Weather Channel to buy HVX200

A

alisterchapman

Member
Just found out that The Weather Channel in the USA are buying a whole bunch of HVX200's. TWC are not outputting HD, but they do use the internet to feed footage from the field (encoded to MPEG2 or wmv) so maybe they will use them to shoot SD on to P2, slot he card in a laptop for encoding and then ftp the clips. Saves having to digitise/capture. Maybe they will use them in HD mode for documentary productions (storm stories etc).
 
alisterchapman said:
so maybe they will use them to shoot SD on to P2, slot he card in a laptop for encoding and then ftp the clips.
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i wish i had a forum decoder for horrible grammar. i can't even begin to decipher what you are trying to say in that sentence.
 
Justin_Kirch said:
it's not just his grammar, but shooting SD onto P2 doesn't make any sense.
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Actually, if you wanted immediate access to your footage in the field, shooting SD to P2 would work great. In the case of something like the weather channel, imagine this workflow:
Shoot exciting breaking news storm footage onto P2.
Put that P2 card into your laptop.
Drag the files off the P2 and do a quick edit.
Upload the files to headquarters where they can immediately air the footage.

In this scenario, if they don't plan to air HD then they can shoot DV25 and get a lot of footage on a couple of 8GB P2 cards. If you have a 2 person crew the camera guy just runs back to the van/room/whatever and hands the edit guy a P2 card(s), grabs a fresh card(s) and goes back to shooting while the edit preps and uploads the videos. Maybe I'm missing something (hey, I'm a programmer, not a news camera operator), but that sounds like a pretty good workflow to me.
 
SD on P2 makes a lot of sense (or at least the 200 or so television stations currently using SPX800's think it does!)

Instant access to the footage is one thing, tapeless is another. Being able to play back a clip and not have to rewind/fast-forward/end search is another great little benefit. In-the-field continuity checks too. Marking good takes, deleting bad ones. DVCPRO50 mode. Four channels of 16-bit/48khz audio in DVCPRO25 and DVCPRO50 mode. There are lots of reasons why SD on P2 makes a lot of sense -- not the least of which is that you get much longer recording times -- two 4gb cards gives you half an hour of DV or DVCPRO25.
 
DVCPRO50 will give you a better picture on two fronts: it's got twice the color sampling, and it has much milder compression.

On the other hand, it takes up twice as much storage space on the card.

As Policar said, DV and DVCPRO25 are bit-for-bit identical IN NTSC. In PAL, they're different -- DV in PAL is 4:2:0, DVCPRO25 in PAL is 4:1:1. Also, another difference appears to be that in DVCPRO25 mode you can record four channels of 16-bit 48khz audio on the card; in DV mode you can only do two channels.
 
Thanks, that pretty much clears up the picture. DVCPRO50 is definitely the way to go for SD.
 
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