Meet my God

Barry_Green said:
That the tape deck portion of the SDX is costing over $7,000!
And that's just for DVCPRO-50, that's not even for DVCPRO-HD! What would a DVCPRO-HD deck add to the price -- $10,000?

Probably more than that as DVCPRO-HD uses double the number of heads as DVCPRO-50.
Wow, P2 is a great deal!
 
total cost of energy

total cost of energy

Jan's original observation on this thread was that P2 helps with camera battery life. Absolutely. No question.

But the thread is also about the rigors of event photography away from a convenient wall socket.

A lot of Mr. Billup's article had to do with how they were going to power their equipment on and around a sailing ship. These issues are the same kinds as I typically deal with, and you can bet that I'm looking hard at the specs of the HVX and how it will fit into 'frontier' shooting.

It is far cheaper to have a laptop (or workstation) with a P2 capture widget, than to tote around a bandolier of P2 wafers for your entire shoot. So you have to factor in the power requirements of that equipment also. When possible, if I'm shooting out in the desert, or on a mountain top, or a moody street alleyway, I bring along a 6000 watt putt-putt generator, and do my best to mask the noise of the thing from the shoot. This takes a serious investment in heavy gauge extension cords, but for us that is a sunk cost. We can run 3 ARRI lights (from 150 to 300 watts), a monster smoke machine, a Sony 16:9 high-def 13" monitor, a laptop, a DAT tape recorder (or an 800 Watt stereo to play back music if we have a lip-syncing band), and a DVX100. 5 gallons of unleaded gas buys us about 6 hours of continuous power for all of the above. If we require pristine sound for our shoot, we do not rely on a putt-putt generator.

If I'm channeling Robert Rodriquez particularly well, we dispense with lights, and bring along a couple of 400 Watt Triplite UPS's that hook up to a couple of heavy duty 12v marine batteries to run stuff like the sound system and monitor. (Although the monitor could run much more efficiently from 12v DC, the adapter to do this is the dictionary definition of highway robbery!)

The DVX holds up its side of the bargain. We bought 5 or so 3000mah batteries from Jarred for about $150, so we've got plenty of camera power, even with LCD and phantom power for the shotgun mics. I suspect the HVX will be similar.

On the plus side, those P2 slabs can handle any shock that you throw at them, certainly more so than the camera itself.

I guess my long-winded point is that camera power is the least of our worries on a remote shoot, therefore the power gains one gets from P2 media vs tape don't matter much in the context I'm concerned about.

P.S. Jan- I'm an ideal candidate for field testing equipment in remote locations! I love to write reports about real world performance, in a language that engineers and managers understand... hint, hint! ;)
 
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