New Panasonic 4K 60P Camcorder HC-X1000

Sounds good- the only drawback (for me anyway) is that it's only a 1 yr warranty. Gotten kinda used to panasonic's 3yrs for this price range. Even the AC8 has 3yr coverage- and I can buy 3 of those for what the HC costs. For a $3.5k camera- 1yr is kinda chincy.. This is like a Sony warranty- but Panasonic has always excelled w/ their coverage, and it's one of the major factors that keeps me a customer.

why would Panasonic consider the AC8 a pro model and not this one? This camera seems like an AC100.
 
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I can't answer that, I don't know. This is as pro a camera as any that they've offered in the AG lineup... but for some reason, this one's being launched from the consumer side instead of the pro side. I don't know if it's market overlap or divisional infighting or just the company charting a new direction or who knows? It's certainly unusual. But this camera is absolutely a pro-line camera, with all the menus and operations and ruggedness and build quality and everything else the pro line has been famous for. The only difference is in who's marketing it, as near as I can tell.
 
Maybe its being advertised from the 4k stand point to help advertise 4k in general. Try and sell more TV's. They still could put 3yrs on it though, or at least split the difference and put 2.
 
Doubt that, panasonic seems to be wary re: 4k tv. Some bean counter probably looked at the what the rest of the industry offers in terms of warranty coverage, and said one year is enough.
 
Latest discovery: this camera has the ability to control and copy to, and copy from, external USB hard drives. This in and of itself isn't all that shocking, as P2 cameras have been able to do this for years, but -- it's infinitely better on this camera.

First -- you don't have to reformat the drive! The P2 cameras required the drive to be formatted in a certain way, and each card you copied over became its own drive letter. This camera doesn't do that at all. You can plug in an existing drive, and it may (or may not) recognize it and let you start copying right to it. I had one drive that I know is formatted which it said it wanted to reformat, but two other drives worked fine as-is; I chalk it up to prerelease firmware issues and look forward to testing the final version.

Okay, so -- no reformatting. You can use an existing drive. You don't have to dedicate a drive solely to working with this camera, like we used to do with P2 cameras.

Next big thing -- it only takes up as much space as it needs. Huzzah! With the P2 cameras, if you were offloading a 32gb card, it would take up 32gb of drive space (even if you'd only shot 1gb of footage). With this camera, it copies what it sees, and it takes up as much space as it needs, and no more.

Next big thing -- it bus-powers USB drives! What an incredible relief, they got it so very right -- you can keep a terabyte usb hard disk in your pocket and offload it while being powered directly from the camera.

Another thing -- it's reasonably fast. A UHS-1 card offloaded 7.2 gb in about 3:45 to an old USB2 drive. Might be even faster with a modern USB3 drive. But even so, that's about twice as fast as the old P2 Store used to do, and about as fast as my laptop normally copies cards.

Okay, now for the big or not so big thing: when it copies clips, you don't get say in the data management. It doesn't copy clips in a card-centric format. It dumps the footage into one big directory, so effectively the hard disk ends up looking like it was one gigantic SD card that you used to record onto. There aren't separate PRIVATE directories for each AVCHD card you copy, etc. Is this a good thing or a bad thing? The OCD side of me says "I want my cards stored in the order I shot them" but the reasonable side of me says "what does it matter? You've got timecode and time/date stamps and thumbnails, and it stores the clips in the order you copied them." So I'm not 100% sure about that, but here's something fairly big I think I can say -- it's INFINITELY better for AVCHD clips. It copies all clips into one big AVCHD folder, and it renumbers each and every clip as it copies them. What does this mean? NO MORE DUPLICATE FILE NAMES! If you're doing an AVCHD shoot and you end up with half a dozen cards, and you copied them using the camera onto a hard disk, you'd end up with one gigantic folder with all your footage, grouped by the time it was shot, and with every clip having a unique and individual file name. Seems like that might be a bonus for people who shoot a lot of footage at once...

With AVCHD, every card starts the clips over at 00000.mts, then 00001.mts. So if you shot four cards worth of footage, you'll have four different 00000.mts files, one on each card. But if you use the camera to copy the footage, you'll have one gigantic folder and only one 00000.mts file. The others will be renumbered, in order as to how you copied them... i.e., if the first card has four clips on it, and the second card has three clips on it, then instead of having two 00000.mts, two 00001.mts, two 00002.mts, and one 00003.mts, what you'll end up with is 00000, 00001, 00002, and 00003 will all be from card 1, and then 00004, 00005, and 00006 will be from card two. They'll be grouped by card because the clips will all be copied off together, but they won't share filenames so no hassle about that in editing.

Oh, one last thing -- you can reset the clip numbers. You can have them start back over at 00000 if you want. Lots of people have asked for that in past cameras, and this one finally does it.
 
Wow. Thank you, Barry. I can see a lot of usefulness from being able to connect a USB drive! Not sure about the file numbering thing. That could get a little messy but it's still worth it to be able to copy footage out in the field from the camera. It can be sorted out later I suppose.
 
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Barry, what do you expect better for weddings Sony pxw-x70 or this camera from Panasonic?
Im looking for a affordable 4k camera for weddings and im not sure which camera is better:
X70 has 50mbs, long gop and 4:2:2 in HD
x1000 has 200mb, intra and 4:2:0 in HD

What do you think?
Any link for a raw video from this camera.

Best regards!!
 
Hi keinan,

I don't know enough about the X70 to make an informed choice between the two; the only two things I know for sure are:
1) The X70 has a larger sensor, and
2) The X70 doesn't record 4K. It only records 1080, 720, and standard def. They say that it is "4K ready" and that in the future, with some sort of upgrade, it will be able to do 4K, but they don't say what that will be. I don't know if it'll be a free firmware update, or an additional hardware device you have to buy, or what?

If you want the shallow DOF look, it'll be easier to create that on the Sony. If you need 4K right away, the Panasonic is the only one of these two that has it.
 
This has been a really interesting thread to read. Thanks to Barry and others for their input.

I'm about to buy my first camera before go fully pro as a freelance videographer. It will mostly be for video journalism, corporate and wedding/event stuff. I have experience shooting on AC90, AF101 and GH2/GH4 so this one feels a very natural choice. What do you think? The low light performance does concern me, but as you say - will probably be better than the AC90 which wasn't too shabby.

There's also the added bonus of a fixed lens - which means versatility and not having to invest heavily in lens kits which I imagine can be a huge financial drain when you're first starting out.
 
I was watching a review of the LX100 from TheCameraStoreTV when at the end Jordan shared that used a HC-X1000 to film the review. He also goes over some impressions of the camera. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4K7v3IyuMnE&app=desktop

His impressions were not positive and what struck me was how sharp his segment at the end is as it was shot with an LX100. Don't know what is going on over at Panasonic these days regarding camcoders...
 
Bassman2003 said:
I was watching a review of the LX100 from TheCameraStoreTV when at the end Jordan shared that used a HC-X1000 to film the review. He also goes over some impressions of the camera. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4K7v3IyuMnE&app=desktop

His impressions were not positive and what struck me was how sharp his segment at the end is as it was shot with an LX100. Don't know what is going on over at Panasonic these days regarding camcoders...
Click to expand...

Because the histogram wouldn't move I'm betting this was a very pre-production version... That's obviously a firmware issue and that video looked BAAD so it can't be close to final. Looks to me like Panasonic's biggest mistake here was sending out such an early version of the camera.
 
I don't know what they are talking about.
I only did a very quick glance over of other vid's, but IMO none of the video they do looks much different. I'm sure they could do a lot better if they put effort into it. But if they make the video look much better its going to take to mach away from the stills they want to display.
But maybe I'm just going blind :cry:
 
Phil vG said:
I don't know what they are talking about.
I only did a very quick glance over of other vid's, but IMO none of the video they do looks much different. I'm sure they could do a lot better if they put effort into it. But if they make the video look much better its going to take to mach away from the stills they want to display.
But maybe I'm just going blind :cry:
Click to expand...

The video they shot with the X1000 looked TERRIBLE to me... splotchy, grainy, really bad skin tones, just really terrible footage.. then they cut to the LX100 shots and BAM... GH4 looking clean....
 
ATL Media Group said:
The video they shot with the X1000 looked TERRIBLE to me... splotchy, grainy, really bad skin tones, just really terrible footage.. then they cut to the LX100 shots and BAM... GH4 looking clean....
Click to expand...

Yup. It looked AWFUL. They had to apologize at the end for the quality and the shooter says, unless its addressed he won't use it for anything. For that price they should have placed the GH4/LX100 sensor in that body and made it shoot 240fps etc.
 
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I don't know what those guys did, but the video I've been shooting with it looks fine. There's nothing splotchy or grainy about it, nothing bad about skin tones. Maybe they had a preliminary version that wasn't ready to be actually used, or maybe they shot in one of the super-compressed AVCHD modes (like 8-mbps PM or 5mbps HE). In my experience with the camera, it delivers the same look as Panasonics are typical of -- it looked just like AC90 or AC160 footage, just way way sharper.
 
Yes, seems odd. I think Jordan knows what he is doing when it comes to video cameras so something I not adding up. But one thing is for sure, the $900 LX100 makes quite an image.
 
Barry_Green said:
I don't know what those guys did, ........
Click to expand...
After reading the comments before watching it (and allowing for web compression etc) it wasn't as bad as the comments had led me to expect, but....... As far as web viewing allows, the problem seemed to me a "puddingy" look to skin tones, and my bet would be on grossly excessive what I've always known as "coring" - suppressing detail enhancement on subtle detail, but allowing it on contrasty edges. He says that they checked "skin detail" was on the default setting - maybe default is totally the wrong value?

Worth noting that they have added a postscript to the original - http://www.youtube.com/watch?annota...&feature=iv&src_vid=4K7v3IyuMnE&v=SGW3wUsOFNE . They're basically apologising for "reviewing" a camera that wasn't finalised or intended for review. Worth establishing that to all here as soon as possible. But.... if you're a manufacturer with a camera that you know is far from finalised, if you let it out the door shouldn't it have a big red sticky label on it saying "don't judge by this sample!" or such like? As it stands, the reviewer says "we understood it was a review copy".

One word of warning is that the whole point of coring has been to reduce noise levels, and that dates right back to tube cameras I know from the 1970's. The principle is the same. It's something I've always hated, and personally (back in the 1980's) used to largely wind it out with the view it caused more issues than it solved. Too much led too often to a miscorrection with excessive overall aperture correction, and that's the best way to bring out a "video look" I can think of. The potential danger here is that (if what I suspect about coring is true) is that it was originally set that way to control noise - so any "fix" will necessarily bring the noise level up.

I'd still think that was far preferable - but it may then make such as lowlight performance somewhat worse. If that did happen, it shouldn't be a surprise - 4k deserves a bigger chip than 1/3"
 
Wow. Thanks for posting that postscript link harddrive. That explains it. That footage in the first vid was worse looking than some cellphone videos.
 
Yer, thanks for posting that link harddrive. It even gave another good idea of in your hand camera size.
 
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