I shamefully have to put my hands up to this, I know , I know.

I did (a while back) record TV programs from DVB-T on my PC, via a DVB-T PCI card, and record the direct stream off the air and then do some funnky stuff and burn playable DVD's without any format conversions !!! i.e this was complete lossless recording no transcoding. But in the end it was too much hassle (audio sync, bad frames, list goes on).

I guess bad habits die hard.

Anhar

There's been a hot & heavy discussion about the HVX-200 vs HDV at the NYCFCPUG (Final Cut Pro) users group list. One (only one) well known person in FCP circles believes HDV will expand and make tapeless DVCProHD a very tiny niche, with no great client demand. That said, I'd thought I'd breakout the niches. Some have already been mentioned on this list.

Wedding/Events
Corporate - Training, marketing, VNR
Coporate - Conference
Feature Movie
Feature Documentary
Performance Entertainment
Broadcast/Cable - series
Local/Regional spots
ENG (ING?)

Currently the only high demand for HD production is in niches that need to future proof their content (Broadcast/Cable series, Feature Movie, Feature Documentary). In that group I see only Feature Documentary benefiting by HDV over tapeless DVCProHD due to long records and possible remote locations. The others all allow time to "offload" and/or have short record times and would benefit by DVCProHD (and 4:2:2 for compositing work!). It's also possible that certain "Reality TV" formats need the long record times of HDV.

Wedding/Events and Corporate Conference require long record times but I don't see much demand to HD content for some time. They'll probably benefit by HDV over tapeless DVCProHD.

Corporate training, marketing, VNRs all involve short record offload time. Training and marketing can by FX intensive at times and benefit by 4:2:2 for compositing. HDV is 4:2:0, add the heavy MPEG2 compression and the artifacts on fast motion and HDV can have a "painful" FX workflow. When the "corporate" folks present to their clients in board/conference rooms with HDTV, there will be a market for HD in this area. HD VNRs will be useful when news heads in that direction.

Performance Entertainment - record times for a typical concert/band, play, dance preformance might be anywhere from 45 minutes (or less) to around 3 hours. If the Firestore can hit 100 minutes it might cover many of these situations. I'd love to see how the HVX-200 performs in bad dark club lighting (etc.). HD demand will grow with consumer demand.

Local/Regional spots - Tapeless DVCProHD makes much more sense than HDV with short records and offload time as well as 4:2:2. The demand will grow for HD over time. I shot a :30 sports commercial last year on DVCAM and later used on ESPN and in the local Regal Cinema chain. HD would have been appreciated for both those targets.

ENG - stand ups and b-roll are short. A few situtations might warrent long record times but the looped prerecord of tapeless can help one catch the "moment" without running tape nonstop. It'll move to HD as news does. Tapeless workflow is much better than an HDV workflow.

Wedding/Event market is big here so I'll make some additional comments about HDV vs DV. Most of this work is Flat Fee. HDV downconvert or render for output adds time to your workflow. Long GOP structure (whether 6 or 15) can make a dropout a nightmare compared to DV. Without going to an expensive card, there's no way to accurately color correct HDV (downconvert on input?) without a means to send it to a monitor. Unless a customer is willing to PAY MORE for your shooting HDV, you're actually hurting your income by a longer and riskier workflow. Better to shoot in 16x9 DV (which the various HDV cams and the HVX-200 do . . . to DV tape). That 16x9 will still look decent on the customer's HDTV (if they have one) and you can deliver on standard DVD.

Darn! That was a good one Barry.... Wish I had thought of that line.

How true it is..................

I love it when Barry and Michael come in and put my ideas in more intellectual terms. Thanks guys.

Dead?
 

Like Zorrilla wrote in Don Juan Tenorio «los muertos que vos matáis, gozan de buena salud» (the dead that you kill enjoy very good health)

I wouldnt kill tape, at least not just yet. And for P2.... I dont know....XDCam seams, at least for a good number of years to come as a MUCH better option.

TV stations, production companies, etc,etc,etc. all over the world have a lot of money invested in tape machines, not to mention millions of dollars in libraries.

2 key words here : Distribution and Archive.

In a P2 enviroment you will have to dedicate an entire department of your company just to Archive footage.... think about it.

This is one of the biggest myths about P2 (or any disk-based image capture). Archiving is an issue no matter if you shoot film, tape, disk, paint whatever.

When you shoot tape, you have to spend time, money and labor to capture that footage. Film is much more labor and cost intensive. Tape maybe cheap to pop into a camera, but it ain't cheap to capture and have non-linear access to it. Disk based solutions skip a big expensive step.

Now, archiving...

Anyone who "archives" footage just by only storing one copy of the original camera tape is not "archiving". They are merely hoping nothing happens to the original tape. Anyone shooting tape that wants to actually archive should capture all needed footage and archive in native format to disk, optical or tape copy and store off-site and/or a second location. That's archiving. Keeping camera tapes is good, but truly archiving off-site, that's priceless.

And, periodically as formats change and media degrades, that archive must be refreshed & updated if needed to be kept over time.

P2 (or direct to disk) actually speeds up the process. The only real flaw I see is that shooters may eliminate takes that seem "bad" on set trying to save P2/disk space only to miss them in the editing room. But as P2 and other storage formats come down in price and get bigger, this should go away.

I plan to dump all P2 takes off to laptops (I take laptops to every set now as I try to capture 90% of my shots straight to disk now anyway - such a timesaver). Then I will archive that to VXA2 tape now (as I do my miniDV camera originals) and store off-site.

When = IF ?
 

Another big problem I see is that everybody seams to have a crystal ball that sees the future around here. Everybody talks about WHEN P2 cards will come in a gazillion terrabytes and WHEN P2 cards will be as cheap as VHS tapes.
And some can even predict how many years all this will take.

Well, were most of you see "WHENS" I see "IFS". As in "IF P2 capacity increases to usable amounts" and "IF the prices really drop". And all this will happen if another very big IF clause is acomplished :

IF XDCam, HDDs or any other bigger and cheaper format dont end up sending P2 to share a cloud with BETAMAX in the geat haeven of the superior formats that never made it.

Well, the thing about P2 capacity is that it's based on existing high-quantity SD cards. As SD card capacity grows, P2 card capacity grows. They go hand-in-hand. When 2gb SD cards are on the market, 8gb P2 cards will exist (any day now). When 4gb SD cards are on the market, 16gb P2 cards will exist (estimated 4/2006 introduction).

P2 cards are slated to grow to 128gb, and originally that was supposed to happen by 2009. The fun part of the equation is that Samsung just announced a breakthrough in NAND technology, which means they can start producing 32gb SD cards as early as the middle of next year! So it's possible the 128gb P2 card could be manufacturable as early as one year from now. I'm sure it'll be horrifically expensive at first, but -- 128gb gives you five hours of 720/24p recording. Two cards in the camera and you're talking about 10 hours of continuous recording.

It's not a matter of "if", it's a matter of when. P2's about more than just the HVX as well; there's also the SPX800 and SPC700 cameras that use P2, and the forthcoming VariCam II will be P2-based. Prices will continue to plummet, and capacities will continue to grow.

XDCAM is sort of a halfway step. It's still basically linear, although you can jump from clip to clip, but you can't delete clips, etc. But you couldn't edit off of an XDCAM disk, it's way too slow. You also still have to buy a deck, you still have to ingest the footage in basically a real-time capture situation. And it's very limited in transfer rate: I think it currently is limited to 36mbps, and the fastest they've talked about that I know of is someday doubling it to 72mbps. P2 cards are about 18x faster than XDCAM. You could edit six streams of 100mbps DVCPRO-HD in real-time straight from the card.

So while XDCAM-HD and P2 are both tapeless recording formats, they're not the same at all. And then there's price too; the cheapest XDCAM-HD system will be around $25,000 vs. around $7,000 for an HVX+4gb P2 card. There's probably room for both systems.

P2 pricing
 

For prices to plummet there has to be a HUGE demand for a product. My question is, were is this needed massive demand for this outageusly expensive product going to come from?

As of today the installed base of P2 based systems is VERY VERY low.

Look, I love the idea of the HVX and Ive always waited for the day of solid state to come..... but I simply dont see it as clear as you guys do. I simply dont think this is the way to go, at least not now, not in a decade or so.

From SD cards. There are something like 700 companies making products that use SD cards. Digital cameras and now video cameras and all sorts of things use SD cards. The mass market adoption drives down the prices of SD cards. The P2 card literally uses four SD cards in its construction. As SD card prices fall, P2 card prices fall.

The "way" to go, will be in about 30 days from now, not 10 years. Heh heh.

Craig - for right now I kind of agree with you, it seems the P2 card is an intermediate solution. (as do HDV & DVCProHD too)

But it haralds in Direct to Digitized/un(or less)coompressed
I think that this will spill into larger sections of Broadcast/Cable series, Feature Movie, Feature Documentary
as P2 cards (or Firestore solutions) become larger and cheaper.
If for nothing else but simply the fact that you have everything digitized and ready to work with

For right now I plan on recording directly into my laptop
and getting two P2 cards, always downloading one while I shooting on the other. Not ideal, but workable and seamless
Until the Firestore gets here in 3 months and then I will have longer range of constant recording
(Firstore/P2 cards while it downloads/Firestore)
but, again I think you are right all this is pointing somewhere else
(maybe it always will)
I should get up on the NYC FCP users group

Offer and Demand.
 

Yes, and Panasonic makes thousands, probably hundreds of thousands of video cameras a year, does that mean that the Varicams will soon be as cheap as a Palmcorder? No. The Varicam is a high end product and Panasonic only produces a handfull a year. Or Intel, they make millions of chips a year, I can get a Celeron for $80, but if I want the lattest top of the line juiced up CPU Ill have to pay over 10 times that.

So great demand at the lower and mid level of a product dont translate automaticaly to lower prices in the high end.

My theory is that prices WILL come down, but I dont see them coming down so much to make it an option for a lot of us, nor I see them coming down as soon as many are willing to bet on.

Oh the price for P2 will come down, it's just a question of when.

I see these same discussions with every new technology that comes out such as DVD. Now look at DVD.

I realize P2 is not a consumer format, but please remember that SD memory is.
The demand for larger memory formats are there and have been from the start.

Agreed. It's Panasonic's best interests that prices come down. It's in customer's best interests that prices come down. The cheaper P2, the more card Panny sells, the more cameras Panny sells, the more high capacity P2 cards are made.

Unless there is some fundamental tech reason and/or P2 cameras are made that people don't want, there appears to be little chance that P2 prices won't continually fall and fall at a decent clip.

Actually the demand for SD chips are already fairly high. At a seminar put on by Panasonic at the Cine Equipment Show in NYC, they said the real price issue is in the Quality Control. Only about 2% of the SD chips are of the quality needed for P2 use. As the Quality of the yields improve, the prices of the P2 will drop closer to that of SD cards.

Well....this might help
 

http://news.com.com/Small+gadgets+to...?tag=nefd.lede

Still....Im not sure about the high end part of the market going down to much.