will 24p Panasonic HVX200 kill Sony Z1U?
 

Does anyone know if the much anticipated HD Panasonic HVX200 will feature the "shot transition" feature like Sony's FX1 or Z1U???

Also, does this camera shoot in true HD or HDV???

- Nicholas

Haven't heard any mention of a shot-transition feature.

It shoots in DVCPRO-HD, not HDV. DVCPRO-HD is the format used by the $70,000 VariCam and the new $45,000 HDX400. However, with those cameras, you're also looking at $60,000 lenses and 2/3" chips, which are things that the HVX will not have. Just because it uses the same recording format doesn't mean that it will deliver comparable images. If all other things are equal (equal lenses, equal CCDs, equal DSPs, etc) then you will get better footage from DVCPRO-HD than you would from HDV. But all other things are not always equal. The ultimate test will be viewing the output of the actual cameras side-by-side, shooting the same subjects, to see what kind of difference you'll get in the actual delivered footage.

Calling HDV not "true HD" is a misuse of terms. HD is not a format, it's an image standard. HDV is a format, as is DVCPRO-HD, and HDCAM, and HDCAM-SR.

Saying HDV is not "HD" is like saying that VHS is not "SD". It is. Of course it is. But DigiBeta is also "SD", and obviously there's a gulf of difference between VHS and DigiBeta.

There are gulfs of difference between HDV and HDCAM-SR as well. But they're both HD.

I would argue based on your tests posted at DVXuser that in a 720p mode or a 1080p mode, HDV will produce a superior image to DVCPRO-HD in terms of resolution and mosquito noise in locked-off tripoded shots without too much going on. It's a limited set of circumstances for sure, but I don't think it's accurate to state that DVCPRO-HD will always yield better footage. I expect that HDV at 24p and 30p in either 720 or 1080 mode will ultimately be quite competitive with DVCPRO-HD... but only time will tell.

But in those cases aren't you best to just use a stills camera? <joke> ;)

Aaron

And let's not forget that the Panasonic HVX200 isn't really in the same pricing category as HDV, partly because of the outrageously expensive recording media it uses. With HDV you pay $3000 for a camera which can record an hour of 1080i video on a $3 miniDV tape; with the HVX200 it's $6000 for a camera which records 8 minutes of 720p footage on a memory card expected to cost $1700 at the time the camera ships! (You read right -- that's seventeen hundred dollars for eight minutes of video storage!!) At those prices no one will keep their HVX200 footage on the memory cards for very long, meaning you'll also need some way to offload the data and somewhere to store it, plus someone to do nothing but manage the memory cards while another person runs the camera.

So no, the HVX200 will not kill the Sony FX1/Z1U, it will merely make it clearer what a bargain HDV is. HDV yields amazing images for the price, with some limitations due to the high compression used. The HVX200 will get rave reviews and sell widely to people with deep pockets, but HDV will continue to spread and likely become the mainstream successor to DV.

In terms of mosquito noise, I'd agree that the absolute-best-case 720p HDV footage was a little cleaner than the DVCPRO-HD. But resolution? Look at the color curves again -- DVCPRO-HD has twice the color resolution, easily outdistancing the HDV image. I guess one could argue the 33% luma gain vs. the 100% chroma gain, but just looking at the pictures, I thought the DVCPRO-HD was a much better quality shot overall.

And that's with HDV at its very, very, very best. Under average circumstances DVCPRO-HD would be much better.

However, like I keep trying to point out to people, what a codec does, and what a total camera does, are two different things. The lens, the chips, the DSP, everything has to work together as a system. You could strap an S-VHS recorder onto a Digital Betacam camera, or a DigiBeta deck onto a $299 Sharp DV ViewCam, and I'll bet the S-VHS/DigiBeta copy would look better than the ViewCam would.

I think it's accurate to state that under almost any conceivable circumstances, other than shooting still shots, an equal signal will be recorded more accurately and more pleasingly by DVCPRO-HD than by HDV. The only circumstance where HDV looked competitive, in the tests I ran, was in 720p mode when shooting a still shot (an artificial circumstance which would artificially exaggerate the efficiency of long-GOP MPEG compression). And even then, it was still recording only half the color.

What you're discounting is the average and worst-case pictures. The average looks decidedly worse than the DVCPRO-HD test shot, and the average is much more likely to be what you're going to get. And the worst case, while admittedly a "worst case", was frighteningly inferior. And while it is unlikely to encounter the worst case, it is possible. Whereas with DVCPRO-HD, every shot is the same under all circumstances, so you know exactly what you're getting.

For the price, and for the price of a $3 tape, HDV is amazing, absolutely. But as a raw codec, as a compression format, it's not competitive to DVCPRO-HD. That doesn't mean the cameras won't be competitive, because like I said, it depends on the entire imaging chain. But just from the codec, not a chance. Not unless you artificially restrict your HDV shooting to unrealistically limited still shots, and even then, you'll gain only a small benefit in mosquito noise and still be sacrificing half the color resolution.

I'd like to devise an ultimate camera-free codec comparison, but none of the HDV cameras or decks offer any sort of analog or HD-SDI input. I'd like to take a CineAlta out in the field and record the same signal onto an HDV deck and also onto a DVCPRO-HD deck -- that way we could record an identical raw video signal equally onto both formats, which would give us an absolute way to compare just the recording formats, without confounding the issue with different cameras and lenses. But the HDV decks don't allow input yet.

As a substitute, I'm exploring getting some high-quality 3D-generated footage and using that as a test case. Unless anyone knows of a second of some uncompressed 4:4:4 HDCAM SR footage available for download? :)

I did such a test some months back in After Effects - a simple animation exported as uncompressed and then Procoder to Avid DV100 and HDV 25mbs. In short watching the animation play back at real time shows little difference if any - however microscopic observation of individual frames did show the DVCPROHD to have less blocky artifacts. I can put the AEX file up if anyone interested.

4:2:2 is better for compositing and keying but the latter is no match for a live uncompressed source - lighting the BG and perspective matching is much easier to fix this way.

Applying a Gaussian blur of 1.0 simultaneously to the red and blue channels is a popular quick fix in post for chroma and other noise and the average Jo Public would not tell the difference - in fact they would say the footage looks a lot cleaner so again 4:2:2 is not much appreciated.


Having operated the FX1 since Dec last, the most irritating issue is one of Chromatic Aberration. I am looking toward Panasonic/Leica to deliver a decent lens , however stretching 1280 out to 1920 is going to require careful attention to this CA issue as it is really troublesome to fix in post. The other issue is a low noise progressive image - a SNR at least as good as the Sony's. For me these are the two key issues - I would even take some resolution hit to have them sufficiently addressed. If not then I do not see a convincing reason to buy into P2 as a more expensive way to store afflicted imagery then I already have.

And? Digibeta has twice the color resolution of DV, but that doesn't make it look twice as good... in reality most of the benefit comes from shooting on a $50k camera (with better lens, CCDs and adjustment options) rather than a $2k camera. Transfer Digibeta footage to DV, and unless you want to do greenscreen work or really push the colors in post, you'll see very little difference. Heck, DVDs are 4:2:0 as well, and few people complain about those when they're decently mastered.

As I see it, the Z1/FX1 is for people who want a $6k HD camera. The HVX200 is for people who want to pay $20k to shoot on a $6k HD camera... and, unlike Panasonic, I don't think there are many people in the latter category. If I wanted a better HD solution than HDV, I'd get a proper camera, not what's effectively a $20k Handycam that requires me to lug a laptop, tape backup system and several extra people around just to support the video format.

Also, I've heard rumors that it uses 720p CCDs and 'pixel shift' to scale up to 1080: if that's true, then there's a sizable chunk of your color resolution gone already. 'Pixel Shift' doesn't matter on the Z1 since the recorded color resolution is lower in the first place.

Either way, none of us is going to be shooting with a theoretical compression codec: the camera hardware will determine far more about the final image than the codec will.

Even if the HVX-200 uses pixel shift that isn't going to hurt the color resolution. When dealing with pixel shift there isn't a difference between 4:2:0 and 4:2:2. When you have pixel shift you are left with half the chroma detail which would give you about 4:2:2. Therefore no matter which camera you use with pixel shift they will start with 4:2:2. HDV however then pushes that down to 4:2:0.

Has anybody checked out the Cineform website where they compare HDV and DVCpro HD? Cineform feels that even with HDV having a lower chroma at 24p and 30p HDV is higher quality.

It is interesting how close the two actually are considering HDV uses 1/2 or 1/4 the bandwidth. It should be even more interesting when HDV50 comes out. This will build on HDV by adding 4:2:2 and a much higher bandwidth for quality.

If I went with the HVX-200 I might actually use the 1080 mode to give me 1280 x 1080. I would then edit in a 1280 x 720 project instead of using the 720 mode. This way I could get a full pixel count and a higher bandwidth for 720p. The only downside would be any effects or rendering would need to be either uncompressed HD or scaled down to 960 x 720 for DVCpro HD.

Decently mastered being the key... Take commercial DVD's for example... They start with a film (or HD) source and then do a shot by shot (if not frame by frame in some cases) encoding... It's no easy feat...

Ummm... $20k? I see an MSRP of $5995 for the camera, add in about $1500 for the new Firestore that Focus Enhancements is working on, plus at most $50.00 in parts to find a way to mount that to the camera... and we're talking $7550.00. Big difference from $20K...

Also, using a Firestore type device means you don't need all the extra people or to lug around a laptop (which even without DV rack I seem to have on location all the time anyway...).

But all that is only temporary... once p2 is cheap enough and big enough for just about anyone's taste... Then you have an amazing camera that now has an amazing work flow with some of the most stable recording media ever...

My understanding on pixel shift, if it's done correctly, is that it adds latitude and light sensitivity at the expense of some color information... However, the raw 4:4:4 stream off the CCD's minus the color loss for pixel shift should give you 4:2:2, which is what the DVCPRO (50 or HD) codecs record. Thus, if you have a 1280x720 CCD (which isn't yet confirmed) you end up with navtive 720p (which is switched to an anamorphic 960x720 by the codec) and, with pixel shift, a 1280x1080 image which is what the codec records anyways--but now you have better latitude and light sensitivity and in reality, you're not losing any color information that the codec would have recorded.

what about the shot transition feature???
 

Thanks for your replies, but no one has yet answered a key question:

Does anyone know if Panasonic added the "shot transition" feature to the upcoming HVX200 that Sony has on the FX1 / Z1U???

It's a fantastic feature.

A great idea if you're happy with losing all your footage in a hard disk crash... if you're not, then someone is going to have to plug that into a computer and make backups to tape as you're shooting.

The HVX200 will be long obsolete.

Does the camera even exist outside of case mockups? I guess you could look for the transition buttons on the photos of the mockups.

Harddrives are far from perfect, but people keep having the same knee jerk reaction--You'll loose all your footage in the crash! Like HDD crashing is a daily occurence. I've been working on or building computers since I was old enough to mow lawns for cash, and the number of harddrives I have had crash I can just about count on one hand. It happens and it sucks, but the portable HDDs on the market are pretty darn tough. Not as tough as solid state, but pretty tough.

Wow, camera's are only useful for a couple of years then, huh? And here I am shooting on a 4 year old XL1s... wow... I am ancient... Funny how people still pay me money for the work I do...

Something like Firestore will make a lot more sense than the P2 memory, but you'll need more than one if you want to shoot any significant amount of footage without pausing to download it somewhere. So let's say an 80GB drive for the HVX200 costs $1500 and holds ~80 minutes of 720p video, and you want the ability to record at least four hours without stopping: that's three drives at $1500 each = $4500. Now you need some way to store your footage when you get back to your studio, which means you'll either need a DVCProHD deck costing $15-20K or a big stack of hard drives costing roughly $30 per hour of raw footage (because this is your permanent archive for all your projects). So for your first 100 hours of shooting you'll be spending at least $6000 + $4500 + $3000 = $13,500, plus batteries and such for a total of at least $15K. If you do much event work you'll need even more Firestores, so let's say another three of those at $4500 = $19.5K. So yeah, the $20K figure was about right.

I think most people who get the HVX-200 do not intend to be shooting 4 hours worth of footage. DVCpro 50 and HD is more suited to the commercial/broadcast/film market. I'm not really sure if I see the point to having a higher chroma bandwidth with event video. It's not like you are going to be shooting a 4 hour interview in front of a blue screen for example. If you need the extra chroma bandwidth for extreme color correction then perhaps you should learn how to white balance first. DVCpro is a higher end format and we are getting a huge gift from Panasonic for making it so cheap for us to use that format. Don't expect to see a SONY HDCAM camera in this price range anytime soon. Higher quality does cost more money. I'm sure if we could many of us would love to shoot a wedding in HDCAM SR with a Cinealta 950 but it just isn't going to happen.

the $20,000.00 in just one of many ways to look at it. You know the camera could go out just as easy as the hard drives so you better go ahead and buy 2 more cameras just in case. What about your ediitng computer? Better get 2 more in case it goes down on you.

Many of us will not be going that route for the camera because we will not need to. I for one will be mainly using the camera for VFX, TV commercial, and music video work. All of this type of work only needs short segments of shooting so two small P2 cards would be fine. I actually plan on backing up all of my footage onto DVD RW disks. This may be slow at first but it is cheap and I can either choose to keep them for over 100 years or use the disks over again. At some point we "will" have a larger DVD format with faster burners so this will be even better. For now however I should be able to fit most of the raw footage from these types of projects onto 3 or 4 DVD RW's

If you do not like the DVD method well you know you will now be doing projects in high quality HD. I'm sure you could at least charge your clients an extra $100.00 to cover the cost of a cheap hard drive. Each project you get you buy a new hard drive just like you would if you were buying a HDCAM SR tape. Besides how much would you spend on HDV tapes for 4 hours of shooting? Then after that you would need a few more to record your final edit back to tape. If you get the new SONY tapes with less chance of dropout those tapes are not cheap. You could end up spending around $40.00-$80.00 just on your HDV tapes. Oh you better have some backup tapes with you as well just in case.

When the HDX-200 comes out I plan on getting

the camera ($6000)
1 small 2GB P2 card (around $900 I think)
cheap laptop.($600)

Most of my shots are never longer than 30 seconds so even if I shoot 1080 with the 2 GB card I could get a few shots in before I would have to dump the card.

So for about $7500.00 I will be able to use a high chroma detail format where it really matters. For cheap DV stuff I can still use tapes in the DV tape deck on the camera.

Instead of the $20,000.00 for the HDX-200 and all of that storage why not just get my method of the HDX-200 for $7,500.00 and then a SONY Z1 for anout $6000? For $13,500 you now get the best of both worlds and you save $6,500.00.

If you don't mind being chained to the laptop via firewire (perhaps with a 70' Laird firewire cable), you could use that laptop to capture the HD stream, and then you actually could record four hours at a time (or more). You don't need a P2 card in order to capture HD through the firewire, so running a program like HD Rack (a presumed name for DV Rack) to a 300gb external hard disk would give you five hours of continuous record time, if that's what you really wanted. Not highly portable, but it would be a way, if you wanted to, to get longform cheap recording. A 300gb hard disk should be under $150 by the time the camera comes out, so you'd be talking about $30/hr, which is about half the cost of recording to HD tape.

Obviously not a practical solution for *all* shooting situations, but for studio work (where you're usually cabled to a monitor, and frequently to the audio recorder as well) having one more cable shouldn't be any big deal, and makes the HD recording incredibly cheap!

Would hard drive be able handle 100 Mbps? Is there firewire output of DVCPROHD signal?

Has the camera have uncompressed 1080p output like new HDV cameras have? Is there way to record uncompressed output to some RAID hard drive array, without laptop, or with laptop? Output converted to HDSDI will probably close to 1 Gbps.

Well, this just goes to show what the most realistic uses of the HVX200 will be at first. Looking at how Thomas described what he wants to do, I wonder if there won't soon be a digital still camera which can do that equally well for a fraction of the price, using media which costs under $50/GB instead of over $200/GB. I saw a description recently of a new consumer-oriented digital camera which can record 640x480 video continuously until it fills up the memory card, so if someone would just put that feature in a pro camera and bump up the resolution, then you wouldn't need an HD video camera at all for short takes.

i read somewhere on this forum , that the output of the camera, out of P2 card, allows only DV recording. So the argument of attaching a disk to the camera is valid only if you want to get the video in DV format.

Good luck getting audio on that digital still camera.

There is a huge difference between 640 x 480 and HD video. It isn't just bumping up the resolution. Besides that video is usually either mpeg2 or mpeg4 video at very high compression levels. For that you might as well use HDV then.

What you are talking about could be 5 to 10 years down the road yet. If you want you can go ahead and wait 10 years to have a HD camera for $300.00 but most of us want to have one now to make money. In 10 years you will have a fun time trying to make any decent money with a $300.00 HD camera since everybody and his brother will also have one.

Will shooting P2 for a wedding be as easy as with HDV? no. That is part of the tradeoff for quality. Take photographers for example at a wedding. Many now use digital which means they use media cards. They either have to buy a lot of cards or have a person come along to transfer to a laptop at the event. Shooting on P2 could use the same method. I know P2 costs a lot more than still photo media but once you buy them you have them forever. Think of it as buying 5 DV tapes that you could use as many times as you wanted to without dropouts or hurting the tape. Maybe in your first year with the camera the costs will be higher but each year the costs go down. After 5 years how much will you have spent on high quality HDV tapes?

$13.00/tape (in bulk) * 4-6 per event * events a year.

Lets say you use 5 tapes per event and have 20 events a year. Thats $1,300 each year on HDV tapes. After 5 years you will have spent $6,500.00 on HDV tapes. For P2 if we buy 2 cards that will only be $3,400.00 but we get to use them as much as we want to. So for 1,5 or 10 years down the road our media will still only have cost us $3400.00.

I actually predict a great P2 trade community forming at some point in the future. At some point bigger P2 media will come out. Leading edge pros will want the bigger cards so they can now sell the smaller cards. The cards are just as good as they were before so there will be a market for smaller end users to buy those cards used. This also means for me if I only get one card now I am sure in the near future I could get more P2 cards at a much lower used price

Your math is off, if just a bit. The advantage to tape is that it archives itself. You will not use P2 to archive so you need to buy something to archive it on. And hard drives are about all that will do that for you at this point. So count the cost of the hard drives into the equation.

Hard drives, DVD-R, Blu-Ray and HD-DVD (due out about the same time as the camera) and in a couple of years HVD's with 200 GB plus storage capacity per disc....

Sure P2 may be costly now and for the HVX200, it may be prohibitive to some people. But it is a new workflow and a new way of looking at things. The days of tape acquisition are numbered--sure it will be around for a while still, but nonetheless, their days are numbered.

Just think... eventually computers will use entirely solid state memory, and the whole hard drive argument will be a thing of the past as well...

Easily.

Yes.

Yes.

Capturing uncompressed would be a tall task with any of these cameras.

Not true. It streams all the signals out the firewire port live: you can capture DVCPRO-HD straight to a computer, or to a DVCPRO-HD tape deck, or to a compatible FireStore. You could capture DVCPRO-50 straight to a computer, to a DVCPRO-50 tape deck, or to a compatible FireStore. And the same with DV25.

Yes, but hard drives cost a lot less than tape! (at least HD tape.) DVCPRO-HD tape costs $68 for 46 minutes (or, extrapolating forward, about $90 per hour). Hard disk storage costs under $1 per gig now, so a 300-gig external drive is readily available at Best Buy for under $300, and provides five hours of storage, so that's $60 per hour, cheaper than tape. And that's at today's prices. By the time the camera is actually on the market, hard drive storage will probably be down around $40 per hour.

Archiving on tape will cost a lot more than archiving on hard disk (or blu-ray DVD or HD-DVD or dual-layer DVD-R or many other options).

Barry: the problem is that Thomas didn't account for any cost associated with archiving video from a P2 camera, so his calculations are way off unless he plans to erase all his footage when he's done editing. Like I showed in my earlier figures, if you back up from your HVX200 to today's typical hard drives, it's going to cost you roughly $3000 (give or take a little) to store every 100 hours of footage. So let's say you shoot 30 weddings per year with a modest 4 hours of source footage per event: that's an ongoing cost of $3600 per year to archive footage from the HVX200, versus as little as $360 per year to record the same footage in HDV. And since there seems to be some agreement that hard drives can't be trusted as much as tape, you should double the HVX200 archiving cost to $7200 per year so you can duplicate everything to two separate drives. Okay, so you can massage all these figures somewhat depending on your circumstances, but the bottom line is that archiving HVX200 footage is going to be a non-trivial expense. For the right customers that will be worth it, but it's definitely not going to "kill" HDV.

I don't think it will kill HDV. I think there's a definite advantage to having two different types of cameras out there. Obviously the tape-based solution is clearly preferable for certain types of shooting --the oft-quoted example of doing a documentary while backpacking through the Himalayas, for example, would probably be easier/more practical on HDV than on DVCPRO-HD. And if you find the HDV quality good enough, then that's a great example of when you should choose the HDV solution.

I also think that if consumers ever do make a mass adoption of high-definition, and they want high-def in their consumer camcorders, HDV will be the obvious choice. I think there's a very good reason Sharp was one of the initial signatories to the HDV coalition. I don't think we'll ever see, ever, a $299 DVCPRO-HD handycam at Best Buy. It's a totally different market. But I fully expect that five years from now, we likely will be seeing $299 Sharp HDViewCams at Best Buy. It's a market that makes sense, provides high-def cameras for the consumer in a familiar form factor, and is not employed in mission-critical image gathering. I mean, let's not forget, JVC started this whole thing with their first consumer HD camera, and their stated goal wasn't to go after professionals or pro productions, they said they wanted to provide a camera for consumers who have a high-def TV set at home.

That doesn't mean pro's wont adopt and push HDV into the professional workplace -- Sony's Z1 is by no means a consumer camera! But I think in the professional world, where image quality is the paramount goal, people will look to the various formats and see that there's a clear distinction between them, and make their choices based on that. For some, the ability to record on $3 tapes, regardless of the compromises necessary to get footage on to that tape, will be the paramount concern. And for them, we have HDV, and some pretty darn nice HDV cameras at that. For others, image quality and color resolution and freedom from MPEG motion artifacts will be more important -- and for them, the DVCPRO-HD solution is available.

I don't think one will "kill" the other. But I do think there's a substantial quality gap between HDV and DVCPRO-HD. I do think each format is more suited to certain types of jobs than the other, and and I for one am glad that they're both out there.

HDV is more suited for beginners. HDVPRO (what I think is a future format) or DVCPRO-HD will be something for every budget-minded Pro, but I think Barry's right.

Right again! HDV is way more compact and the only format that can stream back to broadcaster HQ. Recently, the Discovery Channel Canada used 720p24 DVCPRO-HD footage to the near-top of Everest (all-real) but none of it could be edited until they went back to their Avid studio back at HQ, with HDV, they could've edited streaming HDV from Everest with the editor at HQ and releasing the show within weeks of the climb, not months. (It took 3-4 months to edit DVCPRO-HD after they came back.)

If you would read my earlier post you would see that I do not plan on backing up to hard drive. I plan on using optical RW media right now. Yes that also costs money but much less than tape or hard drives. At some point in the near future we will be getting an even better form of optical media which will be cheap, fast and can hold a lot of video.

My whole point that mnay people seem to forget is that those stupid tapes also cost you money. You may not be buying 1000 tapes right away with your camera but after a few years you will. The same P2 cards can be used for many years into the future. It is easy to say a decent P2 card costs $1700 and a HDV tape only costs $15 but unless you plan on only ever buying one tape and using it over many times this isn't a fair way to compare the formats.

Yes in the end maybe HDV tapes might be a little cheaper after 5 years instead of the optical or hard drive method but it isn't the same $6000.00 to $20,000.00 price gap some people are trying to say.

I actually do not think HDV will be the main comsumer format years into the future. Just like with every other technology video will become easier to use. The fact is that solid state recording does open up a whole new world of consumer editing. It will be like digital still cameras and how people can now shoot, transfer and edit photos with ease. At some point an optical or solid state consumer format will hit main stream. Consumers love things to be easier and cheaper. Tell them they can now shoot video onto an optical disk and instantly edit their footage from the disk and make endless copies onto Blue-ray disks and they will never look at tapes ever again.

I know there are cameras out now that record to DVD disks but they haven't hit very hard yet and almost seem like a neat toy at this point.

With us living in the day of E-mail and I-pods who wants to stick with a tape?

I do however think HDV will be around for at least a few years. Optical media just isn't big enough, cheap enough, and fast enough for SD or HD video.

I'm in no way knocking either format. They both have their advantages and disadvantages. I'm just trying to point out that you have to look at both formats from many different angles and not just from head on. For my short projects P2 actually will be cheaper than HDV in the long run although many people have a hard time seeing that. Remember we all heard this same stupid argument between DV and dvcpro-50 for years. People who love DV say DVCpro-50 and other 4:2:2 formats are stupid and a waste of money because nobody can tell between the two. While the high end market tries to say DV just isn't as good. Editing uncompressed video from a dvcpro-50 camera 3 years ago was a bear but people did it. They cost was much higher than if they would just stick with DV and it's cheap storage needs. Now I sit here and watch the fighting start up all over again between the "pro" and "consumer" formats that actually only have a slight increase in quality change.

While 3 years ago I doubt anybody shooting weddings would use dvcpro-50 and uncompressed editing I also feel perhaps shooting weddings with the HDX-200 might be equally silly. It can be done just not as easily. At least now the gap is slightly smaller than before. In terms of gear the cost difference is much smaller. Now instead of a $20,000 camera compared to a $4,000 camera we get cameras around the same price. Instead of massive storage needs the storage is only 2 or 4 times larger. Finally today almost any computer for $1,000.00 can edit either format with no special hardware card needs.

Nope. It's here now. Google Kinetta.


Almost never have seen them go past 4 cards. I don't call that a lot.


Not even a factor when I'm making 15,000% profit on the cost of tape.

Cheers

Max Allen

I think the Z1 is better than the DVCPRO job because it looks better. Not talking about the codec and all that other useless crap, but the camera itself. And as we all know it's all about how your camera looks than little anal differences about the quality of it's image like 4:2:2, 4:2:1 blahzy blah blah.

Personally, I prefer a black camera to those wimpy silver ones and I am very glad to see that black is back. This will definitely get me more jobs.

Thomas: you make some good points and it sounds like the HVX200 will be an excellent choice for your purposes, but practical considerations will be a significant problem for event work. No doubt some people will manage to use it for that purpose, but that's going to take some doing. As far as price is concerned, it's going to cost at least 3-4X as much to buy an HVX200 with a day's worth of recording capacity as it currently costs to buy a Sony FX1 (see below), so your comparison of $20K cameras to $4K cameras hasn't changed much. The HVX200 is still intriguing for what it offers, but it doesn't present an immediate challenge to HDV in terms of cost and practicality.

Sony FX1: $3500
5 hours worth of tapes: $15-60

Panasonic HVX200: $6000
Three 8GB memory cards: $5100
One 1-hour P2 card downloader and some hard drives for storage: ~$2000
or five hours worth of Firestore-like storage: ~$5,000

Minimum cost to put an FX1 out in the field for a day of event recording: under $3600.

Minimum cost to put an HVX200 out in the field for a day of event recording: $13,000.

Your economics aren't right there. Your math only works for the first five hours of recording.

The cost of recording five hours on an FX1 is the cost of 5 DV/HDV tapes.
The cost of recording five hours on an HVX is the cost of the archiving media.

The cost per hour of footage from the camera depends on how many hours you put on it. If you can make the argument that archiving HVX footage is cheaper than DV tapes, in principle if you shoot enough footage on the HVX, you're video will be cheaper to produce than the FX1. If you don't archive, the cost of using the camera for that day is effectively zero.

The formula should be:
A = cost of camera
B = cost per hour of footage (including maintence, archiving, tapes, and insurance)
C = number of hours shot:

cost/hour = A/C + B

-Steve

I was thinking about that based on what Thomas said, and here's what I came up with:

Let's say your use the HVX200 to record DVCProHD at 100 Mbps, which is 12.5 MB/sec or 45 GB/hour. If you copy that to standard single-layer DVDs at a cost of roughly 50 cents per disc, that's ten discs at a cost of $5 per hour of footage. A little less if you use the cheapest discs and more than twice as much if you use the most expensive ones -- so essentially exactly the same cost as running an HDV camera using miniDV tapes costing anywhere from $3-12 each in bulk. Now factor in the time required to archive an hour's worth of footage to ten DVDs and then retrieve any of it later when you need it for something, and the actual cost of using DVDs skyrockets compared to storing video on one-hour miniDV tapes. But let's say we assume blu-laser DVDs start shipping at a cost of roughly $5 each for approximately 30 GB of storage, so around 16 cents per gigabyte or $7.20 per hour of DVCProHD footage, plus the time required to copy your footage to those discs. Okay, maybe when blu-laser DVDs are down to $1 per disc this will start to make sense, but no matter how you slice it you'll still have to devote more time to managing your media with an HVX200. Given that time is even more precious for most of us than money, it's hard to see how you can come out ahead here with the P2 media format.

Plus we didn't factor in the cost of hiring someone to manage your P2 media downloads while recording with an HVX200, and we don't have any data on how much it will cost per hour for maintenance -- like the cost of replacing one of those $1700 media cards if you lose or break it. Bottom line is that there's just no way the HVX200 is going to compete with the FX1/Z1U in terms of cost-effectiveness or convenience, at least not for several years yet. When I can buy a 45GB SD card for under $10, then we can talk...

Which of course, isn't even an argument for most people. The main argument seems to be that "the HVX will undoubtedly have better quality" - in which case, the DVCPRO-HD footage will be worth inherently more than HDV footage - to the point that some people refuse to pay for HDV footage.

I have yet to be convinced through either mathematics or practical codec testing that the the overall quality of DVCPRO-HD is really that much better than HDV though. I'm quite confident that all other components being equal, that the only way people will be able to differentiate HDV from DVCPRO-HD is with a trained eye for their respective artifacts - with it being a toss-up between which codec's artifacts are more obvious/irritating.

-Steve

I have no quarrel with that and see the HVX200 being a good choice for customers willing to pay the extra cost of using it. But for basic event work it looks like HDV will easily be the more palatable solution, and as you say it should be good enough for most viewers. So we come down to the conclusion that there's room for both HDV and DVCProHD as (respectively) low-cost and medium-cost solutions to the challenge of creating high-definition video. It's nice to have this sort of choice, and we can all pick and choose accordingly.

Oh Dear... Here we go again...
 

I'm having visions of Panasonic camcorders slaughtering any Sony HDV camcorder they come within viewfinder range of...

More conjecture about the demise of something, even before it's successor has been spawned, than at an anarchists' convention!!

So... let's just say that the HVX200 and DVCPRO-HD do 'kill' Sony's (and JVC's by default) HDV MPEG2 products.

What format are you going to mass distribute your material in, and what viewing devices do you expect your material to be viewed on?

May choice never die... and long live democracy!!

For independent productions distributed directly to viewers, I would think that DVCProHD will get compressed to the same WMV and H.264 formats we're talking about using now for HDV footage, with output and playback on standard DVDs or blu-ray discs to consumer HDTVs. So distribution options will be exactly the same no matter what HD/HDV camera you use, and this will reduce (but not eliminate) quality differences between various HD recording formats.

All else being equal, one would hope that a camera which records HD at a bit rate of 100 Mbps will outperform a camera which records HD at 25 Mbps, but how noticeable will this be when compressed to disc and displayed on a mainstream HDTV? My guess is that the difference between HDV and DVCProHD won't be nearly as noticeable upon delivery as the difference between either of those and typical SD footage, so most viewers will be quite happy with output from HDV cameras.

Whatever the quality of the Panasonic when it finally hits the streets it is IMHO unlikely to change the general scene. Two days ago I visited the Production show in Londons Earls Court. Of all the camera kit available there Sony easily outnumbered the others by a ratio of 5:1. If you took out Panasonics own stand then it was easily over 90%. HD Cam was the format that all the hire companies were touting and was dominant amongst the crewing and production companies. There were also large numbers of Z1 HDV's.

I spoke to one of the major UK production companies and he told me "we love the Z1, in certain applications it outdoes Digibeta and if we need more we use the HD Cams". Compatability is everything, unless you are doing your production from start to finish in house you need to be using the same kit everyone else is. The Z1 in the hands of a really good DOP will yield stunning results.

For those in the serious production market the high end 730, 750, 950 will still be the main tools of choice. I respectfully suggest that the Panasonic will be seen as the "cheap" option for those that haven't got the investment, and the corporate videographer. Look at DVC pro and JVC's D9, for all their potential benefits neither of them made any significant inroads to the serious broadcasters.

HDV is perfectly pitched as the HD replacement to DV Cam, a roll it fulfills admirably. At its £3,000 price tag it certainly delivers.

Regards



Roland

The Panasonic camera has 24p but CCD chipset ADC only outputs 720p and 1080i, so it will be 40 Mbps 720p24 960x720 pixel camera, but ADC will not likely put out 1080p, so 1080p will have to derive from 1080i or 720p ADC output, so no true 1080p, just like Sony FX/Z1 has no true 1080/25p, just CF25.

Although camera will record 920x720 pixels in 720p, the chipset ADC most likely output better pixel numbers, like 1280x720 for 720p, which will be interpolated to 1280x1080 for 24-25p or 1440x1080 for 30p. If it will be interpolated from progressive 720p or interlaced 1080i scan is to be seen. In either case no true 1080p.

Radek