getken
Well-known member
I had a job yesterday using the HVX P2 workflow for the first time. It went well considering it was a first for all concerned. The Producer was surprised by the camera. She knew we were working in HD and I think she was expecting a Varicam, not the peewee HD. Both Crew and Producer were freelance and arranged by a production company in charge of the job. I had not worked with this producer before. We got on fine but she was a little put off by the fact that we had only 17 minutes of record time and then we'd have to dump to computer. Of course I was concerned as well having not done this workflow before.
We were recording sit down interviews. 17 minutes is not a long time when interviewing folks but I reminded her of the days when we had 20 min betacam loads. I think for the future for interview jobs like this a firestore would work much better.
The first time through I ran both cards out. It caused a 10 minute break while I dumped it to the Mac. After that I would pop a P2 card when it was full and pop it into the Mac while the other P2 was recording...but I didn't work out before hand how to reformat the card on the Mac. So I had to wait for natural breaks in the interview to reformat cards. This worked well for a while but would catch up to me occasionally causing longer breaks.
It was a learning experience for all of us and worked in the end.
The producer was very impressed with the camera. We were set up in an old factory, a very big space with exposed brick walls so we were able to create some depth. I was at the end of the bottle for a lot of it so was able to achieve some shallow DOP. There were some huge windows allowing beautiul soft natural light to work our background and I lit the subjects with Kino Flo Divas. I was using 720 60 in Cine-like V on the video cam setting.
The pictures were really amazing and the producer was very happy. I do not have an HD monitor so instead was monitoring from the video out to a Sony PVM 8044Q 8 inch high-res monitor (I didn't know that when in HD mode you could still monitor the HVX on an SD monitor and was very happy to discover that you can!). Even on that the pics looked beautiful. They will look incredible on an HD monitor.
I was called last minute for this job and would have liked to have been better prepared regarding this work flow. The production company that hired me (I know these guys well) made it sound like there was going to be a PA handling the P2 card transfer. When I got to the location, I discovered that in fact I was that PA (as well as being the DP). Thus no experience reformatting from the Mac...as a matter of fact I have yet to buy P2 cards instead relying on clients to either provide them or I rent them, relying on the client to have a drive to export to. I have no pressing need at this point to own the media considering its current cost. (Although I plan to buy a Cineporter when it becomes available).
We were recording sit down interviews. 17 minutes is not a long time when interviewing folks but I reminded her of the days when we had 20 min betacam loads. I think for the future for interview jobs like this a firestore would work much better.
The first time through I ran both cards out. It caused a 10 minute break while I dumped it to the Mac. After that I would pop a P2 card when it was full and pop it into the Mac while the other P2 was recording...but I didn't work out before hand how to reformat the card on the Mac. So I had to wait for natural breaks in the interview to reformat cards. This worked well for a while but would catch up to me occasionally causing longer breaks.
It was a learning experience for all of us and worked in the end.
The producer was very impressed with the camera. We were set up in an old factory, a very big space with exposed brick walls so we were able to create some depth. I was at the end of the bottle for a lot of it so was able to achieve some shallow DOP. There were some huge windows allowing beautiul soft natural light to work our background and I lit the subjects with Kino Flo Divas. I was using 720 60 in Cine-like V on the video cam setting.
The pictures were really amazing and the producer was very happy. I do not have an HD monitor so instead was monitoring from the video out to a Sony PVM 8044Q 8 inch high-res monitor (I didn't know that when in HD mode you could still monitor the HVX on an SD monitor and was very happy to discover that you can!). Even on that the pics looked beautiful. They will look incredible on an HD monitor.
I was called last minute for this job and would have liked to have been better prepared regarding this work flow. The production company that hired me (I know these guys well) made it sound like there was going to be a PA handling the P2 card transfer. When I got to the location, I discovered that in fact I was that PA (as well as being the DP). Thus no experience reformatting from the Mac...as a matter of fact I have yet to buy P2 cards instead relying on clients to either provide them or I rent them, relying on the client to have a drive to export to. I have no pressing need at this point to own the media considering its current cost. (Although I plan to buy a Cineporter when it becomes available).