Live from the Panasonic NAB press conference...

>You sound like a candidate for an EOS 5D MKII. Thought about it?

Every day. But I need 24p support in it, and shutter speed support too. Without these two additional features, it's also a deal breaker. I hear rumors that there will be a new firmware about it though, so if that happens, that's the camera I will be getting, as my husband already owns many Canon lenses from his 10D and 5D Mark-I days.

>Eugenia, check out the Panasonic GH1.

No, I am afraid it doesn't do what I need. It only does 24p at 1080p, and only at 17 mbps, which is too low for the quality I am after. Plus, the videos I have seen from it so far are overly contrasty.

>The consumer Canons your talking about are indeed VBR

All the discussions I've seen about it, including a 50,000 views thread on another forum, no one mentioned that, so I am not sure this is true.

>Did you expect 3 1/2" sensors?

I was expecting a single 1/2.0". I don't care about 3 of them. I just want a big sensor.

>sounds like you want a vdslr.

Not without reasonable frame rate support (23.976 instead of 24.00, and 29.97 instead of 30 -- I really want exact frame rates otherwise I get resampling ghosting on Vegas if I export in IVTC or NTSC), exposure compensation/locking, manual white balance, cine-gamma support, and also shutter speed support. There is none that does all that, and that's all rudimentary support! They either do half of the deal, or they don't do any of that. If Canon fixes my problems with the 5D though, I'd go with that, yeah. Not to mention that h.264 in MOV/MP4 is unbearably slow on Vegas and requires proxy files. AVCHD is not slow on a modern machine, because Vegas is optimized for it.

This is why I am rooting mostly for a hybrid consumer-prosumer Canon camera with half inch sensors. Kind of like this Panasonic one, but with bigger sensors and faster lens.
 
No problem, the new E cards are P2 spec, not P2 limited spec, meaning that functionally, they are identical to the old cards except faster and with a shorter life.

Dan
 
TimTyler said:
NAB offers no promises.

I mean - Even the 64 E's are months away and I'm glad I've got 128GB of P2 storage I can work with now because I'm using it, but I need Panasonic to convince me I wasn't suckered.

Sure, maybe my 64GB 'A' card will work just fine after five years, but it will have devalued so much by then that it will not matter.

Buying P2 media should not be like playing the stock market.
Click to expand...

"Even the 64 E's are months away and I'm glad I've got 128GB of P2 storage I can work with now because I'm using it" Sounds to me like you made a good decision. I guess I could cry about what I paid for the 4's when they first came out but I got the use out of them, making it worthwhile.

Honestly, as long as you didn't buy them to video your neighbors barbeque (as opposed to actually making money), I don't think you should give it another thought. It's a "mind thing" my friend -- so don't get into your own head. It's not Panasonic's job to convince you (or any of us) of anything. They're fulfilling their role by offering an array of products from which to choose.

If it makes you feel a little better . . . I need more cards now and will probably make the same decision as you did, except that I will do so with the knowledge that if I wait I could save money (which won't offset what I'll make having the more expensive and available ones in hand).

Best.

D.
 
The new E series card couldnt have come at a better time for me over here in South Africa. I was about to buy a 16gb card at approx $1625 today (best price I could get here) and thought before I do it, let me Google P2 once more.

Also confirmed that I did the right thing when I bought my HPX174. What a great camera.
 
Barry_Green said:
The 150 is CCD, the HMC40 is CMOS. The HMC40 will probably be sharper, but I'd expect the 150 to be (in general) the better camera, especially in low light performance. But, we'll see. It's smaller, denser-packed CMOS chips. And it's tiny -- it's like a DVC30. If you saw the DVC30 vs. the DVX100, that should be about the same comparison between the HMC40 and the HMC150. But it's very early; the HMC40 isn't supposed to be out for at least several more months.
Click to expand...

Could the HMC40 be the answer to JVC´s HM100 ? sounds like they have about the same size? I wonder if Canon comes up with one in this size...
 
AwakenedFilms said:
Not really, David. I believe there is a counter function that will tell exactly how much 'life' a card has left.


J
Click to expand...

You'll see people start to take pictures of a screen shot of the life / cycle meter like they do for the hvx hour meter when they advertise them for sale.

I'd never use 10% of a five year card because I'm going to buy several to avoid downloading in the filed. I'd have no fear of buying them used with 25% or less life left but I'll bet we won't see those on the used market for 3+ years.

How many people here have 1825 hours on thier hvx? I'll bet not many but thats how long this card is guaranteed for. I have 450 hours on mine in 2+ years so it would take me 8.1 years to wear out a $998 64 gig card. I can assure you I'll have a 1TB card before that time comes.
 
Hmm, well after just dropping a bundle on a 64gb, initially I thought I would be a little frustrated at a major 64gb price drop, which, whilst this is a diff. type of 64gb p2, is essentially the same thing.

Having the 64gb has helped me demo longer record times and pick up a few clients along the way so getting it sooner rather than later was the best thing to do. And the new 64's arent here until August - no way I could wait that long or rent that long. Pretty much my thought process when I saw the announcement.

I never buy until I have a need.
 
Since the internals are different, I have to hope that the new E-Series P2 cards will allow us to use off-the-shelf PCMCIA card readers.

That would be economical.

-Andrew
 
Andrew:

The new E series cards are functionally identical to the existing P2 cards other than speed and longevity so I seriously doubt that off the shelf PCMCIA will work any better than they do with the existing cards.

Isn't there a PC desktop solution that some are using from Addonics? Or are you on a Mac?

Dan
 
We were ripped-off all the time and most of us were happy, and finally we are gladd that there is a significant price drop comming. They had to find a name for it so it became the "E"-type card - whatever.
IMO it is the SOS with a new name to keep those who paid a fortune for P2 at ease.
I wonder why some of us are so willing to believe whatever Pana is telling us?
Anyway, Iam happy that reason has won from "greed".
 
Hey Dan,

I am on a Mac, and holding out hope for more P2 solutions.

It would be great to buy a "slim line" card reader for P2. Maybe we can ask Steve Jobs to replace the disc slot for a P2 slot in Apples external Super Drive.

-Andrew
 
Kenny_G said:
We were ripped-off all the time and most of us were happy, and finally we are gladd that there is a significant price drop comming. They had to find a name for it so it became the "E"-type card - whatever.
IMO it is the SOS with a new name to keep those who paid a fortune for P2 at ease.
I wonder why some of us are so willing to believe whatever Pana is telling us?
Anyway, Iam happy that reason has won from "greed".
Click to expand...

Define "ripped-off".

Somewhere else it was partly explained why this newer type of card was cheaper... having to do with maturing technology and the fact it has a much shorter shelf life. The fact that you can buy a Focus for $15k doesn't mean that $30k Mustang is a rip off.

You do not sell an item based on what it costs to produce, you sell it based on what the market will bear. No one put a gun to your head and forced you to buy into the P2 workflow. You knew the costs before you bought into it, and bought into it anyways. The fact that they say they are going to be able to offer cheaper versions four months down the road doesn't mean they were ripping you off when you bought into P2 however many months or years ago. If you don't like it, there are other formats you can choose. And for the record, I don't own any P2 gear. It was originally designed for the broadcast/news organization market, and for cameras costing north of $20k. I decided it wasn't worth the cost to me. You could have chosen to do the same. Please don't blame Panasonic because you didn't.

Remember, Panasonic exists to make money for their shareholders, not provide you with cheap stuff.
 
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"We were ripped-off all the time and most of us were happy..."

We can say it again and again, P2 is made for professionals, not hobbyists. For Pros, P2 MAKES you money, For hobbyists, it costs you money so buy a 150. I just pre-ordered two of the new 64GB cards, they are going to make me so much money. Don't you charge your clients for card rentals? The $2,000.00 I spend will pay me back five or ten fold in a couple of years.

This board cracks me up. How about when the HVX200 was introduced, I was so freaking stoked to be buying a $5,000.00 camera that shared the same codec and VFR as the $70,000.00 Varicam I was renting at the time and shot to a new, amazingly cool format called P2 that allowed us to dump our freaking $25,000.00 lame AJ-HD1200 DVC ProHD deck and expensive $140.00 per tape 126 DVC ProHD tapes? That's more like the reality. P2 was and is a Godsend for me, it changed the entire way I work and saved me hundreds of thousands of dollars of camera rentals, HD decks, new heads, downtime, troubleshooting.

I did some calculations and my original HVX200 made me over $28,000.00 in camera rental profits in two and half years.

Yeah, P2 is a total ripoff.

Dan.
 
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Thats if you believe that P2 cards were expensive because of R&D an all those other reasons that were given for the high cost. Especially for the HVx200 which never needed that kind of card as it couldn't resolve that much more resolution than a SD camera.

Obviously some people believed the reasoning to be false and believe it was simply price gouging because there was no other alternative. Yes it made you money but your profit margin was lowered because the cards were so expensive.

Panasonic had to do something and these new cards are welcomed because long record times and cheap media is a reality and they have been too far behind.
 
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