Panasonic P2HD and Premiere Pro
 

The HVX sounds supersweet. My little site and business is picking up steam, but my biggest concern about acquiring this cam is post. What kind of sick memory and storage are we going to need for uncompressed HD editing? Is it even out there for us prosumers? Sure, Final Cut Pro HD might be the software, but how on earth can I build a machine to edit my footage without dropping another $5-10k? Krikee!

Hmmm...Even a mac mini will edit DVCPRO HD from its internal drive.
and thats $499 and FCP HD is 999$, so for $1498 you can edit footage from the HVX 200. (ok, you will need some more RAM though)

You will need a deck to master your program, but to rent a firewire equipped Aj-1200 is about $200 for a 1/2 day, so thats pretty cheap if you are producing a TV programme.

AvidXpressPro cuts uncompressed HD. You're looking at a fast pc with dual xeons and at least a gig of ram, two even better. You can get the software and a decent system for under five grand.

Good to know! Thanks guys.

EDIT: As a followup, how much storage space should we be talking about? Seems like 1TB for any kind of longer project at least, right?

DVCPRO HD is 100mbs (12.5 MB/s) at 1080p 30 fps or 720p 60 fps.
If you shoot 720p at 24fps its about 5 MB/s.

So a 500GB firewire disk holds about 28 hours of 720p at 24fps.....

Even though a mini will edit it, when it comes to rendering you will soon want a G5. One of those is about $2599 for a fast model.

I forget, isn't it possible to network several computers for a render farm? I forget if that's just for After Effects stuff, but do any NLE's support networked rendering like that?

Serial ATA drives (SATA) are more than fast enough. The latest SATA3 supports up to 300MB through put (or is it 3gigabit, I forget). Plus external firewire will soon be passe as External SATA3 is currently going through certification.

A powerful Wintel based system can be put together forl under 2K with at least 2gigs of the latest fastest ram and a top of the line DX9/10 video card and close to a terabyte of storage. It gets more expensive if you start talking Xeon or Opteron.

Interesting! I built a P4 w/ 2gig of RAM and a 500GB RAID 0 for HDV editing via Cineform; sounds like I won't need to do too much upgrading if I want to go to DVCPRO HD (assuming there's PC-based editing software that'll handle it)... This is helpful info for folks!

maybe premiere pro
 

Anyone thinks that premiere pro will get into dvcpro HD? They adapted HDV (even indepedently from cineform) pretty quickly...

Steven

To my knowledge, and someone correct me if I'm wrong, but doesn't AVID support it, or is it in their software/hardware combo only types of AVID?

Avid XpressProHD cuts "HD". With or without Mojo.

www.avid.com for the details.

Some of Blackmagic's products may be of interest to you.

http://www.blackmagic-design.com/

-Bon

Keep in mind that uncompressed was necessary for HDCAM editing, but it's not necessary for DVCPRO-HD.

DVCPRO-HD's codec is supported natively by Avid, Apple, and I think Pinnacle. So if you have an editor that supports the codec, the editing experience will basically be the same as that for editing DV. It'll be slower, most likely, because you're pushing around about 5x as many pixels, but the storage requirements aren't much more -- you can store an hour of footage on a 60gb hard disk, so a 300gb hard disk would have five hours of storage (and that's at the full 1080/60i or 720/60p rate; using 720/24p a 300gb hard disk would hold about 13 hours of footage).

The computers are there today, already. I don't think you'll need that much more horsepower to be able to edit comfortably. It should be a lot more responsive than HDV editing is, because each frame is encoded separtely, instead of having to either a) uncompress up to 15 frames to find the frame you're looking for, or b) spend time transcoding to an "editing" codec. DVCPRO-HD is already an editing codec.

barry you can add edius to that list as well...

http://www.canopus.com/US/products/EDIUSPro3/pt_EDIUSPro3_Options.asp


Canopus Codec Option
Optionally available for EDIUS Pro 3 is the Canopus Codec Option Pack, which includes the DVCPRO 50 and new DVCPRO HD software NLE codecs. Developed in collaboration with Panasonic, the Canopus DVCPRO HD codec provides EDIUS Pro 3 with high-quality HD video with full native DVCPRO HD (SMPTE 370M) compliance.

With the Codec Option Pack, EDIUS Pro 3 supports direct HD lossless capture and print–to-tape functions with the Panasonic DVCPRO HD VTR (AJ-HD1200A) in native 1080/60i/50i via any IEEE 1394 OHCI FireWire controller.

Grrr!!! Where is Vegas on this! Well, I've been putting off a FCP switch for a while now... maybe it's finally time...