I work on a variety of projects for production houses and record labels, and a problem I see coming is the situations just after a shoot. Producers want the tapes in their hands when you walk away. If you do not shoot & edit for clients, then it will limit their post options. They will have to go to post houses who support P2. And will they keep the card until it is dumped in the system, do they replace the cards, do they bring their own, etc? 75% of the time, I hand tapes to Producers at the end of the show, pack up and leave. This could not be the case with P2 cards unless they cost as much as a tape and clearly they will not, at least not for several years. This is what may give JVC an advantage. How many Producers do you know that want to add more costs and more steps to post production? None. And how many shooters are going to hand their cards over to a company so that the footage can be entered into the system, which could take a day or two? None. And no producer in their right mind would let the "master" card go until post is totally complete. And even then they would probably want to keep it. It isn't going to be the technology, it's going to be changing the minds of professionals who are stubborn and scared by a system that "seems" to take away the safety net. Would they digitize the tapes you give them now and then say, "Here are the tapes back, do whatever you need to do with them, erase what's on it so you can use it again". Sounds scary to me. This will be a huge hurdle. Anyone got any ideas.
Producers will keep P2 cards?
- Thread starter Kahn
- Start date
Barry_Green
Moderator
I addressed this in the other thread, but I'll repeat it here:
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It's only a hurdle if you think of it in the same way as one thinks of tape. Gotta change the mindset to see how much more powerful this can be.
Instead of the idea of handing over the cards, imagine this workflow: as you shoot, you offload the cards to a firewire hard disk. At the end of the shoot, instead of handing the producer a boxload of tapes that they'll have to then go waste a day or two or five logging and digitizing, you instead hand over a hard disk. With all the clips pre-digitized. Edit-ready. In a format that's already understood by FCP-HD, Avid Express HD, Canopus Edius, and (next week) probably even more platforms.
Rather than creating some sort of "hurdle", you will instead be the producer's hero, and the #1 call on his/her speed-dial list next time they're shooting in your town.
You keep your cards, and you give them the hard disk (which, contrary to what someone may think, would actually be a lot *less* expensive than handing over HD tapes!)
It remains to be seen how Panasonic intends to approach this P2-to-hard-disk workflow. They have the P2 Store device, which lets you automatically transfer to a 60gb hard disk, but unless that hard disk is user-interchangeable, I don't really see that as a practical option for handing over at the end of the shoot. But if I could pick up a 160gb hard disk at Best Buy or CompUSA before the shoot, use it to dump the cards to, and then let them have it at the end ... that's a revolution. Instead of wasting days digitizing, the producer can be editing the show right away. They're gonna love it. And those shooting HDV aren't gonna have a chance to compete with that -- especially if they're shooting incompatible HDV formats (which, by the way, is the situation we currently have with the HDV so-called "standard" -- if you shoot on the JVC 720p cameras, and try to play it back on a Z1, you *cannot* digitize from the Z1, it won't play back the 720p HDV stream out the firewire...)
Handing over a pre-digitized hard disk is going to make you the producer's favorite shooter.
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It's only a hurdle if you think of it in the same way as one thinks of tape. Gotta change the mindset to see how much more powerful this can be.
Instead of the idea of handing over the cards, imagine this workflow: as you shoot, you offload the cards to a firewire hard disk. At the end of the shoot, instead of handing the producer a boxload of tapes that they'll have to then go waste a day or two or five logging and digitizing, you instead hand over a hard disk. With all the clips pre-digitized. Edit-ready. In a format that's already understood by FCP-HD, Avid Express HD, Canopus Edius, and (next week) probably even more platforms.
Rather than creating some sort of "hurdle", you will instead be the producer's hero, and the #1 call on his/her speed-dial list next time they're shooting in your town.
You keep your cards, and you give them the hard disk (which, contrary to what someone may think, would actually be a lot *less* expensive than handing over HD tapes!)
It remains to be seen how Panasonic intends to approach this P2-to-hard-disk workflow. They have the P2 Store device, which lets you automatically transfer to a 60gb hard disk, but unless that hard disk is user-interchangeable, I don't really see that as a practical option for handing over at the end of the shoot. But if I could pick up a 160gb hard disk at Best Buy or CompUSA before the shoot, use it to dump the cards to, and then let them have it at the end ... that's a revolution. Instead of wasting days digitizing, the producer can be editing the show right away. They're gonna love it. And those shooting HDV aren't gonna have a chance to compete with that -- especially if they're shooting incompatible HDV formats (which, by the way, is the situation we currently have with the HDV so-called "standard" -- if you shoot on the JVC 720p cameras, and try to play it back on a Z1, you *cannot* digitize from the Z1, it won't play back the 720p HDV stream out the firewire...)
Handing over a pre-digitized hard disk is going to make you the producer's favorite shooter.
First off, you will have to excuss me for not reading your post on this subject before making a statement. Second, I want the points in your reply to be true as much as you do. But I live in a world where the best way often dies off due to skeptics and convenience. I will also be one of the first people in line to buy a HVX-200. However, I believe that my DVX-100's will continue to be requested more and rented more than the HVX-200. Of course, I hope to be enjoying this new technology while others remain in the dark for a while. It seems to me that the cards have to become a cheap medium for everyone to convert. I love technology. I agree that no more digitizing will be brilliant and save an enormous amount of time. I want to also say that I don't know the answer. But my feeling is that MANY producers will not trust this medium or get on board with it in a timely fashion. The time it takes to CONVERT them may spell trouble for us. I don't know what types of shoots you are on, but taking a few to several minutes in the middle of a shoot day to download anything does not seem like an easy sell. I see us sitting somewhere after the shoot and downloading everything at once, which would not be the safest approach. I recently shot a pilot and we had 6 wireless mics going to a hard disc recorder for sound. The sound op wanted to take breaks and download everything but he couldn't. He sat and downloaded the entire days work each night. And the producers had to be coaxed away from using DAT. This P2 system should be every producers dream. And maybe you are lucky enough to always work with forward thinking technically savy people. I often find them to be opposite or middle of the road. No matter their level of experience. In the end, I truly hope I'm wrong and everyone falls for it right away. Hell, I'm in love and I haven't even seen the thing. Time will tell us.
thisiswells
Retired
I think a client would be willing to wait an extra twenty minutes for a dvd or harddrive
immediately following the shoot if it means it saves them time and money.. a significant
amount of time and money later since there is no digitising. It's business. It makes sense.
Anyone who pays for me to shoot this stuff will know something about it first and if they
don't then they won't be doing this kind of work for much longer. Their competitors will.
immediately following the shoot if it means it saves them time and money.. a significant
amount of time and money later since there is no digitising. It's business. It makes sense.
Anyone who pays for me to shoot this stuff will know something about it first and if they
don't then they won't be doing this kind of work for much longer. Their competitors will.
thisiswells
Retired
On wireless mic's--yeah that stinks. Though it's more work, and hopefully pay for
your sound man. I recently billed a guy five bills for digitising five hours of dat's.
your sound man. I recently billed a guy five bills for digitising five hours of dat's.
Zim
Veteran
So I guess you just pass the cost of a harddrive onto the customer as you would the tape. That is not a bad idea, but to me the cards will still have to be larger.
I still think a tape drive would be nice because some people will not trust this yet.
If you could only record about 45 min on a P2 card that only cost a couple of hundred bucks!!
I still think a tape drive would be nice because some people will not trust this yet.
If you could only record about 45 min on a P2 card that only cost a couple of hundred bucks!!
I am a producer and I don't trust JUST having a hard drive with my footage. Until P2 is within the price range of DBeta and is an affordable archivable format like tape it's just not going to catch on in the industries that are most profitable to Panasonic (ie news organizations, government, advertising, etc). How long has that SDX800 or whatever it's called been out? A year maybe? Maybe a little more? I haven't heard a word in the industry about P2 other than in magazines and this message board. If I went to any post house or production house with a P2 request they'd ask WHY? and my boss and client would ask an even bigger WHY?
As a producer I need every second of my footage available to be archived for at least 5 years. Is Panasonic suggesting we back up all that footage to hard drives? I have an AVID Unity Server with terrabytes of storage and the manager of that would laugh at me if I suggested archiving raw footage on that.
When P2 becomes is as costly as Digibeta tape it will be a fantastic recording format. Until then why is any post house in the right mind going to remove a tape infrastructure worth million dollars with a recording format that is insanely expensive to archive in a reliable manner?
As a producer I need every second of my footage available to be archived for at least 5 years. Is Panasonic suggesting we back up all that footage to hard drives? I have an AVID Unity Server with terrabytes of storage and the manager of that would laugh at me if I suggested archiving raw footage on that.
When P2 becomes is as costly as Digibeta tape it will be a fantastic recording format. Until then why is any post house in the right mind going to remove a tape infrastructure worth million dollars with a recording format that is insanely expensive to archive in a reliable manner?
..you can still archive to tape if you want.
you just do it afterwards instead of on capture. but P2 is much more reliable than tape as a capture format, and being able to go to a reliable redundant HDD if you wanted would ensure you could just stream that out via firewire to a DVCPRO deck later if needed for archive purposes. its a much more quick and reliable method of doing things than capturing on tape is. and still leaves the path open to archive or output to tape if desired.
personally ill probably be going to some new high capacity optical disk storage like blue ray or HD-DVD.
you just do it afterwards instead of on capture. but P2 is much more reliable than tape as a capture format, and being able to go to a reliable redundant HDD if you wanted would ensure you could just stream that out via firewire to a DVCPRO deck later if needed for archive purposes. its a much more quick and reliable method of doing things than capturing on tape is. and still leaves the path open to archive or output to tape if desired.
personally ill probably be going to some new high capacity optical disk storage like blue ray or HD-DVD.
Zim
Veteran
iamloser said:
that's just more time and cost. For the HVX to really be a good deal, the P2 cards need to be cheap so you can archive on them. People might trust a card more than a harddrive.
They can make these cards cheap..what is the current cost of labor in Sri Lanka? About $300 a year. Pansonic can sell us a 20 GB card for about $20.
At $1,700 for a 4 gig card, tape won't be dead for a long time.
Bart_Boge
Well-known member
I would think that 99.99999% of the price of a P2 card is recouping the R&D and production set-up to make them. They aren't made of gold or platinum.
Remember what a 1MB RAM chip cost 10 years ago? RAM is now, what, about $2-5 per MB? It is so cheap for what you get that it is now essentially a commodity market--demand is what drives the price more than anything else. Once the R&D is done and the factory production line is set up, its metal and sand in one end, chips out the other.
Three years from now P2s will be plentiful and cheap, and the more vendors get involved making them and the more consumers find use for them, the faster the price will plummet.
From an economics standpoint, what you DON'T want is one manufacturer making the product for an affluent, niche market--that spells high pricing. Several manufacturers selling millions of them to a hungry market will make the price drop like a stone. Then you'll have no problem handing someone their original footage P2s--you'll build their cost into your fees, and it will be negligible.
My prediction:
-- 3 years from now tape is dead for acquisition
-- 5 years from now P2s will be what you hand your clients after a shoot
-- 10 years from now a 256GB P2 will be shrink-wrapped and hanging by the candy bars & chips at the register at Best Buy for $8.99--which you still won't buy because you'll know they're even cheaper online.
Remember what a 1MB RAM chip cost 10 years ago? RAM is now, what, about $2-5 per MB? It is so cheap for what you get that it is now essentially a commodity market--demand is what drives the price more than anything else. Once the R&D is done and the factory production line is set up, its metal and sand in one end, chips out the other.
Three years from now P2s will be plentiful and cheap, and the more vendors get involved making them and the more consumers find use for them, the faster the price will plummet.
From an economics standpoint, what you DON'T want is one manufacturer making the product for an affluent, niche market--that spells high pricing. Several manufacturers selling millions of them to a hungry market will make the price drop like a stone. Then you'll have no problem handing someone their original footage P2s--you'll build their cost into your fees, and it will be negligible.
My prediction:
-- 3 years from now tape is dead for acquisition
-- 5 years from now P2s will be what you hand your clients after a shoot
-- 10 years from now a 256GB P2 will be shrink-wrapped and hanging by the candy bars & chips at the register at Best Buy for $8.99--which you still won't buy because you'll know they're even cheaper online.
braw
Well-known member
Zim said:
Dumping the card to hard drive, or P2 dumped to a laptop for burning to dual layer or HDDVD and Blu-ray will still be faster than capturing tape. Plus, DVCPRO tapes will add up to a lot more overhead for you than a reusable P2 and a stack of single or dual layer DVD's. When the tapes are gone and used, they're gone. You could hand over a small stack of DVD's at roughly 30 cents a piece.
Zim said:
That's really not funny and intensely arrogant. :thumbdown
Zim
Veteran
Of course it's not funny but its true,,,,these big companies send all that work to these poor countries and they work for **** wages. So if they make a card for next to nothing why does it cost $1,700? R&D cost, good golfing off the mainland of japan, etc.
Sorry if my point went to far for you...
Sorry if my point went to far for you...
..the only thing that makes it cost is that people choose to trust tape over an HDD or other optical disks or digital medims for backup.. i for one dont intend to back up to tape ever again. which is alot cheaper.. my point was that the workflow for tape archival is still there with p2 aquisition if you need it.
but i dont think its any more time. you have to capture the tape if you aquire on tape. which takes the same amount of time to simply output to tape. and p2 aquisition doesnt take any longer seeing as it offloads faster than it the camera can load.
but i dont think its any more time. you have to capture the tape if you aquire on tape. which takes the same amount of time to simply output to tape. and p2 aquisition doesnt take any longer seeing as it offloads faster than it the camera can load.
Prairieboy
Veteran
Burning this data to normal DVDs seems to be the best option, unfortunately it is not the most time efficient method at the moment, Blue ray will certainly help(and something tells me that apple will mac this an option rather soon). I am not looking forward to shooting for 12 hours then sitting down at my laptop for the next forty minutes to burn and check disks, but it is either that or the harddrive method that Barry has mentioned. And even with the hardrive method most of us will sleep easier at night knowing there is a hardcopy back up on disk.
scharky
Veteran
I think the problem is that people want something that is not yet possible. You want a less compressed format, but you aren't willing to pay for it.
If the camera had a tape drive, it would be a DVCproHD tape drive. Now lets just say that the camera still amazingly came out with a DVCpro tape drive for under 10G's. Well lets go shoot some footage, so I go to my local Video store to by some DVCproHD tapes, "you want how much for a 20Min tape?" you screem at the top of your lungs?
No look at the alternative, go buy an external HD enclosure, $25, get an OEM 120Gig HD, $75 (New egg.com) or an 80 or 40gig, whatever the shoot calls for. You now have a format that can store more information for much less cost. Get some disposable HD cases (hard plastic) and hand the final product off as a hard drive. Now, no one has to capture the footage. Make a duplicate HD copy and back it up. It's not a big deal, and in the end doesn't cost more than DVCpro HD tapes, plus it will save time. I really don't see why a producer would not love to have a hard drive that he can just plug into an enclosure, and start editing right away. IF you really want to back it up to tape, well, then it takes just as much time as it would to capture the footage in the first place.
If the camera had a tape drive, it would be a DVCproHD tape drive. Now lets just say that the camera still amazingly came out with a DVCpro tape drive for under 10G's. Well lets go shoot some footage, so I go to my local Video store to by some DVCproHD tapes, "you want how much for a 20Min tape?" you screem at the top of your lungs?
No look at the alternative, go buy an external HD enclosure, $25, get an OEM 120Gig HD, $75 (New egg.com) or an 80 or 40gig, whatever the shoot calls for. You now have a format that can store more information for much less cost. Get some disposable HD cases (hard plastic) and hand the final product off as a hard drive. Now, no one has to capture the footage. Make a duplicate HD copy and back it up. It's not a big deal, and in the end doesn't cost more than DVCpro HD tapes, plus it will save time. I really don't see why a producer would not love to have a hard drive that he can just plug into an enclosure, and start editing right away. IF you really want to back it up to tape, well, then it takes just as much time as it would to capture the footage in the first place.
Simul record to next generation DVRack...
Simul record to next generation DVRack...
As a for instance, why wouldn't you archive / safety / simultaneous record to a next generation DVRack-style device through 1394? We already do this when it matters shooting SD 100a.
As others have mentioned, pricepoint will come down on P2 if this camera takes off the way it should. If the cards are too expensive to sell to your hiring entity in today's market, a dupe to HDD as Barry suggests certainly will fill the bill.
I'm certain Panasonic, which has now twice shattered technology versus pricepoint barriers with the DVX and HDX, has given serious vision to a cost-effective workflow for producers and independent media creators.
This situation will be suggested and demonstrated at NAB, and I'm more than confident that Matsushita can figure out how to make P2 a viable recording and archival medium in the nearer term. This camera and the recording technology behind it has several months to buzz prior to making it into our hands - you should hear and see plenty in the way of P2 support before fall. I predict that NAB announcements might do much to quiet your concerns.
e
Simul record to next generation DVRack...
As a for instance, why wouldn't you archive / safety / simultaneous record to a next generation DVRack-style device through 1394? We already do this when it matters shooting SD 100a.
As others have mentioned, pricepoint will come down on P2 if this camera takes off the way it should. If the cards are too expensive to sell to your hiring entity in today's market, a dupe to HDD as Barry suggests certainly will fill the bill.
I'm certain Panasonic, which has now twice shattered technology versus pricepoint barriers with the DVX and HDX, has given serious vision to a cost-effective workflow for producers and independent media creators.
This situation will be suggested and demonstrated at NAB, and I'm more than confident that Matsushita can figure out how to make P2 a viable recording and archival medium in the nearer term. This camera and the recording technology behind it has several months to buzz prior to making it into our hands - you should hear and see plenty in the way of P2 support before fall. I predict that NAB announcements might do much to quiet your concerns.
e