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Panasonic P2 quirks
Hello,
Like many people, I was eagerly awaiting the HVX200. Before its arrival, I created a movie project that made use of a large cast in one room and rented two HVX200 cameras to do the job.
During pre-production, I had my DP and his AC take field trips to the rental house so they could acquainted with the HVX200 camera and P2 store workflow.
Once on set, the reality of using the P2 cards and the time to recycle P2 cards became one challenge of many to come. They get used up too fast on a feature film. The P2 store doesn’t transfer media fast enough to keep up, either.
To make matters more complicated, the P2 store didn’t like my Power Mac or my iBook. We sent people to Fry’s to buy an upgrade for OSX and downloaded updates of Quicktime to try and fix things.
Still, we suffered problem after problem with things such as reading files, losing files, corrupt files, etc.
To combat these glitches, many of my crew got involved and tried helping by calling editor buddies and other DP’s. Yet, the result was still sketchy as far as being reliable and our confidence in the system wore thin. We wanted to switch to MiniDV mode for safety.
When a rental house rep showed up to our set (two days after my original distress call), even his team didn’t have a silver bullet to fix the problems. We were literally dealing with these tech issues and losing hours and hours of valuable filming time as 20 actors were standing by ready to work.
After three days of trying to make a movie under these circumstances, we had to cease production and send people home in order to stop the bleeding. As you can imagine, we took a serious financial hit over this.
I hope Panasonic and Apple act quickly to improve this before other filmmakers suffer this fate. If the system is this quirky, the rental house should hand out a “must have” list of software and hardware components with each rental.
The making of the movie isn’t supposed to be scarier than the movie.
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22 Replies
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Sorry to hear your tale. This is one of the reasons why I think people have underestimated how many P2 cards they would need to handle a normal workflow. Considering you were doing a feature which usually has shorter scenes and set up time in between your production is an example why much larger capacity P2 cards are needed. Of course there are several other ways of recording the siganls from the HVX-200 and you probably should have learned them. Recording to a computer and recording to the now released Firestore sound like options you desperately needed.
Daniel Epstein
Gold Teleproductions, Inc
New York, NY
http://www.goldtele.com -
Daniel,
We had two cameras, six P2 cards and one P2 store. Even shooting with the delays and the company giving us four more 4GB cards, the cards and the P2 couldn’t keep up. The P2 transfer times were killing us and the P2 store transfer times killed us, too.
To do the next take was like waiting for somebody to go to 7-11 and back. Everybody’s standing around and we kept losing momentum.
Michael
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javamikey,
I’m sorry about your experience, and I’m curious what your workflow was.
Hope you don’t take this personally and I may be wrong, but it sounds like your tech staff didn’t do their homework before starting this shoot.When I bought this camera a few months ago it was clear that this is not a go to the rental house and walk out with the gear kind of workflow.
It’s an accident waiting to happen. I’ve been waiting for stoires like this.
Just saw one yesterday about someone who lost everything when a hard disk crashed – well it seems he didn’t have a back-up … duh.The HVX workflow needs to be very well understood and well tested by whoever is using it before the pressure of production.
Its best to work with an owner op who knows the camera and computer interface well.
You shouldn’t have had any surprises about download times etc.
I’m not familiar with the P2 store , but i know that even just with a laptop with a PCMCIA slot and 2-3 cards you should be able to keep up with a dramatic feature, though I guess it depends on how fast you are shooting. 4- 6 cards ought to be workable.How much time did your crew have with the gear before you started?
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If you waited until the P2 store was full and then discovered that your computer did not like it……??
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Michael,
Interesting set of problems. I am not sure how it would take so long to transfer the cards, longest I have seen is about 1 minute a GB, so with 6 cards, I am curious why it would takes so long. If you were first transferring to the P2 store, it is about a minute and a half per gig with verify.
The fact that the Powerbook didn’t like the P2 or was it the P2 store is also interesting, perhaps the P2 Store wasn’t set right or the P2 driver for the PCMCIA slot was not installed. Because overall, there are folks that are indeed working very successfully in documentary as well as dramatic film production on a MAC as we speak.
From here it sounds as though the crew was not well prepped for the experience. Akin to taking a bunch of noobs out on a film production and appointing one of them on site to be the film loader. It does take preparation and a knowedge level to be successful, but if your crew can take the time, I am sure that you will not lose your shirt.
Feel free to contact me off list with the name of your rental house, I would be happy to call them and walk them through the process of what they should do to prep/help their customers. crittendenj at us.panasonic.com.
Best,
Jan
Jan Crittenden Livingston
Product Manager, DVCPRO, DVCPRO50, AG-DVX100
Panasonic Broadcast & TV Systems -
Michael,
Assuming that all the P2 cards were 4 GB you were still way under what I estimated would be necessary to be comfortable for just about any shoot I could think of doing. Depending on the frame rate you shot you could have been looking at only 20 minutes per camera before you needed to recycle. Even with the added P2 cards. Of course all this is hindsight for you and your crew now.
When I would proposed this issue to various people who were promoting the P2 workflow they often would dismiss my concerns or compare it to changing magazines on a film camera. This is why I think P2 is a lot more expensive a solution than people are comprehending. Changing film magazines doesn’t mean you have to erase your original to keep recording new images. As an example most people shoot film with at least 3 or 4 magazines per camera so they actually have more time to replace the film in the mags than you did with the P2.
Many times during productions I design in redundancy so I can timeshift tasks in order to keep the production going. One P2 Store per camera would have been the first thing I see being added to your list. Each camera pretty much needed the capability to record half a day before recycling any P2 cards. Not seeing your script and knowing the way you wanted to work then the people who added up the time it would take to transfer footage and to recycle the P2 didn’t arrive at the correct number for your shoot.
Unfortunately there doesn’t seem to have been a way to rescue you from this. If it was film or video tape you could throw more money at the problem. P2 cartridges are in short supply so you probably couldn’t have gotten enough delivered to handle your problem in time.Daniel Epstein
Gold Teleproductions, Inc
New York, NY
http://www.goldtele.com -
Jan,
I love Panasonic and shot my last movie using the SDX900. Great camera and I was going to use that one again except for a bunch of DVD companies who wished that I had shot on HD.
This time around, I did go the HD route.
As far as getting a hold of you off list, what’s the best way to reach you? I spent one morning calling Panasonic for help (New Jersey and in Los Angeles) but didn’t get to the right people.
At this point, I have media files in 3 different computers and this is a total mess.
If you can do anything to help get our movie back on track (files found, opened, and sitting on one drive), I would be VERY, VERY, VERY appreciative.
Sincerely,
Michael
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My DP and AC visited the rental facility several times so they would know the system inside and out. The DP had a choice of cameras and this was the one he really wanted to work with.
However, the glitch came when the P2 cards were full and we struggled to get them back in use. Interfacing the P2 store with the available computers was a nightmare.
Somebody earlier today wondered why we didn’t use the PCMCIA slot instead of the P2 card. Unfortunately, my iBook or my Power Mac doesn’t have a PC slot. I looked online today for a PC slot that I could install into my Power Mac but haven’t found one yet. Anybody got any ideas?
Michael
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Seems like the camera may have been well researched but not the P2 and computer workflow, but that’s the really tricky part that needs to be well vetted before production.
Nothing like hard knocks. -
You got that right. We love the camera itself. But the P2 cards and the P2 store – combined with trying to interface it with our computers – was and still is a nightmare for us.
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