<<<Steven White]If you're in a studio, such devices already exist.>>>

Yes, I should have specified a battery powered-solid state (or disk) based
field recorder that has all the cool features therein. I bet in a couple of
years there will be a laptop that can capture HD-SDI and provide
all kinds of other cool functions such as monitoring, scopes etc. Edit
at night in the hotel or tent.

True, but it is not the only option. Both the Z1 and HD100 have uncompressed component out from the CCD head and theBlackmagic compoennt to HD-SDI converters are quite cheap. I'll bet it is next to impossible to tell the difference without a full res large reference monitor or enlarging frame captures.

Then, if you consider 2x JVC HD101 is about $11,0000 (one SDI/one HDV) but one XL HD is $9,000+, you get an extra camera for not vey much more, and can even do two camera studio shoots etc

$9,000 is a lot to pay for this camera, too much I think.

I have to agree. $9,000 is alot. The HVX200 even though it does not have removable lens is looking to be my camera. I like the P2 concept alot but not the price for them. I'm sick of tape though. I will just have to see how the 1080/24 on both H1 and HVX looks. If the H1 is way better, then that will be the camera if not then the HVX we be the camera.

Anyone know if there are free passes to res-fest to see products? I want to see the HVX200, but I'm not paying to see it. That seems stupid.

Michael Pappas
PappasArts Entertainment

What, you're going to choose your camera based on how well you like the video it produces? Now there's a new concept...
:)

Personally, if I were to think about the $9000 price tag and the maybe $5,000 to $10,000 to rent a deck for 3 weeks, I'd rather use my friend's FX1 and use the $14,000 to $20,000 on making the movie, paying the cast/crew and feeding everyone, not to mention insurance.

But Shannon's enthusiasm is always cool here at DV Info.

heath

$9000 is ridiculous, unless you're setting up a low-budget TV studio, in which case the Genlock and HD-SDI will definitely be an advantage. But otherwise, yes, $9000 for an HDV camera is absurd. Nobody is going to shoot with an HDcam Deck in the middle of Times Square.

The HVX w/Firestore will give you full-out 1080/24p 4:2:2 DVCProHD for less than $8000 ($6000 HVX + $2000 Firestore) and it seems by far the best bang for your buck for indie filmmaking. Portable, inexpensive (for HD) and full quality DVCProHD.

Excellent point. No ammount of uncompressed anything is going to feed your crew, or buy lights, costumes, props, and pay for salaries and transportation and insurance. I love more options, and I'm glad Canon is getting into the HD mix, but this camera doesn't seem like the best indie filmmaking camera out there.

I USED to think that way--better camera=better movie. I do know having the right tool works out best (for my DV needs, the DVX100A is better than my old XL1; for my HDV needs, the FX1 is better than my old HD10), but it still comes back to the story.

It is an impressive camera, though.

heath

That just made me put the HVX200 on my radar screen! That's the beginning of a good workflow. And it's cool because you could always switch over to P2 cards (if you wanted to) as the prices came down in the future.

I think we're getting off topic--let's talk more about the Canon (the P2 HVX200 should be discussed here).

heath

it's gigabits, not gigabytes. roughly 200megabytes/sec. still a lot, but far from impossible. definitely doable on a prosumer budget.

Do you have any products to recommend? Or are you just referring to overall storage space? I haven't spent too much time looking into it, but it seems like you'd need a RAID of six or 8 hard disks, and probably more if you want to have redundancy to avoid losing all your footage if just one drive crashes. Then you need to multiply that by the amount of storage you want to have on hand; 10 gigabytes per minute goes by pretty quickly.

However, let's keep in mind that you may not need to use the full 200mB/sec bandwidth -- there are lossless codecs that can compress the data to around half its size while losing nothing (think an LZW-style compression, like WinZip... I believe the Video Toaster 2 also employed lossless compression). You wouldn't get the massive 10:1 or higher compression ratios that you'd get from a lossy compressor (like MPEG-2 or DV-based compression) but you would retain 100% of the uncompressed quality... and when you're talking about needing a RAID of 8 hard disks, cutting the data rate in half gets you massive benefits as far as workflow, cost, etc.

Specific products no (I rarely look at proprietary solutions for a particular problem - my mileage will vary :)... but you could easily build a good RAID array for $2-$3k.

12 250GB drives (~ $100 each @ Pricewatch) = ~ 1000GB of RAIDed space
2 Rocketraid cards (or something similar)
Server PC + case to hold it all (full server size cabinet (not a rack) or roll your own)

100 minutes of uncompressed HD

I guess nobody read my post on options to use instead of uncompressed capture. There are other ways to capture HD other than uncompressed but would also be better than HDV.

One example of storage for HD would be a Lacie SATA II 5 disk external raid that can get a sustained 189 MB/S for the first 75% of the storage unit and only costs $2,000.00 for 1 TB.

Just because a signal is uncompressed doesn't mean you have to keep it that way. Heck even the HDCAM SR deck records the uncompressed dual port 4:4:4 as a mpeg4 2:1 compression.

One example of compression I listed is the bitjazz codec which on a Decklink and Apple you can capture uncompressed video at around a 2:1 ratio with 100% quality. This alone cuts your harddrive bandwidth in half and would even work with a raid-0 with only 2 drives.

If that is still too much for some people you can always capture directly to live DVCPROHD at 1280x1080 and 4:2:2. While this isn't the best format in the world for HD it is only around 14 MB/S which almost any off the shelf hard drive can handle. This will allow you to use the XLH1 with the SDI port to at least give you a nice clean format that would be pretty good for keying without the need for special storage. I'm sure most of the indie people on here already have a G5 with at least one extra hard drive. Now all you need is a $595.00 Decklink card and you are all set to go to capture DVCPROHD from the SDI.

I just do not understand why people want to put up with all these cumbersome solutions to obtaining footage.

No high def for me until I get all of this stuff in one unit.