4 (6) cam comparison

[David S.]

[Gunleik Groven] “P2 is a known headache which one will have to learn how to deal with”

Boy, I really believe it is an issue, particularly at the current price points, and the need for achiving.

Interesting how so many people call it the best thing since sliced bread.

I’m concerned about both this exact issue, and the pricing. Pricing will no doubt change, but only if the market dictates it.

As to the comparison, I believe Adam Wilt was objective in his article. There are strengths and weaknesses of each of the 1/3 chip cameras. All require some accommodation.

Like to have the Canon Sony and Panasonic to test myself.

David S.

[Häakon]

It’s really interesting how people are coping with the idea of P2. I guess I’m in the “sliced bread” category… I can’t imagine shooting to tape any longer, and archiving to optical disc is dirt cheap, fast, and reliable. I realize some people are still concerned about the price (worth) of the cards, but at $650, it’s not like we’re talking a huge investment. After you buy the card, you never have to pay for stock again. Aside from capacity issues (which will only resolve themselves over time), I can’t really find a thing about P2 I don’t like. To each their own, of course…

[David Battistella]

Haakon,

How do you handle out of town clients who might be getting on an aircraft at the end of a shooting day?

How much time do you save against digitizing vs. making backups of the media?

What will you do with your P2 cards when removable media disk based cameras (ieHD XDCAM) become the widespread standard?

P2 can fly if it is rapidly accepted and that has not really happend except for a few “closed shop” news gathering organizations. It depends who you work with and who your client base is. It’s great for news, but in a single user setup, you might have teh P2 card forever and I think stock would still be cheaper in the long haul. The stock arguement only works in places that reuse stock until the have to repurchase (NEWS GATHERING). They can’t pop a fresh tape in the camera every day, so P2 make s sense to them. and in the very long run, it does save them but it is a five to ten year investment, bkue chip style plan. Single users do not gain that much. It’s on it’s last legs so they pushed it out to their consumer customers to squeeze the last bit of moey out of it. P2 is the new M2 NOT the new Betacam.

David

I can’t believe it’s not butter!

[Ron Shook]

David,

My, my, looks like someone is looking to purchase a new Sony HD XDCAM camcorder. Good for you, but don’t make the mistake of assuming that this will be the next BetaSP. If there’s one thing that I’m pretty positive about, it’s that we don’t know what will come out in the wash over the next few years, and that I’m gonna still get a lot of use out of my BetaSP kit. (g)

[David Battistella] “How do you handle out of town clients who might be getting on an aircraft at the end of a shooting day?”

Not easily, that’s for sure. It can be done, but getting that sort of client to accept a commodity hard drive, rather than a tape would be a steep uphill battle, that might not be winnable.

[David Battistella] “What will you do with your P2 cards when removable media disk based cameras (ieHD XDCAM) become the widespread standard?”

What standard and for how long? Anyone in their right mind knows that solid state memory with no moving parts is the future of on-location media production. It may not, probably won’t be, P2, as the solid state memory capability grows in capacity and shrinks in price, but any way you look at it, it’s simply a matter of when and how much the technology advances, and we’re talkin’ a few years, not decades.

[David Battistella] “It’s [P2] on it’s last legs so they pushed it out to their consumer customers to squeeze the last bit of money out of it. P2 is the new M2 NOT the new Betacam.”

P2 as a proprietary technology is probably a new M2, but HD XDCAM is even more so. The IT commodity technology cat is out of the bag and spitting on all proprietary technology that attempts to replace VTRs with further proprietary devices with hundreds of percent markups, whether its P2 or HD XDCAM quasi VTRs or other I/O devices.

My guess is that we have yet to see the “new Betacam,” if we ever do, and that if and when we do, It’ll evolve into something that we can purchase at the local drug store like a phone card, along with our drugs. (g)

Ron Shook

PS. Had enough of dueling codecs? See if we don’t hear plenty of talk about the open source MJPEG2000 codec at NAB this year, along with full MXF implementation by both our production and post-production tools.

[Jan Crittenden livingston]

David Battistella: How do you handle out of town clients who might be getting on an aircraft at the end of a shooting day?

You can set up during the shoot an offloading of the footage on to one or two hard-drives so that when they get back home they merely plug in the hard drive and import the footage.

>How much time do you save against digitizing vs. making backups of the media?

In my limited experience, it this one significant change in the workflow that is noticed first. Because computers work data faster than VTRS can cue up and play back. We had all of the footage copied and duplicated everything before we called it quits the first night. And in reality by the time the shooting team got back to the hotel they had it on the first hard drive. They could have left town right then and there. But we made a back-up and then another backup.

I don’t claim to be in the production business, but more an observer and about once or twice a year I actually end up having to be a producer. Point is that digitizing tapes is the biggest pain, because so much can go wrong, plus there is a whole element in working with P2 that is so endemic to the IT domain it is really hard to describe the differences without having you stand in front of the camera and showing you just how different it is.

>What will you do with your P2 cards when removable media disk based cameras (ieHD XDCAM) become the widespread standard?

That is a pretty big assumption on your part. You are welcome to have that opinion but from here that is not a widely held truth. And if for some reason the P2 card does end up in a back seat to HD Disk, which I don’t believe for a second, I am going to assume that Haakon will continue to make money with his P2 camera.

>P2 can fly if it is rapidly accepted and that has not really happend except for a few “closed shop” news gathering organizations.

You make it sound like just a couple of yokel shops have adopted P2. Cox, Sinclair, Liberty and Media General have been the big time adopters and yes they are pretty happy with the way the system works. And this is just the start of the list.

>It depends who you work with and who your client base is. It’s great for news, but in a single user setup, you might have teh P2 card forever and I think stock would still be cheaper in the long haul.

Actually you should get out your calculator and do the math, because if you compare it to DVCPRO50/DVCPRO HD recording tape costs, you will see that very quickly storage as data is vastly cheaper than storage as tape. So in counter thinking to your position I think that the singular Indy is in a better position financially in a data domain. I mean my 1T Lacie drive was $789, so that equates to $.78 a gigabyte. A 30 minute DVCPRO HD tape will cost $25.66 according to Tape Resources, which nets to $.85 a gig.

>The stock argument only works in places that reuse stock until the have to repurchase (NEWS GATHERING).

Actually this is not true. You should really stop and think more about the whole plan.

> They can’t pop a fresh tape in the camera every day, so P2 make s sense to them. and in the very long run, it does save them but it is a five to ten year investment, bkue chip style plan. Single users do not gain that much.

Most producers do not reuse tape, news guys do. Most producers I know start with fresh tape on every project and they bill the customer. Here, is it is just that you have not thought your own plan all the way through to where are you going to be in 5-6 years. Frankly I think we will all be in tape-less domain. Some of us will have been there for years as we felt that the sooner I faced the decision, the sooner I would make better decisions for the long haul and the money I spend today would be in prep for where I will be 5-6 years from now.

Secondly if working in a tape domain you are required to save everything, in a data domain you are not. And yes people can argue that everything they shoot is valuable but I say that simply is not true. The mistaken shot where the camera was triggered and we watched the crew walk over the parking lot or the talent blew his lines 15 times in a row. I don’t care how you slice it neither grow more valuable, but I might decide to keep the parking lot shot if there was some funny stuff going on, or I could throw it away on P2. My choice.

>It’s on it’s last legs so they pushed it out to their consumer customers to squeeze the last bit of moey out of it. P2 is the new M2 NOT the new Betacam.

And this is the reason I even responded. You baited me in with it. I had a lot of fun selling the MII format, helped a lot of customers make a lot of money with this format. So many people seem to think that MII was some sort of failure, well in comparison to BetaSP, I would say sure that MII did not have the market share, but that does not make it the loser product. It was a great format and a real workhorse. But even more importantly it taught our factory how to listen to the customer. Which is why we did finally win the BetaSP war with DVCPRO25.

Additionally the customers that bought MII found that with each iteration of the machines they were able to get more performance with less money. Unlike the PVW series of BetaSP, which was the same price as the new MII performers, which required the customer to throw away resolution to get lesser cost.

No we don’t expect that P2 is the answer for everyone, we still have a very full array of tape based products that will continue to sell in the market place, yet it is a really cool answer for those that are looking to move away from tape. So what is on its last legs? Nothing that I see in the P2 product line, it has just started. You will start to see stories about how it works in production and how it doesn’t care about the environment.

Because you are not in the news business you may never have seen the stories about Hurricane Emily and her video coverage, which at her worst, was only being covered by P2 cameras. You may not have heard the anecdotal stories from the news fronts but soon you will from the production fronts. This month we will be delivering a much higher quantity to the market over last, thank God, and it will all start to come out exactly what the camera is and what it isn’t.

It is what it is that causes the pause.

Best regards,

Jan Crittenden Livingston
Product Manager, DVCPRO, DVCPRO50, AG-DVX100
Panasonic Broadcast & TV Systems

[David Battistella]

Ron,

I would not purchase an HD-XD CAM. Not a big fan of MPEG2, but if sony gets it out ther faster and cheaper, panny may not have a chance.

Jan,

Your points are all well taken and valid. I am production and I will probably buy an HVX 200 when the first revision has been released.

The big point is that you are right. It is not for everybody, but nobody can accuse me of not know how to kickstart a thread and open up debate.

I admit that I like Panasonic products and I have owned several different pieces over the years. I commend you for getting on these forums and pointing out all of the potential for the product you manufacture and sell, many manufacturers would not be so willing. This shows a great deal of integrity on your part.

Panny vs Sony is a bit like Apple vs Microsoft. One makes fantastic products that fewer people use. That is too bad because we all know how great MAC’s are and I love all of my Panny equipment, and yes any panny purchase I make involving P2 will pay off in the long term, but we have to consider the wide and interesting scope of the business and market trends and that is what makes this boards so much fun.

Thanks Jan, I hope the knee heals up well.

David

I can’t believe it’s not butter!

[David S.]

[Jan Crittenden Livingston] “This month we will be delivering a much higher quantity to the market over last, thank God, and it will all start to come out exactly what the camera is and what it isn’t.”

This is great news. At least for me, I’ve really struggled with this product. It seems so promising. Somewhat pricey in acquisition and delivery workflow, and there are so many unknowns. But the tradeoffs, as I’ve said, look to be manageable.

On one side, there is almost a cult of adherents. But I don’t see alot of objective evaluations without scopes, graphs, etc.

At least for me, I just want to handle a camera and test it. But where I live which is shared I believe by many potential buyers, that isn’t possible and I, like so many others, have to rely on those who have some inside handle on getting cameras and doing the testing.

I sincerely wish that Panasonic and/or Jan would put this camcorder on some basis in the hands of an average/median user, and let that girl/guy provide some journeyman footage.

I volunteer, but if ain’t me, then can’t it be someone else that can at least report results from a center, unbiased position?

Many of the potential purchasers have no alternatives to evaluate and compare side by side footage between the cams in the mix.

Anyway, MtC

David S.

[Steve Connor]

At the very least Panasonic get to go down in the history books as the Pioneers of HD solid state recording.

Steve Connor
Cardinal HD

Please fill in your profile – it helps US to help YOU!

[David Battistella]

Steve,

I can’t resist.

Apple invented the Newton
Pioneer invented the Laser disk
Sony invented Betamax

all fantastic technologies as well 🙂

David

I can’t believe it’s not butter!

[Ron Shook]

Steve,

[Steve Connor] “At the very least Panasonic get to go down in the history books as the Pioneers of HD solid state recording.”

You betcha! And they’ve done it right by wrapping their codecs in MXF. But Panasonic has also opened a can of worms, that if they aren’t nimble enough, will also gobble up their foundation. They have no choice, because no one’s big enough to stop the march of technology. I’m sure that when Panasonic set P2 in motion, they must have thought that solid state technology would have marched a little faster than it has, so now they have to scramble to present more cost effective alternatives for the short run, particularly for a camcorder in the under $10k market place.

The saving grace for the major players is that the large majority of the industry is more than a bit befuddled by the marching technology armies. Unfortunately that also makes ’em set back and wait.

Ron Shook