PC/Windows NLE Mess - Jan - what can be done?

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Jarred Land said:
im using virtual pc for mac.. to run the windows programs that didnt work for me before.. and its pretty good guys.. much easier to go that way.
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Jarred, VPC won't be necessary any more, once you use an IntelMac. Dual Boot does the trick then :thumbsup:
 
PC vs. mac

PC vs. mac

I couldn't bring myself to slog through more than about 10 pages of this thread, so apologies if this has been said many times before.

1. To all those here complaining about the hvx and editing situation - DVCPRO is not new, is not panny's proprietary codec (as someone said) and there is no conspiracy here. Most of the editing apps it seems we here have opted into, such as Vegas, cost very little money and are aimed at the low end of the editing market (pro-sumer on down). You cannot buy a volkswagon rabbit and expect to drag race with a sports car costing many times more. I personally use Vegas on my PC and FCP HD on my mac, and the difference is quite obvious, which brings me to point 2:

2. For those of you afraid/disinterested in switching to a mac for editing, let me tell you the benefits go well beyond access to dvcpro. As a designer/special effects artist, I have used both PCs and Macs for some time, and Macs have won me over with ease. Apple spent a LOT of time and money refining Final Cut Pro to offer very high end features at an amazing price point ($1,200 for the entire suite of products is simply amazing). Their hardware works well, and I spend about 1/10th the time troubleshooting BS issues like codec problems, bugs and other unpleasant crap that comes along with anything microsoft has its fingerprints on. In short, Macs are the product of smart design and engineering, and because Apple designs both the system AND the software, the two play together very, very nicely.

3. We have NO BUSINESS even pretending to be interested in the HVX and its high end features if we aren't, to some degree, willing to "grow up" with the format and invest a little money. You can't expect stunning HD with a perfectly easy workflow AND cheap everything across the board. As professionals, we need to see that Panasonic has offered us an amazing thing - true HD at prices within our reach. In short, I think it makes little sense to invest many, many thousands of dollars into an HD camera and then be shocked to find out that average consumer PCs with sub$1,000 software can't handle it. This is all technology that easily cost well over $200,000 just a few short years ago, let's be thankful it's come as far as it has.


That said, I hope no one thinks I mean any of this in a harsh way or anything, just that I am excited about the potential of the HVX, did my research early, and realized I would need to invest about $5,000 on top of buying the camera to have a reasonable workflow. That's not a lot of money to be able to produce stunning HD work, and we should all be more than happy to advance our craft and art to the next level, financially AND artistically.
 
I think the bottom line, Beeny, is that the PC solutions are far behind the Mac one right now in terms of taking the P2 card out of the camera, plugging it into the computer, and editing in whatever format and framerate you've shot at instantly. That's mostly what the bitching has been about, and there is great validity to those concerns. Personally, I'm just leaving the PC platform (for editing), and switching to FCP. It's becoming a standard across the board these days, even for feature editing, and there's no reason I shouldn't know it. The HVX just gave me the excuse I needed to switch.

As far as the cost is concerned, I actually think it's a lot less than you've quoted to get into this stuff. The camera is selling for ~$5,600 at the reputable places, and that's a good deal considering we knew the list would be $5,999 from the beginning and with demand so high, none of the vendors needed to shave $400 off the price to sell the cameras. They'd still have waiting lists 100 deep. The P2 cards, however, are now under $650 for a 4 gig, which is way more reasonable than we were first led to believe. And even a simple G4 powerbook with no frills can edit the DVCPROHD without any strain. Yeah, if you want to be editing 8 streams in realtime and get all fancy, you'll probably need that shiny new 9GHz 8-processor super machine coming around the corner. But in reality, you can get into HD - not HDV, at that - including the camera, a card, and the editing system for well under 9 grand. I don't think anyone's bitching about price (or they shouldn't be).
 
DvcPro is Panny's proprietary codec as much DvCAM is Sony's.
Others have bought licenses from them or reverse engineered the codecs.
And yep, powerbooks with their G4's (like the one I'm using as a typewriter right now) have a massive CPU power like the PC's in the 90's ;-)
You can easily compare the processing power with eg. seti@athome.
So if you think about how slow G4 is and how massive cooling G5 needs, it does not surprise why apple had to change to x86 cpu's.
 
BEENYWEENIES said:
3. We have NO BUSINESS even pretending to be interested in the HVX and its high end features if we aren't, to some degree, willing to "grow up" with the format and invest a little money. You can't expect stunning HD with a perfectly easy workflow AND cheap everything across the board. As professionals, we need to see that Panasonic has offered us an amazing thing - true HD at prices within our reach. In short, I think it makes little sense to invest many, many thousands of dollars into an HD camera and then be shocked to find out that average consumer PCs with sub$1,000 software can't handle it. This is all technology that easily cost well over $200,000 just a few short years ago, let's be thankful it's come as far as it has.
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This my friend is one of my favorite posts of the day... because it hits home very hard.

Last year we shot a movie with the 900's and I knew i would hafta edit HDCAM. I didnt expect it to just plugin to my computer and work.. I knew i had to get my system up to date, and had to drop $10,000 to get it there. This was incorporated into the budget... that was my first wakeup call on working with HD... its not SD, and unfortunately people want it to be, really badly. I remember at that point the HVX was coming, and thinking wow are alot of people gonna be upset when they cant edit HD.. thank god that DVCpro HD does not require an uncompressed step in there like HDcam or you all would really, really, really be mad.
 
I don't think it's that expensive to work with, though. You have to invest in the camera, and you have to buy a $650 P2 card. After that, if you're a Mac user, chances are that you already have all the computer power you need to deal with DVCPROHD on an acceptable level at least. It's not going to require redundant RAIDs and quad core processors to run, which means the investment above and beyond the camera is fairly minimal.
 
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