first PAL?
 

hm, but all these sources (UK, Belgium, Spain) are PAL countries...
how about the NTSC version? why there seems absolutely no official info on NTSC sites (e.g. Japan, US)?
btw. i'm also very confused which model i should try to get... PAL or NTSC?? here in Taiwan of course it's NTSC, but i'm not sure how long i'll really stay here, of course i hope very long! :-)
but does anybody have a suggestion which one is better for making "worldwide" compatible videos or DVDs? i know, PAL DVD players can play back NTSC DVDs and vice versa, but which looks better on both players?
why they don't build a combined PAL/NTSC model?? ;-) i heard technically this should be possible... seems all about the money again!

Andreas, you should e-mail pana via their contact page. Ask them for GS400 info, and then post what you get, here. Keep in mind that if you're the first person to find new info, you will be the person to have out-chucked the meister---and maybe Pana USA as well. It's a panasonical idea, I think.

Andreas, there are a lot of Pal countries and only few leaked info of GS400. There are no official info leaks in US, but there are quite a few unofficial.

In my opinion Pal has better colours and gives better picture resolution. This of course won't matter if you will be able to record in HD720 ;-)

Yes, i just can agree that PAL has the better picture, as i'm from Germany and was "PALalized" for many years! ;-)
The only problem is the frame rate, especially frame rate conversion between PAL and NTSC. I just tried different programs to convert PAL to NTSC, but nothing really satisfied me. I have not tried the opposite way from NTSC to PAL, but i guess this will also look terrible!?
Of course 720p would solve this problem of conversion, but in fact i don't believe the GS400 will be able to do 720p. How should it be possible to save the stream of 1280x720p and maybe in 60fps to the DV tape? Maybe speeding it up?? Saving to SD disk is no option, way too small capacity. And no recording at all, just outputting on FireWire... hmm, not really useful if you are not in a studio or brought your large HD equipped laptop around! ;-)
So i'll try to mail Panasonic Taiwan and Japan now. Let's see what (and if) they'll reply... I'll post it!

yeah =) well.. it's 1500$ cam... actually soon Panasonic will have 1GB SD available... so just for the GS400 release ;-)

The way I would convert footage would be... well from Pal is easier, if you are not tooo picky about the accuracy.. :)

you have 25fps footage, just reset the video stream speed to 23.976 (thats "legal" NTSC too by the way). you will need to adjust the soundtrack speed. when you are done. put them togather and run them trough a "pulldown" to get the 29.97 stream =) (for NTSC-DVD)
depending on what you use to change the sound speed you may have change in the pitch (just a little), thats why u should use this if you are not too picky ;)
by the way lots of movies are transfered to 23.976 in a similar way and then "pulldown"ed for NTSC-DVDs...
(by the way... 24 fps will be better (no noticable change), but who knows weather the GS400 will have it or not)

agghh.. piece of cake, eh? ;-)

ps. I doubt GS400 will be able to record 720 on tape either.

ps2. hmm imagine a MMC - WiFi card radio-ing the H720p stream to the PC at home... hmmmm =))

ha, yeah, wireless transfer home... :-) ...but first the data rate is too low and i guess then i'd need some satellite equipment, as i often travel and shoot in the mountains far away from any access point! ;-)

ok, 1GB SD card... hmm, so that could be around 20min footage in 720p if you use the same data rate and file format as on some samples here...
http://www.microsoft.com/windows/windowsmedia/content_provider/film/ContentShowcase.aspx
...but... read the requirements even for playback!! 2.4GHz...
i don't want to imagine what u need to encode this in realtime and i also doubt it's good enough to be editable.

23.976fps ...hmm, good idea... i'll try that!
the pulldown should be not nessesary on the DVD as most DVD players can do this and play 23.976fps directly, right!?
But ok, then i need to get a PAL cam... might be more expensive!? :-( The guy here in the shop told me the price for the NTSC model will be likely 40,000NT$ (1,200US$). Let's see...

PS: btw. i mailed to Pany Taiwan and Japan... and now i'll try to "bother" Pany Germany! ;-)

SD cards
 

ok, email to Panasonic Germany is sent too!

I just calculated a bit about those SD card stuff...
using the new 1GB Pana SD card would give around 20min storage space at an average data rate of 7,000kBit/s.
They say the max. transfer rate is 10MB/s and even 20MB/s for the upcoming 2 and 4GB cards.
Hm, 4GB would be 80min then... or not even 6min for conventional DV footage! ;-)
So there is still a small DSP power problem about the realtime calculation of 720p in HD WMV format (or whatever codec is suitable)!
Ok, that's maybe the specification of a "GS800" then!? ;-)

hmm let me look in my glass ball.....gs800....
hmmmmmmmm.. foggy... ;)

please remember that if you have hardware encoder (as in say cams) the problem with speed can be eliminated very easy. But still it's most probable that only uncompressed stream 720 will be available trough wire (MMC/FireWire).

about NTSC DVD- only, 29.97 is legal format.
you need after encoding the mpeg2 stream, to do the pulldown.
it won't change your file size, it just adds flags for specifuc playback. As the DVD-player does the "pulldown" of frames in real-time.
(so don't do the pulldown in avid and then encode in mpeg)
but you need to do it, or you probably won't be able to author the dvd (and who knows about playback). =/

hey, Panasonic Germany replied already... but: they just write that they don't have any information yet and we should be a little more patient! hmmm, how long still?!?!?

oh, and about FireWire and UNCOMPRESSED 720p ...i think this is impossible to transfer on standart 400MBit/s FireWire... the data amount is about 2,7 times more due to the resolution change only! so should be something around 93MBytes/s! and if u really want progressive 60fps it's even double... much more than the 50MBytes/s FireWire could theoretically handle.

nah.. if there's 720 it will be 30fps...

so.. lets cross fingers and whish for MPEG4 compression for 720?
it's quite sure it won't be mpeg2-HDV

but if we take into account the mockup of 3000$ HD1080i cam:
http://www.camcorderinfo.com/content/panasonic-p2-flash-pro-04_18_04.htm

I guess if they can make it work for 1080i they can do it for 720 =)
and record it on SD/HD.

i'm getting really tired of guessing =)

In June it all will be revieled. A whole damn month.. i'll go geeky till then ;)