27H Varicam to firewire out

[John Sharaf]

Dusty,

I went to a Sony event last night at the Motion Picture Academy in Hollywood entitles “HDCAM-SR 2.0” where they showed their own solid state media; about the same size as P2 card but planned to be 1 Terabyte! Also capable of writing 4K 444 at 60p with 4:1 compression.

But you’re write about archiving; this part of the equation needs to be figured out before the ultimate benefit and acceptability of data based video will be universally accepted. The benefits of ingest at high speed, up to 12x real time I recall from last nights presentation (3 or 5 Gb/ second?) and transport full quality media at these speeds now becomes the new “Holy Grail”.

Stay tuned and fasten your seat belts!

JS

[Dusty Powers]

Hey John:

My seatbelt is fastened and I try my best to keep it wrapped tight over my wallet these days. I love today’s technology as much as you do, but man it’s expensive.

Since I started Freelancing 30 years ago I’ve bought 10 cameras. I don’t run a so called public rental business, it’s an owner/operator business. One camera every three years. That’s a chunk of change. These are large expensive cameras. Not small cameras. I’ve bought many of those as well. 8s, Hi-8s, Lipsticks,999s,PDs,P2s and EXs. Maybe 15 or 20 in total? I can’t remember. Oh, don’t forget about the VTRs that the soundguy had to lug around, 3/4 and early beta. Then we had to buy the betas to mount on the cameras so we had to buy the camera to mount the beta. A lot of money spent on camera systems in the past. It’s the price of trying to keep up with technology and what the clients want.

I’m still traveling around with multiple formats because my client all want something different because they all have a different workflow process. I don’t see this changing until the digital workflow is improved. Right now it’s up to the cameraman to provide the necessary format to the client. The digital image we provide right now can be mixed, color corrected and made to match almost any other camera on the market.

I think we need a simple standard archive system on our client’s end which can work with in conjunction with all the camera media and NL edit systems.

My standard line has been, “It’s not the format that counts, it’s what you do with the format”. The Client’s line is, “It’s the format that counts and what you do with it”. We need to find a way to get around this. It’s getting close, but it’s not there yet. Best!

dusty powers
http://www.hdcrew.net