Required hardwre for HVX200

[ksmercury]

I was going to buy the HVX200, but now I'm back to considering the XL2. Everyone keeps talking about the HVX200 for $,6000, but it's not that price. When you include the 4gb p2 cards ($650 ea), AJ PCD10 ($2,500), AJ PCS060g ($1,800), Avid Xpress Pro HD, Canopus, etc. ($1000 - up).
I don't know about these Laptop schemes to cut the price down... And I know there are similiar requirements for the JVC HD10 and XL h1...
I believe it will be over $10,000 to get the camera and be able to download to computer and edit.
And then you'll need your lens to get that "movie-look" (notice I didn't say film-look). The mini35mm, wide angel, telephoto....
Let's not even talk about lights or sound, even though we're already up to like $12,000 what's another couple of thousand....
All this for a 1/3" ccd and DVCpro50 format... I know it's to keep the price down, but I hate the fact that they make the pixels smaller (or round, whatever) to get that native 16:9. The smaller pixels are really going to result in poor lattitude, darks, lights, ets....
By the way, I really enjoy the technical talk on here. Some of these guys know about the positioning of the 3 ccd and how it helps resolution.... Before reading the posts on here, I thought all cameras had a squirrel on a wheel with a dangling piece of cheese inside them...

 

[d-mac]

Archiving

Archiving

hi ksmercury,

I think one thing you're forgetting about is archiving your footage.

For example, let's say you want to shoot an independent film on your hvx-200.
The final print will be around 90 minutes long after editing. Your total filming time will more likely be around 200 minutes long (I'm being very generous here). Already that's 290 minutes for your first project with the HVX. (final edit plus all the raw footage)

If you filmed in 720p (24 fps) DVCPROHD, you'd need 116 gigs just to keep the movie on your hard drive. (each gig of memory gives you 2.5 minutes of DVCPROHD 720p recording time).

Looking at this, you'll probably need a raid setup or hard drives giving you at least 400 gb, probably more like 1 tb or space, to work with. (1 tb of drive space will give you almost 42 hours of recording time in DVCPROHD 720p). This sounds like a lot, but in reality it isn't.

Eventually, you'll need a way to archive your footage once this space is all used up....possibly an intermediate codec?

I don't think there's an adequate answer to this question yet, and it's one that a lot of people overlook with the HVX-200 camera. I don't own any of the new HD cameras, and from what I see, the HVX-200 is the best out there, BUT......

For me, this is one way the HDV system is better, the fact that it's still tape, and you're basically creating your footage archives as you film. You can also dump your finished edit back to the HDV format on some cameras. It becomes a lot cheaper to have a large collection of HDV footage versus a large collection of DVCPROHD footage.

Just my two cents, and I'm not a technical wizard by any means, so if I made a mistake here, please someone correct me on it. I'm still trying to figure out all this stuff myself.

Thanks,
David