Yeah, the HVX + two 4GB P2 card bundle is less than $7000. Bliss...

That's retail -- street price might be a grand less than that. Although I don't know if we'll see much discounting until the backorders are filled...

Barry,

You and Jared did a nice job providing the HVX200 footage. Thank you.

Could you capture the footage directly to a PC as well, or does it have to be a laptop? Say, if you are in a studio enviroment, and you've got a PC sitting there, could you just firewire it in that way?

Sure -- there's nothing unique about the laptop for that purpose, other than it being portable. If you're talking about a studio shoot, you could easily pipe a firewire cable over to a desktop and use your NLE's capture application to stream the full HD signal directly to the hard disk.

Barry, is that how you guys recorded the HVX footage? I noticed the h.264 Karate Kid clip was a 60p recording (59.94 actually) with 24p look. Stepping through the frames seemed to confirm the repeat frames, which I presume you wouldn't record with P2. If you did go the laptop route, did it require a fast IDE internal drive, or did you pipe it into a G5 with a RAID somehow?

Just curious...

Barry, hope I didn't offend by calling it a "Karate Kid" clip. I apologize if I did. It's very nice material. Just wondered how you acquired it.

No, it was recorded on P2 cards using 720/24PN ("native") mode, so it only recorded the actual frames. So in 12p it only recorded 12 frames per second, etc.

It was then edited on FCP on a laptop, in a 24p timeline.

Don't judge it based on that h.264. I don't know how that h.264 clip got authored, but it got authored wrong. It should have been authored with a 24p timebase, not a 60p timebase.

I don't know the specs on the laptop, but I think it was just whatever current PowerBook is out. The drive we used was a regular external firewire drive, I think just a Maxtor OneTouch II, whatever Jarred picked up for cheap at Fry's. No RAID, nothing like that. We used a regular firewire drive and the editor guy was able to play back full-screen, full-res, full-motion video with no hassles at all. For that matter, he also showed me DVCPRO-HD footage playing back on a 2-year-old 1.33ghz G4 powerbook, playing off the internal hard disk. Full-screen, full-res, full-motion, no dropped frames, no problems at all.

I'll have to start calling him that! :)

You can look him up at http://jakebass.com/.

No HD recording to tape... Tough decision
 

I like to get everyone's opinion. I've done tons of research on the Sony Z1 and the upcoming Panasonic VX200, but I just can't decide.

What's holding me back is the P2 cards. I want to record HD (that's kind of the whole point), but from what I've been reading, you can only record HD to the P2 cards or to a hard drive. No tape option whatsoever.

Now, I'm a video producer with a number of clients. I currently have hundreds of tapes from various shoots over the last couple of years. Some projects (like documentaries) are ongoing, others are raw footage archived for the client (special events, AGMs, etc).

If I want to shoot HD with the Panasonic, I'm assuming this would mean that I:

1. Have a separate, removable hardrive for each project and each client

2. Have a DVCPRO HD Recorder to output the footage to tape. Current cost: $25,000 Canadian.

Am I correct? This does seem like a real negative. Though I know the there are issues with Sony (no 24p for instance), being able to record HDV straight to tape seems like a real plus.

Any thoughts you could offer would be most appreciated. Again, other than having a hundred hard drives, how do I manage footage from multiple clients day-to-day?

Thanks.

Peter Reynolds
www.fortherecordproductions.com

That's the problem. In your circumstances, I'd go for the $25K deck. Even if you get a separate hard drive for each program you're working on, you still would need a second drive for backup for each one. Remember, you dump your footage to the hard drive, then erase the P2 cards. I wouldn't feel very comfortable with my only original footage on a hard drive. I've seen lots of hard drives die for no reason, but I've never seen a tape die, and I've got lots of tapes that are over 20 years old.
I'm hoping Sony or somebody would come out with an optical disc recorder so P2 footage could be backed up that way. The discs are cheap enough to store as we do tapes.

Blue Laser
 

If you’re not in a hurry, you can get a Blue laser burner once it comes out in the 1st quarter of 2006. Each disk is expected to hold 50 gigs of information which equals to 50 minutes of DVCPRO HD footage if my calculations are correct.

Well, given that you're even considering the Z1, I would suggest demoing the Canon XL H1. It's easily the best HDV camera on the market. A lot of people are going to be shocked as to what that camera can do. All I know is it shoots astonishingly good HD onto cheap DV tape.

If you're only considering 1/3" cameras, the H1 would probably give you the best combination of image quality (far FAR better than Sony's) and simplicity. It can give you a very good film look in 24F mode, and shoot superb 1080i to
inexpensive media. Yes, it's more expensive than Sony, but not much more than the HVX when you consider the P2 scenario. That camera is more like a $7000 minimum investment (unless you want to try and tote around a laptop and be tethered to it) and that's with miniscule recording times.

The HVX is not the camera to own if you want a simple archive workflow.

When it comes to a film look, don't forget how much better/shallower a depth of field can be with a 20x lens compared to a 13x or 10x. I get some pretty good blurry backgrounds with my 20x XL2 lens, though you have to have a lot of room! It also makes some awkward interviews when you're standing 50 feet away! But it works...and looks great. I'm sure the H1 will, as well.

KW

I could swear there's a little more play with the 20x H1 lens then with previous lenses. Let's not forget how cool it is to be able to take the lens off and put on a mini35 if you REALLY want shallow DOF