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2GB Memory Stick: Zero to 80Mbps
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I think if Panny had the opportunity to put out these cards much cheaper they would. This camera could conceivably “bury” most HDV cameras if the media was cheaper.
Steve Connor
Cardinal HD -
[Steve Connor] “I think if Panny had the opportunity to put out these cards much cheaper they would. This camera could conceivably “bury” most HDV cameras if the media was cheaper.”
And therein lies the irony in this whole argument. It is a free market economy. If Panasonic is charging $2,000 for something that could conceivably be built by some entrepreneur for $1000 (or $500 or $200 or whatever)… don’t you think they will? I know I’ve entertained trying to contract with someone to build cheaper options. I know of two independent efforts to develop a P2 alternative.
If a recording system can be built and sold less expensively, it will be. If it cannot be done so, then it won’t be.
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Brian,
[Brian SaenzDeViteri] “you could dump all the media onto a regular external hard drive, but that will require copying files after a shoot, maybe not as quick as your clients want it?”
Neither the formal Pana solution or the informal roll your own solution are nearly fast enough for a very high percentage of my clients. I’m actually encouraged that, other than the fact that Jan is in the middle of a show right now, she did not respond to this probe. Perhaps my need is being met but it’s far too sensitive for her to even wink at. (g)
Ron Shook
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Ron Shook:I just don’t see how the P2 technology fits into this now, or in any foreseeable near term unless you Pana folk have something coming that we don’t know about.
Hi Ron,
First, you are right, I am busy, very busy, I am in the middle of a bunch of shows. Just check the time of this post to get an idea of when I found the time to respond. Second, Panasonic is not in the Data Storage business, other than a SAIT drive set that is aimed more for the small broadcaster and not every day Jane or Joe producer. But there are plenty of manufacturers that will stand in line for the business.>80% of the production work that I do is for outside producers coming in, overseeing the shoot, grabbing the cheap tapes of whatever format and running for the airport or post house or Sattelite uplink, while we are packing up to leave.
If you want to adopt this camera, you must first learn how to embrace IT and the cost savings that it offers over tape, and here we are not talking little DV tapes, we are talking DVCPRO HD tapes, as that is what this camera records. You put it up against DV tapes and it doesn’t make sense. We are talking VariCam DVCPRO HD here, designed from the ground up to be a high end HD solution.
>I can’t give them $2k memory cards or hard drive units, or even $200 memory cards which despite the best of intentions I’ll never get back.
And I would not expect you to. You need to think of other alternatives.
>I suspect that it’s going to be a very long, long time before memory card technology will allow for that, so we need some quick, easy, transportable, cheap way to get from P2 cards or hard drive recorders to media that’s disposable and overnite shipable. Have you-all got anything like a P2 and/or hard-drive to Optical portable, DC unit in the pipeline that would meet such a need?
Frankly a quick look around the industry shows that there are plenty of Hard drives available for storage. It isn’t like we don’t know how much storage is required. In HD it is about 1 minute a gig. Hard drives have become down right cheap. Now I am not saying that this works in all cases but frankly some derivation might work in many. Most of the shoots that I have been on have some form of electricity, and therefore a transfer station can be set up. What is handed to the client at the end of the day is the data in a drive, and a back up drive. The back up drive could be a DLT which is cheaper yet, but there is security in having back ups. So unlike many productions that then make copies of the tapes before they start their post work, the clone is made before it even leaves the set.
So is that different from a tape based reality. Yep. Will it take a bit of selling to make it go, probably, but is the benefit there? Yes, and most producers that I talk to see this benefit as they have all have stupid things done to their tapes in the dub process, or have had problems in the digitizing stages of the post process. With this workflow, they move from the production arena to the post in one fell swoop and start making creative decisions.
>Like a lot of folks posting here, I’d very much like to consider this camera over the comparable HDV offerings from others, but without a way to move the files quickly to cheap media of whatever sort, it doesn’t make sense.
Drives are cheap and the data does move quickly, in most cases 4X real time, and the capability for faster is bred into the P2 card, we are waiting for the rest of the channel to open up to 640Mbps.
>This is a problem not only for production that demands fast, inexpensive transportability but for longer term archiving as well.
On a Dell DLT, cost of the machine is $2250 or so, the 200GB tape is about $50. This will hold 200 minutes. Compare that with a 30 minute DVCPRO tape at $30 each, obviously this is just the begininngs of savings for an archive. A hard drive to do the initial transfer to is more expensive but if you average the cost of the 250 gig drive with the cost of the DLT it actually will come out about the same as DVCPRO tape. The producer is now able to save a day because they do not have to dub tapes and save the money they would have spent there, and they are able to just attach the HDD to the computer system and start the post process, be that on an Apple, Avid, or Canopus, and soon Matrox. They can start making creative decisions. Yes, review the footage but that is what I mean by making creative decisions, they don’t have to think of the batch capturing process as this arduous process that can become tedious at best, especially if there are problems in the time code. They can select the takes they like, immediately and move them to the time line.
Keep in mind that the producer doesn’t get paid till he invoices his client and the sooner they can do that the better. IT moves the process though much faster and it is even more significant on long form than it is on short form.
>At this price point it must be designed to be, to suck up market share, promote a better technology, and justify that better technology at higher price points. If part of the workflow makes that technology worthless to too many folks, then the HVX200 isn’t doing its job, no matter how good it is.
The whole deal is that if people approach the HVX and want to maintain a Tape like workflow, it isn’t going to work. New workflow needs to be embraced if this is going to work, if trying an IT based workflow does not appeal to you then you probably won’t be able to benefit from the feature set this camera has to offer. But if you do then the benefits of the camera are many.
>I realize as a company rep you can’t divulge proprietary information, but if you-all have something on the drawing boards, for at least previewing at NAB that speaks to the concerns expressed here, a “maybe” and a wink might be in order. (g)
For Hard drives take a look at the Western Digital, the Lacie, and frankly many others out there. For Archival and back up, check out DELL, Quantum, Exabyte, In-Phase Technologies. Of course there is the Blue-ray product coming that will handle short form work.
>BTW, I have been experiencing your participation on various newsgroups and forums for years and you do your company a great service. I doubt whether a little course language is about to put you off too long from the rough and tumble and enervation of these forums, so please keep comin’ ’round.
No, coarse language won’t keep me away, but it does give me a picture of the sender and in general I won’t respond to another post written by that person as I don’t care for that sort of discourse. The whole problem with the internet is that many folks feel that rudeness and crudeness is an acceptable form of communication when no one knows who you are. It does take more effort to say something civilly than crudely, and the folks that aren’t willing to make that effort, well, I don’t have time for.
Anyhow off to the IFP Market.
Best regards,
Jan
Jan Crittenden Livingston
Product Manager, DVCPRO, DVCPRO50, AG-DVX100
Panasonic Broadcast & TV Systems -
Jan,
You don’t believe in “yes” or “no” or “maybe,” do you? (g)
[Jan Crittenden Livingston] “If you want to adopt this camera, you must first learn how to embrace IT”
You’re preachin’ to the choir, here. I hope that those not in the choir study through this succinct mini tutorial on IT from the Panasonic perspective.
[Jan Crittenden Livingston] “>I can’t give them $2k memory cards or hard drive units, or even $200 memory cards which despite the best of intentions I’ll never get back.
And I would not expect you to. You need to think of other alternatives.
>I suspect that it’s going to be a very long, long time before memory card technology will allow for that…
Frankly a quick look around the industry shows that there are plenty of Hard drives available for storage. It isn’t like we don’t know how much storage is required. In HD it is about 1 minute a gig. Hard drives have become down right cheap. Now I am not saying that this works in all cases but frankly some derivation might work in many. Most of the shoots that I have been on have some form of electricity, and therefore a transfer station can be set up. What is handed to the client at the end of the day is the data in a drive, and a back up drive. The back up drive could be a DLT which is cheaper yet, but there is security in having back ups.”
Hard drives or DLT can be made to work and work well as long as the production/post-production chain is in one pocket, but none of these alternatives are broad based enough in the industry to work when the chain is in multiple pockets, and I don’t see Panasonic addressing this aggressively…Yet. More about this later.
[Jan Crittenden Livingston] “Drives are cheap and the data does move quickly, in most cases 4X real time,”
Sure, hard drives are cheap, and I could, relatively inexpensively, jury rig something together for myself to back up P2 cards on location, I guess (I’m none too sure about reading these cards and what it takes?) But… that doesn’t help me in my quandary about how to service clients that need to walk away with easily transportable media. DLT might be fine for my longer term archiving, but to ask a client to invest over $2k in linear media handling in this day and age is impossible.
Where is the value to my problem in the AJ-PCS060G Portable DVCPRO
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[Ron Shook] “Sure, hard drives are cheap, and I could, relatively inexpensively, jury rig something together for myself to back up P2 cards on location, I guess (I’m none too sure about reading these cards and what it takes?)
No need to jury-rig anything. The camera has a USB2 port on it. You can plug an external hard disk right into the camera and have the camera dub the contents of the P2 cards right onto the hard disk, at faster-than-realtime speeds.
But… that doesn’t help me in my quandary about how to service clients that need to walk away with easily transportable media.
Sure it does. Ask your client this — which would they rather receive at the end of the day — a box of tapes that they’ll have to then sort through, log, and digitize (assuming they have the right kind of deck, otherwise they may have to go and rent a deck)… or… hand them an off-the-shelf external hard disk that already has all the clips on it, ready to edit?
That’s the no-brainer of the decade. They’ll take the hard drive in an instant, and slash their postproduction time and costs dramatically. No logging, no digitizing, no deck rental, just immediate editing.
And the hard disk solution is going to be a lot cheaper than tape would have been as well. Hard disks are already cheaper than DVCPRO-HD tape, per gigabyte, and prices will likely fall even further by the time the camera is available.
Where is the value to my problem in the AJ-PCS060G Portable DVCPRO
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[Barry Green] “No need to jury-rig anything. The camera has a USB2 port on it. You can plug an external hard disk right into the camera and have the camera dub the contents of the P2 cards right onto the hard disk, at faster-than-realtime speeds”
If I understand you correctly, this means that I can shoot on the P2 cards until they are full, plug an external hard drive (Firewire/USB 2.0 combo such as Maxtor, Lacie, etc) into the camera via it’s USB 2.0 port and download the P2 content to the hard drives without the use of a laptop or other device?
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[Brian SaenzDeViteri] “this means that I can shoot on the P2 cards until they are full, plug an external hard drive (Firewire/USB 2.0 combo such as Maxtor, Lacie, etc) into the camera via it’s USB 2.0 port and download the P2 content to the hard drives without the use of a laptop or other device?”
Correct.
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Get the most from your DVX camera. The DVX Book and DVX DVD are now available at https://www.dvxuser.com/articles/dvxbook/ and at Amazon (https://tinyurl.com/54u4a) -
Barry,
[Barry Green] “No need to jury-rig anything. The camera has a USB2 port on it. You can plug an external hard disk right into the camera and have the camera dub the contents of the P2 cards right onto the hard disk, at faster-than-realtime speeds.”
You must have some very specialized productions that’ll allow you to shoot for 8 or 16 minutes and then stand around for a nearly like amount of time while you use the camera to purge the cards for the next few minutes of shooting? Because what you say is possible doesn’t mean that it’s usable in the real world, not even if the cards were 32 or 64 gig. 90 percent of production would demand an external station to off load 1 card while the other is recording, whether this station is jury-rigged or not.
[Barry Green] “Sure it does. Ask your client this — which would they rather receive at the end of the day — a box of tapes that they’ll have to then sort through, log, and digitize (assuming they have the right kind of deck, otherwise they may have to go and rent a deck)… or… hand them an off-the-shelf external hard disk that already has all the clips on it, ready to edit?
That’s the no-brainer of the decade. They’ll take the hard drive in an instant, and slash their postproduction time and costs dramatically. No logging, no digitizing, no deck rental, just immediate editing.”
Sounds great on the surface, enough to intrigue me. When I add up the costs, I’m less intrigued. It means having an AC power source near to the production, an extra crew member, who can’t be a dumb mule, to do the dump to disk and slep cards back and forth, and a second dump to backup disk, because there are just too many things that can go wrong in this scenario, and I wouldn’t want to depend on just one hard disk copy of the cards. I’m a PC guy, so I don’t know this for certain, but wouldn’t you need to have 2 dumping stations and operating systems to service both FCP and PC clients? Kinda starting to sound more like a nightmare than a no-brainer as far as the production workflow is concerned.
Dang!
Ron Shook
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[Ron Shook] “You must have some very specialized productions that’ll allow you to shoot for 8 or 16 minutes and then stand around for a nearly like amount of time while you use the camera to purge the cards for the next few minutes of shooting?
TV commercials, corporate films, training videos and independent films, mainly. Scripted stuff. I wouldn’t call that “specialized”, I’d call it common. But I don’t do live-event shooting. And yes, in scripted shooting you spend a lot more time in lighting, dressing, blocking, rehearsing, etc than you do shooting. You set up for half an hour, you shoot two to five minutes worth of footage, and then you move on to the next setup. There’s easily enough time between half-hour setups to offload cards if that’s what you need to do. Five minutes of footage would be offloaded in two or three minutes max.
And that’s not the only way to do it either. You could just as easily use a laptop computer and a bus-powered USB2 drive, and use the laptop to offload it (which means the camera would never be “out of play,” since the cards are hot-swappable). It’s not hard, and if it’s important to you, you’ll easily find a way to accomodate it. Unless you’re talking about shooting a football game or something like that — in a situation like that, the P2 workflow may not make sense. But if you absolutely had to do it in a longform situation like that, the belt-mounted P2 Store would accomodate you. The FireStore would probably be a better choice, but the P2 Store is there for those who need it.
90 percent of production would demand an external station to off load 1 card while the other is recording, whether this station is jury-rigged or not.”
90 percent? That’s a pretty high statistic. Are you including things like weddings in that? I’ve been doing this for a while, and other than some all-day convention shoots, I don’t think I’ve been involved in many (any?) productions that couldn’t be adapted to the P2 workflow.
Obviously it won’t work for some uses. But then, for those uses, there’s always the FireStore option. And dubbing a FireStore over to a cheap external hard drive (that could be handed to a client) will be infinitely faster than digitizing tapes. Might take a little time at the end of the day, but so does breaking down gear and loading the truck and all that other stuff. Start the transfer before you start the end-of-day wrap; the Firestore would be transferred long before the set is fully wrapped.
And besides, what’s the alternative? HDV? What do you do if you go out and shoot a day’s worth of HDV tapes and hand those over to a client, only to discover that they can’t use ’em? As in, you shoot on your JVC HD100, and the client has a Sony deck — oops. Can’t use it. Or you shoot on your Canon XL H1, and the client only has a JVC deck — oops. Won’t work. Those tapes are useless to the client at that point (unless you expect them to buy/rent other equipment just to view your footage, or you expect to have dual gear so you can satisfy both modes of HDV, having to choose your format based on what the client uses).
By comparison, a FAT32 hard disk could be read on any Mac or PC… seems like the safer, more universal format. Not to mention the enormous workflow benefits of having instant random access to all the footage (without dropouts, too) vs. having a box of tapes that all need to be scanned, logged, and digitized, which will take time and equipment…
[Ron Shook] “It means having an AC power source near to the production
Maybe, maybe not. For all we know, perhaps the HVX can bus-power a USB2 hard disk. But even if not, it’s a rare production where we don’t have access to AC. If you’re talking about making a documentary backpacking through the Himalayas, then AC would be a problem, sure — and P2 would probably not be the right solution for something like that. But I sincerely doubt that the proverbial “backpacking through the Himalayas documentary” accounts for 90% of the production going on out there! And if those are the type of circumstances you find yourself in — well, there’s always the battery-powered P2 Store device for those (relatively rare) circumstances.an extra crew member, who can’t be a dumb mule, to do the dump to disk and slep cards back and forth
Well, again, maybe, maybe not. This role is already a common role in film shoots, it’s the role of 2nd camera assistant (who, on film, loads and unloads film magazines; loading/unloading P2 cards is directly comparable). But — seriously, it’s hardly a full-time position! In dramatic narrative production we rarely ever shoot more than an hour’s footage over the course of a full day. Rarely ever. With an hour of footage, that would mean offloading P2 cards twice during a 10-hour production day (assuming shooting 720/24p) or four times per day if shooting 1080. With 720, you’d offload once during lunch, and once at the end of the day. With 1080, it’s four times per day, maximum. Does that really need a dedicated crew member spending all day to shlep and dump and copy and whatever? Sounds like massive overkill to me.And, how much of that hour’s worth of footage you generate is garbage? With P2, if you’ve got a shot that was ruined, you can instantly delete it, thus delaying the time when you need to offload cards. It’s entirely possible that you could shoot a full day’s worth of scripted, dramatic/narrative production in 720/24p and not have to offload the cards *at all* throughout a full production day, if you delete the unusable takes as you go…
Again, if you’re shooting eight hours of footage each day, then P2 is not the solution for you. But is that really what you’re shooting?
I guess it breaks down to this: if it’s a shoot where film could have been used, then the P2 solution can be easily integrated. If it’s the type of shoot where so much footage is generated that nobody would ever have considered film then P2 is probably not the right solution (but that still doesn’t rule out the HVX, seeing as you can use the FireStore or direct streaming to a computer etc).
So it’s up to you to examine what you’re shooting, and then determine whether a P2-based workflow can work for your particular shooting requirements.
It’s true that P2 is not yet practical for every possible circumstance. But it can work in a *lot* of shooting environments; and if you like the camera and you like the features and you like the DVCPRO-HD footage, then you’ll find a way to make it work. And it probably won’t be nearly as hard as you fear.
—————–
Get the most from your DVX camera. The DVX Book and DVX DVD are now available at https://www.dvxuser.com/articles/dvxbook/ and at Amazon (https://tinyurl.com/54u4a)
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