Well said.

Rod

I agree, except I personally think its reversed:

You can have a great story without any lighting and people will listen.

You can have great lighting on grass growing and nobody will watch...(unless its on cable)

Don't you HATE that????? lol

That's where guys like me come in. BUY EM ALL and sell the worst ones on eBay *smile*.

But honestly, there is no "war". These cameras are two totally differnt beasts. The P2 workflow is a dream come true and one day all cameras will follow it's footsteps. The H1 is still tape-based. The codecs are totally different as well. The "ONLY" reason these cameras are even being compared to eachother is because of the price. Nothing else. If the HVX200 cost $17,000.00 and P2 cards were $100 bucks each nobody would complain. The HVX would not even be mentioned in the same article as a XL-H1 if that were the case. I personally think thats what Panasonic should have done. Charged ALLOT for the HVX, because I think it's worth it.

- ShannonRawls.com

Barlow, you're refering to uncompressed HD-SDI (SMPTE 292M) output at 1.485 Gbps. I'm very aware of that and not "ignoring" your point at all. The reality though is that the cost of a setup capable of capturing/storing and editing that 8 bit hd-sdi signal is ridiculous, that's my point.

I guess it all depends on what you think is expensive. It certainly isn't run and gun friendly to be tethered, but, in a low-budget production capacity (I'm talking thousands spent on production, with a "video village" of sorts, not the $500 student film) it really isn't ridiculous to try the tethered SDI-to-computer approach. I know I plan to because I want to take advantage of everything the H1 has to offer. And it doesn't bother me in the least to use HDV also. I think it's that good.

DVCPRO HD would make a good SDI acquisition codec with this camera. That's what they used for the Watch maker demo at DVExpo and it looked phenomenal. Max bit rate of 14MBs is more than manageable. Could very well blow the HVX away in the same format.

Barlow is right. Besides, as far as the XL H1 goes, uncompressed HD output over SDI isn't about recording uncompressed. It's about recording whatever HD format that you have a VTR for. It's about recording DVCPRO HD or HDCAM or whatever. Very few people will actually record the uncompressed HD output. They'll record in some HD format other than HD. But why am I talking about this in the P2 forum?

As soon as I get me a rack mountable PC, I will be recording HD-SDI as well. I like the Wafian, but $10,000 bucks is streching it.

Right now (and for the last 9 movies i've made) the camera has been on a leash.
My current leash is:XLR-L send, XLR-R send, Audio Return, Video Return
All wrapped up in a single (and expensive) custom made 75' cable. I have a 75' firewire cable as well just in case I need to use 'HDV Rack' or 'Canon Console', but I rarely depoly that thing. My BNC video return will become the HD-SDI return as soon as I grab a server to put in my Media Station. Then my 'Sound Mixer' will be now called my 'Media Mixer' because he will be rolling SOUND and SERVER. *smile*

But honestly....I may never do this, because the HDV codec seems to be sufficient for the type of stuff I do. HDV has received a serious bad-rap from people who never used it in a practical project. People are just natural born haters it seems.

- ShannonRawls.com

The Wafian runs for $15,000, beta models are running for $10,500. Add that to the cost of the cam, $10,000 and an editing machine, were talking in upwards of $35,000-$40,000. Let's be reasonable now.... I doubt you'd be able to notice the difference in footage between uncompressed out to justify spending an extra $30,000 on top of an already somewhat expensive low end hd camera.

I will know the answers to most this stuff in the next 6 months... looks like I will be doing multiple projects with both the HVX and XLH... and at least one of those will include footage shot by an XLH and recorded over the HD-SDI to a 1200A DVCproHD deck... For the record, the DVCproHD codec is FAR from perfect. I have found that I have to crush the blacks or they get VERY noisy, worse than DV!



ash =o)

Don't bother with a Wafian, just build yourself (or buy) a Cineform Prospect PC and then you have HDSDi and HD component capture, plus an edit suite in one box all for less money.

What components would such computer need? What would be the cost? Is Wafian a small factor PC, with extra dressing? Can you build such small factor PC for a fraction of the cost? I think that Aspect PC, which handles 1440x1080 pixels at 8 bits wold be enough.

Prospect is available from cineform as a turnkey system or you can build to cineforms specs yourself. Aspect is 8 bit, prospect is 10 bit, aspect can't capture direct from HDSDi, prospect can (as well as HD component). I don't know what's in a Wafien box. Prospect could be built into a regular PC case, that could be a rackmount case. The raid array will go in the PC case. Problem with Prospect is it is a PC and as such needs a monitor, keyboard and mouse, Wafien does no. However there is no reason why the PC monitor could also be an on set HD monitor.

Some people have said they think that the HD-SDI out (1920x1080 at 4:2:2) will not be noticeably better than HDV (1440x1080 at 4:2:0). For everyday shooting, I suspect that's basically true, but also suspect it probably ISN'T true for high-end work such as complex compositing intended for professional HD programming. I'm also guessing that since the H1 uses horizontal pixel shift, the detail in the HD-SDI out is higher than the 1440 that HDV can record...maybe even approaching the full 1920 pixels. Would love to have that explicitly tested by rez-chart and real-world images.

So, here's my understanding -- not entirely complete -- of the Cineform solutions at present:

If 1440x1080 HDV is enough, as it is for Petr, then a decent PPro editing box with the $500 Aspect HD software is all you need.

Neither Aspect HD nor Prospect HD Edit can ingest HD-SDI. Prospect HD Ingest into an AJA card (about $5300 for the package) processed on a fast dualie PC (not clear to me right now whether that need only be a dual-core, or must be a dual processor, dual core system) would do the job. So figure around $8-9K. That would be the cat's meow for studio work. For on-location shoots, it is up to you to make the PC setup portable enough for your needs.

According to Cineform, the Wafian incorporates the ingest, conversion to 10-bit Cineform Intermediate, a small LCD screen, and short-term storage in one box about the size of my home AV receiver for $15,000. Then you'd need a Prospect Edit system (PC cost plus $2K for the Prospect software), along with your editing system (PPro is favored) for editing.

Cineform is definitely out in front with their products, but undoubtedly competition will show up on the scene before too long.

I've been doing some research on this HDV capture and unfortunately, software is not the main issue. It's your hardware. HDV takes up sooooo much more space than that of regular DV. For example, (correct me if I'm wrong) but I believe for a dv project that takes up about 300G on your hard drive, if done in HD, takes up close to 5TB. To really work in HD, at a speed faster than that at which grass grows, you have to have something along the lines of a G5 quad with at least 8Gig of Ram AND a conduit connecting it all that's faster than firewire and the like. You are looking at fibre connections, and even that would be preferably dual fibre connections, all connected through a fibre switch. The cable itself is like $100.00 per run. Then once all of that is worked out, then you can get some software.

Now, of course, this is for doing a feature project. I'm sure if you are doing a commercial or something of the like, you can get by with a smaller system.

That's why Waffien is priced as it is. It's all in one unit.

Bryon, maybe you're thinking of UNCOMPRESSED HD, which requires a large multi-drive RAID array of gargantuan storage size. Computing performance for HD is going to depend on the solution chosen, including NLE, but isn't at all out of reach...

HDV files are about the same size, roughly 13GB/hour, as miniDV, and will edit ok but a bit slowly on my 3.0GHz P4 using PPro 1.5.1...can't be too specific about that because I've only done a brief checkout of that mode just to see that it works.

I recently added Cineform Aspect HD on my current system, so also can't give a completely detailed report about performance under various stresses to the system, but the timeline on that same system seems to work just as smoothly as with miniDV projects (For $500 the retail version of Aspect gives you substantial acceleration and an updated codec as compared to Cineform's technology that is licensed in PPro 1.51.). HDV footage converted to Cineform Intermediate files is only about 40-50GB/hour (depending on whether they are 8-bit Aspect, or 10-bit Prospect), which ain't bad for a codec that is touted as being "visually lossless." It is a really practical alternative to true uncompressed output and the huge storage demands it makes. Once editing is done and you're ready to archive, you can choose to export to either a larger but very pretty Cineform AVI file or an HDV file with the same storage requirements as miniDV.

HDV is not out of reach at all for anyone who already has a decent editing box.