it would help to eliminate "junk" footage (that you consequently have to transfer and store), save you space on the card (and increase recording times), and streamline the process in post. Seeing that you can already advance clips you're reviewing on a frame-by-frame basis, it shouldn't even be that hard to implement; just add an "in" and "out" marking feature and a simple confirmation that you indeed want to "trim" the excess footage from the clip. I definitely second this idea! :thumbsup:
 
parallax said:
And the dominance of HDD based sound recording is also as much BS. Most people i know still use DAT, and i'm talking seasoned professionals doing more then weddings and events, but high-profile corporates, brandfilms and commercials.
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But I think they'd likely agree that, their entrenched equipment aside, the HDD/Flash approach has definite advantages. Luckily for audio, most of the problems of P2 have past already... DVD-R has reasonable capacity for backup at ultra-low cost; Flash storage has better recording capacity already than DAT tape, and costs are very low. And, the benefits of multi-format/resolution recording are clear. I can understand very well (as, primarily, a live event shooter) the current problems with P2... but at this point I can't see ANY advantage to DAT. I'm open to hear of any, though!
 
Haakon said:
If you could set in and out points for clips (and throw away the unwanted parts), it would help to eliminate "junk" footage (that you consequently have to transfer and store), save you space on the card (and increase recording times), and streamline the process in post.
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Barry, maybe you can confirm one point, though... a few posts (oh, I don't remember where! Some were Jan's) seemed to indicate that deleting on the P2 card DID NOT free up space; only a format (it said) actually erases P2 contents. I'd really like to be wrong on this... but if that is the case, deleting would potentially streamline transfer and subsequent storage, but wouldn't help with recording time between dumps...
 
@ ullanta

I hadn't thought about the whole bad takes issue, you've got a pretty good point there. I've had plenty of occasions when i used footage that i considered B-grade on set, and came in handy afterwards.
Even in compositing, there is often some element in a bad shot that is very valuable in another shot, wich makes me happy i captured it anyway.
 
JTmoney said:
I'm sure I'm over looking something with this scenario.....Feel free to point it out
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Director says: "Mark take 3, 11 and 19 as "GOOD" and the others "MAYBE"."
Usually people want to do edit decicions in the edit.
 
ullanta said:
Barry, maybe you can confirm one point, though... a few posts (oh, I don't remember where! Some were Jan's) seemed to indicate that deleting on the P2 card DID NOT free up space; only a format (it said) actually erases P2 contents.
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Jan was wrong, and she clarified that a few posts later on CreativeCow. Jan was trying to delete clips on a Mac; they were moving the files into the recycle bin but not deleting them. She found that you can do some sort of "force delete" process and it would actually delete them and free up space.

I'd really like to be wrong on this...
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You are. :) Deleting clips in-camera, or on the PC or doing a forced-delete on the Mac will all free up space on the card.

It works the way you'd expect it to, and the way you want it to.
 
parallax said:
And the dominance of HDD based sound recording is also as much BS. Most people i know still use DAT, and i'm talking seasoned professionals doing more then weddings and events, but high-profile corporates, brandfilms and commercials.
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My experience is that when professionals buy something very high quality and very expensive tools (like TC-DATs), they don't throw it to rubbish bin when it disappears from shop's shelf. They use it as long as it is usable. Dat is very usable alone if you don't need more than 2 tracks (many times 2 booms are enough), for backup or adding 2 tracks for hdd/ss based recorder.
 
Thank you all for your feedback on my loop record secnario. All very good points!
It's a forward thinking idea. Needs work. I do see potential with it
 
ullanta said:
Well, remember, P2 is the key to an IT approach... so I'd look to IT for answers, as there are decades of experience. I'm sure there are hundreds of studies, because it is the meat and potatoes of an IT / computer support person's activities; and many scholarly and technical journals devoted to the subject.

I've never heard of any computer center or other large IT concern archiving on hard drives. One thing I've heard often is that hard drives need to be exercised... sitting on a shelf for long periods of time leads to mechanism problems.

The very fact that a HD incorporates mechanism and media makes it prone to far more problems than a strictly media archiving format.
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Hard disk are in a sealed environment and in a shield casing. The recording surface is never in contact with writing and reading heads.

Btw yes, I am sure a HD on a shelf for 50 year might not work. But I do not care for that long period of a time. Tape, Disk, Memory, Hard Disk there is no medium that I feel confortable to trust for decades. The solution I trust the most rightnow are HD. And I am sure within 10 year I will have found another medium to copy my hard disk data to.
 
Jmfox,

I have used the Diva but I don't own it, and couldn't afford it. I think it's about 10k and you can find info about it online. As far as the Traveller, you can find it through the MOTU site. www.motu.com It's a firewire interface with 8XLR/1/4 inch. The other one to check out is listed on www.hercules.com

The link is: http://us.hercules.com/products/showpage.php?p=91&b=1&f=1

That's a good cheaper version but it only has 2 microphone inputs so it's more for a live even coming out of the board.


The workflow requires a bit more setup so it's not really for walking ENG stuff. although you can do that if you need, but I would prefer to just go mixer to the camera or to a copact flash recorder. The workflow that I'm describing would be more for a feature, commercial and or instructional video.

The Diva is in another league and you can check that out.. alsong with a Fostex that is a 6 input unit I believe. They are standaloen and really nice, but really expensive.


For the Traveller, the hercules and others it's pretty straightforward atleast on a mac powerbook. Here's how it can be done. A dedicated powersupply/block battery and then a power conditioner where everything gets hooked up. The traveller is powered and hooked up to the firewire bus. I use an external timecode generator to get synch with everything, but if you ae only using one traveller this isn't necessary. I also use this for smartslate and for backing up to compace flash recorder out of the travellers digital/analogue out. Then you have the 8 inputs for recording line/mic.

It requires a cart and either your own power or acess to wall power. It's really a very ncie and inexpensive way to do multi-track recording. You might also want to look into 3rd party location softwear. One my friend uses is the metacorder software.. and I believe there is a shareware version called boom operator or something like that.

You have a bunch of options for standalone studiio recorders now. It's a good time for multi-track.


Hope this answered your questions
 
jmfox,

Yes. Just for audio.. thought that is what you were talking about. For video we'd be dealing with a whole heap more data and considerations. The pesky audio guys get the digital advantages before the video guys...
 
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