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CinePorter
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We also have two of them, and do still use them out of necessity, and to be fair, when they work, they work fine. The truth is my complaint is not about the FS-100 itself, but the little 4-pin firewire cable that the whole world is dangling on. My main problem with them is that you can start recording and everything is fine, but at some point, you pan the camera or the wind blows or the moon moves or what ever and the FS-100 just quietly stop recording. Mind you, the cables still in the camera, it just giggled an imperceptible amount and everything just stops. So if you are paying attention to the action, exposure, focus or some other trivial thing instead of just watching your gear, you can easily end up with half a shot. The first shoot we used them on also created a great deal of corrupt audio files in Avid, but we eventually found a work around and the problem was fixed in the next version of firmware.
I have never had a problem with a P2 card, ever. My preferred way to shoot in the field is to record to the P2 cards, then use the camera as a firewire host and copy them to the Firestore in Disk Drive mode. This is much more time consuming, and will not work for long takes, but it’s bullet proof.
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Hi Barry,
Ok, I’ll settle down now. I really want 32GB cards. At this point I think we are going to skip over the 16’s and save our money until the 32’s are available. I just hope I don’t live to regret that.
A couple of years ago we took on a two-camera 720 60P production that had a lot of shots with one the camera mounted inside a car, on a small jib, and in places that a 2/3″ camera doesn’t easily fit. The shoot was a few months after the HVX-200 was supposed to ship, (the end of the year), so we ordered one with the intent, (and budget) of using it for all of the car interiors and renting one Varicam as our primary for exteriors. As the shoot grew near, many more promises were broken and needless to say, we did not receive our HVX in time for the shoot. We ended up renting a second Varicam, which was a bit of a hit to the budget, and a bit of a rigging nightmare. Eventually, we did receive our HVX, and we did use it for a few pickup shots in that show, and in the end everything worked out fine.
I know what you’re thinking and you are right, it’s my fault. I should have known better, but I decided to gamble on a promised ship date and I lost. It’s a lesson learned with no harm done. But seeing the 16 GB cards six months late does not instill a great deal of confidence in anything Panasonic says. Mind you, the only reason I care is because I am so committed to the HVX and the whole P2 production pipeline. If I were not totally sold on this direction, I wouldn’t care.
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Glad that Panny is catching up, taking costs into greater consideration, etc, but it’s also too bad to see this happen…
I always appreciate those folks that take a stab at making other options available – some options work, some don’t, but at least at a minimum some try.
I’m a small business guy and I always reflect on the capital it takes to continually make things happen (or trying to make things happen). The folks trying to make this little widgit obviously put a lot of time, heart, and cash into it – probably got fairly close too…
My personal thanks to those for trying – and certainly thanks for not putting it out early and ripping people off…
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Rumpy,
I can always tell if the FS-100 stops recording because the round red record light in the HVX viewfinder goes off if their is a problem with the firewire connection and it quits recording.
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Oh, so it has happened to you too? We often use our 17″ Panasonic LCD monitor with the camera menus disabled, which means we have to constantly remember to look back at the firestore or the camera viewfinder to see if it’s still working. As I said before, the Firestore itself does do what it’s supposed to do, but any workflow that requires constantly checking to see if it’s still working is just fundamentally flawed. I frequently use the scopes in DV Rack but I never record with it for the exact same reason. That is why I was so exited about the Cineporter, no Firewire cables!! I understand them abandoning the product though. As far as I can tell, even Panasonic has no plans to update the P2 store, which as it stands can only hold one 32GB P2 card.
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[Rumpy the Cat] ” I decided to gamble on a promised ship date and I lost.”
I know EXACTLY what you’re saying. Ironic, isn’t it, that you’re posting that statement in the “CinePorter is dead” thread? There’s just no way to know, until you have the product in your hands… I used to be a computer programmer, and I can tell you: anything and everything can happen between “promised ship date” and “actual ship date”… anything. The Red guys just got hit with that kind of thing; they had an excellent track record for hitting every date they promised but now they ran into one that they couldn’t immediately overcome and so the Red One is on an “engineering hold” until they announce a new schedule.
If Panasonic was just blindly promising 32GB cards on faith alone, I would probably be equally skeptical. But people at the P2HD Clinic in Baltimore told us that they were actually showing a working 32GB card there. I think that’s quite promising, but obviously I wouldn’t book a job that depends on it based on the promised “November” ship date. I mean, it may actually even ship to some customers in November, but until you have your own in your own hands, you can’t make commitments based on it.
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Get the most from your DVX camera. The DVX Book and DVX DVD are now available on ebay and at Amazon (https://www.fiftv.com/db) -
[Christopher Wright] “I can always tell if the FS-100 stops recording because the round red record light in the HVX viewfinder goes off if their is a problem with the firewire connection and it quits recording.
“Is that supposed to be comforting? It’s a bit like saying I can always tell when I’ve been in a horrible car accident because my vision is blocked by the airbag.
Mitch Ives
Insight Productions Corp.
mitch@insightproductions.comApple Certified Trainer: Final Cut Pro 5
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Rumpy,
I have only had the FS-100 stop recording twice in all those 1200 hours of use, both times due to a (former)camera assistant bumping the cables during a film shoot. I caught it immediately though in the HVX viewfinder and we just shot another take. BTW, if you can afford to use those separate monitors on a shoot it seems again a simple matter to have any assistant or PA look at the Firestore to see whether it is recording or not. That is what any conscientious DP, camera assistant, Nagra operator, etc. would do with their equipment and workflow. It is kind of like not cleaning the gate in your film camera and blaming the resultant scratched film stock on the film manufacturer. Sorry it still just seems a like a lot of whining to me.
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Well, Pana is to be blamed here (just like most other camera manufacturers), not Focus Enhancements. The 4-pin FW plug should not be on anything else than cheapo amateur camcorders that are meant to fit in your palm. Period.
If you can fit serious audio connectors on a camcorder, you should be able to fit a sturdier 6-pin FW, right?
That said, I believe it all depends on how that flimsy thing was treated from the very start. Knowing this (learned the hard way on my first Sony VX-1000) we were very careful to protect it with velcro, care for a cable loop and instruct everyone handling that camera.
Until know we never lost connection (even using it on a crane!) when recording to the FireStore. Knocking on wood…
Regards,
Uli
Author of “DVDs gestalten und produzieren”, a book on professional DVD-authoring in German.
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Yes a 6-pin FW connector on the HVX would have been a much better, sturdier (and easy to implement) design!
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