XDCAM vs DVCPROHD

[AshG]

Now you need to know your in/out of everything, in every tape, and wait for your tape to be full before swaping. Every time you open tape door there is dust and other elements that can go in and screw your day. Want tape eject, wait it back in. And in the end, to take your tape and put it into a tape deck, but the tape had a grain of sand on it, and drop to the head and you hit play and put your time in there and all you know is you kill your content while reading it. I mean Murphy's is always close by. It might never happen, but it for the time it will happen that you need something else.

I would never trust miniDV or any tape solution as a SAFE backup. I consider it as a temporary Camera to PC storage if nothing else is available, but youppie P2 is here now.

You can use it as a backup, but for me, Tape is not something that I rely on. It a very sensible medium that is affected by nearly everything arround it.

LOL.... you win the silly award... A piece of sand? Why stop there? I mean, lets say while you are ejecting the tape, you trip, bust open your jaw and go unconcious. You have to spend a couple days in the hospital and now your creepy neighbor has to watch your house. Next thing you know... your daugher's knocked up and the change is missing from your dresser... ALL BECAUSE YOU USE TAPE!

Tape is not reliable? I have shot over 5000 hours of DV and the only tapes that I have ever had issues with were because of a misaligned camera head. I dubbed those off before getting the camera fixed and no problems. Sure there are tape hits now and again but you lose SECONDS not everything. I would say it is about as likely to have data corruption on solid state as it is to have a tape fail.

Who said you had to shoot out the whole tape? Shoot in 5 minute increments if you like. You dont need to know the in/out... just type in 30:00 for the out point! My point is not that the P2 workflow is terrible, just that it has ALWAYS been available. It makes PERFECT sense for ENG guys who have to shoot and edit within hours, I am just perplexed how the doc and indie film crowd seems to be embracing it. We'll see, as other options for storage come out, I suspect P2 will either go away or be priced far more aggressive.

I too have serious concerns with burnable media as source but so far XDCAM has gone off without a hitch. Only the future will tell... choices are good.


ash =o)

 

[jimagine]

I have to say, after learning everything I can about the XDCAM cameras and workflow over the last few days, it seems to be smarter than anything else I can think of. This coming from who has been harboring ill will towards Sony for years since they couldn't give me a 24p camera in any format for lower end work.

If the XDCAM HD cameras take off (and I think they will like wildfire), I'm seriously considering moving up to the 330 from my HD100.

As I understand it, the 18mbit and 35mbit modes on XDCAM HD are VBR. Does anybody either know or know where I can find out if those modes allow for spikes above 35? If so, how much? I could imagine that if it allowed for spikes to, say 50mbit, then it will prove to be much higher quality than HDV.

Interesting Nate, after a few weeks of wrestling whith which format to move to I've decided to just pick up an HD-100 tomorrow and use it for the projects we're shooting through Feb.
With XDCam due in Spring and all of the first generation ?? around all of the new cameras, buying a JVC for $5k and using it for six weeks makes a lot of sense. It will make a profit on the first shoot and if I decide that the XDCam is the camera then when it's available in a few months just trade up the HD-100 and it's win win.
The HVX won't be available till well past all of these projects that have to be produced in HD.
In the meantime if the Firestore is a viable way to bypass the nuttiness of P2 cost then I'll pick that up and see how they can match as a two camera setup
One good thing is we'll be shooting some nice stuff with the JVC so we'll have some good comparison footage in the coming weeks.
The first is some pre-Olympic stuff...Apollo Ono and some colorful action scenes, should put it through it's paces right off.

 

[Haakon]

Power to choose? I assure you Panny would love everyone to use P2, if not, they would have launched with a Firewire drive themselves.

Of course they would love everyone to use P2; that doesn't change the fact that the options still remain.

LOL.... you win the silly award... A piece of sand? Why stop there? I mean, lets say while you are ejecting the tape, you trip, bust open your jaw and go unconcious. You have to spend a couple days in the hospital and now your creepy neighbor has to watch your house. Next thing you know... your daugher's knocked up and the change is missing from your dresser... ALL BECAUSE YOU USE TAPE!

Honestly, even though you like to deconstruct peoples' posts and laugh at them, he has a really valid point. All of the P2 naysayers love to spout the dangers of P2 (when they haven't even used it, of course) especially citing the fact that there's no hard backup in place... "what if your hard drive with the footage crashes on set and leaves you with nothing!" and the like. Well I assure you, it's a heck of a lot easier to render an entire roll of film completely useless by opening up a canister and exposing it than it is to "accidentally destroy a hard drive." Dust and corrosion are realities when dealing with tape... and like another poster mentioned, costs to upkeep tape transports can run very high. I'm not saying it's bulletproof, but a solid-state solution makes much more sense from a reliability standpoint than either tape or film does.

Tape is not reliable? I have shot over 5000 hours of DV and the only tapes that I have ever had issues with were because of a misaligned camera head. Sure there are tape hits now and again but you lose SECONDS not everything.

You must have access to some titanium threaded tape stock that no one else does...

I had my DVX for over two years and only ever used Panasonic MQ tapes with it the entire time. While it was more uncommon than not, dropouts were certainly something that happened from time to time - and even though it did only kill a few seconds at a time, that's all you need to ruin your best take (and we all know the dropouts only appear during the best takes). With P2, dropouts aren't even a factor, and even in the event that something does go wrong, you can review your clips instantly and make sure you got what you needed. I have a feeling that with a random-access, tapeless acquisition method, people will get into the habits of reviewing their takes immidiately after shooting them - just like most digital still photographers do - to make sure that what they shot is exactly what they wanted. Most people don't rewind their tape to check takes in the field after every shot, and you don't know if you've got a dropout until you're back in the editing room and all of the actors have packed up and the location permits are expired.

My point is not that the P2 workflow is terrible, just that it has ALWAYS been available.

You've made your stance on this one perfectly clear, unfortunately the problem is that adopting a similar workflow with tape - while possible - is a lot more difficult. You can't just copy files over to a hard drive with tape, you have to capture them. That means that instead of just a singular hard drive in the field, you are forced to haul an computer system with you in order to "offload" your footage... and not only that, but you have to fire up an NLE, set up your capture preferences, digitize your source, and then make sure you synch up the end of the tape precisely with your camera to avoid timecode breaks. This is a completely different scenario than plugging a firewire drive into the camera and dumping some data off of a card. Even if you pull the card out and plug it into a laptop, it's much less time consuming and delicate of a process than digitizing data from a tape is.

You don't have to like P2, and as I've stated a billion times before, there are other options available so you don't even have to complain about it. But please stop trying to shrug it off like some inferior system by posting unrealistic workarounds that do no one any justice.

 

[Mr. Blonde]

Amen Haakon.

 

[parallax]

No he doesn't have a valid point. Seriously.

I'm amazed how hard it is these days to do some serious debating, using VALID arguments. There are rules in debate, wich might not be all that clear in this era of Fox News bordering rhetoric.

He is setting a precedent with a totally hypothetical premises, that is equal to AshG's tripping analogy (mind you, a bit over-the-top).
Can you imagine your HVX working all fine and dandy, and your other hardware failing when you need to offload your footage? What if your OS crashes? What if you've got bad clusters?
Not that mochouinard is totally wrong about P2 concerning it's superiority when it comes to data transfer, but my god, trying to debunk other workflows with these kind of arguments is kinda silly.

 

[Haakon]

No he doesn't have a valid point. Seriously.

He is setting a precedent with a totally hypothetical premises, that is equal to AshG's tripping analogy (mind you, a bit over-the-top).
Can you imagine your HVX working all fine and dandy, and your other hardware failing when you need to offload your footage? What if your OS crashes? What if you've got bad clusters?

That's the whole point. I keep hearing things like "P2 isn't reliable because your hard drive can crash and you can lose all of your data." Yeah, and sand might get in your tape transport and monkeys might fly out of my butt. None of them are very realistic, and that's why his statement is valid. It's just as nonsense to use the "sand in the tape" analogy as it is to say that P2 is "useless" because its prone to some kind of user error. Everything is prone to user error. People just need to get off of their high horses and use whatever method suits them best.

Believe me, I'm as tired of the rhetoric as you are.

 

[parallax]

Ok, i see.

In archiving there might be a small point, but P2 in itself seems close to indestructible.

 

[Barry_Green]

Power to choose? I assure you Panny would love everyone to use P2, if not, they would have launched with a Firewire drive themselves.

As far as I know, they are. I think the FireStore is apparently a co-branded product that will be sold through Panasonic to Panasonic dealers.

 

[toke lahti]

Sand does not get into tape/heads without user making a mistake or noticing it.
Hard drives do break down without user noticing it.

So far every hdd I know has broken down. I have dozen of them as a decoration with their top removed. Hdd storage really needs a backup so with p2 in the field you need to eitehr be millionare and have enough p2's or have a laptop and 2 hdd's (internal/external).

 

[SergejIvanovits]

P2 is just a buffer in the production.

 

[robroysyd]

Lets try to get a few facts straight.

1) Flash memory as used in the P2 cards has an incredibly low error rate, way better than tape.
2) It is more reliable than tape.
3) It's super fast, the fastest afforable form of bulk data storage.
4) It does wear out but probably the camera will be long obsolete before that happens.
5) HDs are also very low error rate device, but less reliable the flash memory or tape.
6) Flash memory is used in digital film cameras!

Take all the above into account and P2 storage is ideal for what Panasonic originally targeted it at, ENG. A truly brilliant solution in that role, time to air is critical. I'm guessing the reason it hasn't taken off as well as it should is simply psychological, news depts like tape even though everything currently needed is on station servers. And lets get real here about tape in ENG, shots get missed for more reasons than tape/HD/P2 card failure. Batteries go flat, vans break down, they run out of tape, they fall asleep etc. But these days most networks will gladly exchange footage, hey they'll need a favour one day too.

So now Panny have decided to aim P2 at the prosummer HD market. Is that good or bad?
Well most of what I'm reading is missing the point.

As I said before, P2 cards are going to be less error prone than tape and the probablility of one failing I'd guess is way lower than tapes getting lost or recorded over and boy does that happen a lot, so what's the problem.

Well for my money perhaps nothing at all, if you're very methodical in your work, if you have the mindset or extra body to watch what's going on and keep track not only of the kit but the files and keeping them logged etc.

But from limited experience such people tend not to be the creative types, who even bothers to slate shots and keep shot list. I know a few do and they're not the ones who loose tapes or record over them.

So I'd say it comes down to you having to be honest about your abilites to keep things under control and factor this in, the Hollywood mob have over the years lost thousands of hours of camera neg and even so they've still finished the movies. What might go wrong is never a reason for not doing something. It's knowing the risks and the costs in keeping them at acceptable limits. For some that'll mean the HVX 100 isn't viable, for others quite the opposite. The important thing is to thoroughly think things through.