Freelancer work flow as an owner/operator of a HVX.

[Noah Kadner]

I’d say throw in an inexpensive FW drive as part of the service quote- treat it like media. Definitely do not want to give over your P2 cards to the client as they are too valuable for that.

Naoh

[David Battistella]

Chris,

This is a great question and a frequent one. I think that P2 has been designed as a complete workflow for news organizations. This is a fantastic place for P2 because it is fast. It significantly lowers tape costs because these organisations can save and back up files to a server or tape on a daily basis.

When a station is set up with P2 it is a fantastic. Fast, relieable and the one time high costs of the cards will pay for themselves many times over. It’s great for these integrated systems because you can give the P2 cards to the reporters and then they can go from shoot to shoot with different camera operators and then just bring the cards back to the edit station, load and GO! Very well thought out.

In EFP production the workflow is going to have to be a bit different. The big benefit to the HVX is that it records HD formats to the P2 and it does the same variable frame rates the Varicam does. IMHO I think that people will lean to this camera over the Varicam now because up to this point those are the two huge beniftis to shooting varicam.Pundits will say that the Varicam chips are bigger etc, but hey, the Varicam compresses everything down to the same codec. That is a killer. You might say garbage in Garbage out, but at the end of the day you are dealing with the same compression rates with the HVX and the Varicam. If I was a recent Varicam owner, this would upset me because I think that the best picture you could now get out of a Varicam is in direct to disk mode, which move it out of the field and into the studio.

Sorry to get sidetracked.

The workflow for an HVX owner operator is different now. Anyone who has outof town clients know that they want to leave town with some physical media in their hands. Try telling ABC news to buy a firestore or that you will send them the tapes tomorrow. It does not really wash. The other thing is this. You ca’t just buy one firestore because what if you ship it and you have a shoot the next day?

This is where the “you borrow from Peter to pay Paul arguement comes in.” Sure. If most places migrated to P2 then it would be a no brainer, production companies, news organizations, agencies would all send their people out with P2 cards, but that is not the case. There is still a ton of Betacam floating around. What is great about P2 is that every one of these organizations have a PC or mac around.

This problem is easily solved with “PRICEPOINT”. If Panasonic were to prictice the good solid Japanese marketing tactic of “price dumping” then they could actually make a move in this market. This was done very successfully with LCD flat panels and Nintendo games. Introduce them at a huge loss, but corner the market and fix prices in the subsequent years. (Ron Lindeboom could further explain this I am sure 🙂 ) If they were to introduce P2 at a price point of 150.00 per 4gig card, I do not think people would bat an eylash at HDV

[Craig Seeman]

A not there yet fantasy of mine –

A portable powered 50GB BluRay disc burner. Burn the disc after the shoot at 2x or 4x speed from the Firestore/CinePorter/CitiDisk
OR
Add files to a BluRay disc from the P2 cards. Shoot’s done, disc’s done.

Have two self powered burners and you’d even be able to clown the disc at 2x or 4x and they leave with a master as well as you – much faster than having to clone a tape at the studio.

I can’t be the only one thinking this way. Given Panasonic is working on BluRay recording (not just Sony) I can’t help but think they’re thinking in that direction. The workflow may even prove to be an alternative to XDCAMHD.

Alas, I can dream can’t I?

[Donatello]

may be dub houses ? or some post houses will have a transfer service from external hard drive to dvcpoHD tape ??
it may not work for production but it is needed in post for archives/backup ..
i know TODAY you can have your HD transferred to HDCAM or D5 tape from external hard drives so perhaps dvcproHD is not too far down the line = it all comes down to requesting the service so places knew there is a demand .. i do see dvcproHD is starting to show up at film telecine houses and so is HDV …

[Accountclosedduetopolicyviolations]

[David Battistella] “In EFP production the workflow is going to have to be a bit different. The big benefit to the HVX is that it records HD formats to the P2 and it does the same variable frame rates the Varicam does. IMHO I think that people will lean to this camera over the Varicam now because up to this point those are the two huge beniftis to shooting varicam.Pundits will say that the Varicam chips are bigger etc, but hey, the Varicam compresses everything down to the same codec. That is a killer. You might say garbage in Garbage out, but at the end of the day you are dealing with the same compression rates with the HVX and the Varicam. If I was a recent Varicam owner, this would upset me because I think that the best picture you could now get out of a Varicam is in direct to disk mode, which move it out of the field and into the studio.”

Size of 2/3′ chip,Broadcast Digital processing of 2/3′ camera and 2/3′
proper HD glass will make some difference.Varicam owners are not worried
about Pana200.It is nice to have the same format,then all you need is the rest….
Question:If Varicam cost the same money as Pana200,which would You buy??

[Donatello]

“IMHO I think that people will lean to this camera over the Varicam ”

the varicam is aimed at a different market .. the persons buying the HVX couldn’t buy a HD lens !! .. by the time you set up a varicam you got 75-100K spent !! varicam owners may look to the HVX as a B camera for tight shots where they can’t get their varicam and shots where their varicam could get damaged …

also i would say 90% of HVX buyers would NEVER rent a varicam (some might think about it but to lay out 800-1200 day = no way )… just like any hand size camera you get the biggest BANG for you $$$$ …

[David Battistella]

Jiri and Donatello,

I know that the Varicam is about 10 times the cost of the HVX. The glass is better. The chips are bigger. I agree totally. The varicam does not record a better codec than the HVX. Sure the from end is better, but it does not record a better codec?

ON shooting variable speed. Think like a producer for a minute. “hey I can get beautiful slomo images in HD out of that little camera, Great! I’m only going to have two or three shots like that….Blah, blah, blah.” You see where I am going. This camera release is going to bring all of the best features the Varicam has to offer to the masses. Will producers shell out the Varicam rates when the HVX will “do, roughly but not exactly the same thing”

This is the slippery slope that Panasonic has gone on with this release. I can only hope that the HVX draws more attention to the Varicam (which I happen to think is a great camera) but I would hate to see it go the other way. Also, If P2 is so fantastic why did they not implement it into the “H” release of the Varicam.

This is false market segmentation. Does Panasonic think that people will believe that the Varicam

[Barry Green]

[Chris Baldwin] “One concept would be to bring a laptop and an external Firewire drive and transfer the footage as soon as we’re done shooting during wrap… But the question is how long would that take and is there any way of doing this without having a laptop?”
I asked spec-comm to design that functionality into the CinePorter. If it had the ability to dump its contents onto an external drive, you could set it about its business while you wrap the rest of the gear, etc. As for the amount of time it takes, that depends on the speed of the internal drive and the speed of the receiving drive. Probably still in the ballpark of 1gb per minute. In file transfer situations like that, the bottleneck is the drive speed, and a single 2.5″ drive can only operate so fast.

Another option I asked them for was user-interchangeable hard disks. If you could just eject the hard disk from the cineporter, slap it in a $9 external USB enclosure and hand it over to the client, that would be a delightful solution. But it’s not gonna happen. User-swappable hard disks are not going to be part of either the FS-100 or CinePorter designs.

—————–
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)

[Barry Green]

[David Battistella] “This is the slippery slope that Panasonic has gone on with this release. I can only hope that the HVX draws more attention to the Varicam (which I happen to think is a great camera) but I would hate to see it go the other way.

It should go the “other way”. Why hold back today’s technology, or tomorrow’s technology, just because yesterday’s is no longer as competitive? The HVX pushes things forward. The next gen of the VariCam will do the same. I fully expect there to be a VariCam II before too long, and I fully expect that it will do 1080p as well as 720p, and that it will be P2-based. And I fully expect that it will offer even more codec choices. At NAB last year Panasonic showed a brief tease of the “big brother” to the HVX, a 2/3″ camera with P2 slots and an “HD-D5” label on the side. P2 lets them do things like that; it could easily offer DV, DVCPRO25, DVCPRO50, DVCPRO-HD/1080, DVCPRO-HD/720, and D5, and H.264 for that matter.

Will that be the VariCam II? Or another, newer, intermediate-priced model? Don’t know, but I would expect them to move forward, and with all due respect to the magnificent VariCam, well, if it can’t keep up then it’ll be replaced with something else that’s world-class and pushes even further forward.

—————–
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)

[Craig Seeman]

” . . . some post houses will have a transfer service from external hard drive to dvcpoHD tape ??
it may not work for production but it is needed in post for archives/backup”

I’m sure that’ll be available too as well as renting Panasonic’s $25,000 DVCProHD deck to output to tape. I do think BluRay will actually make more sense for archival purposees. A 45 minute DVCProHD data file can be recorded to disk. Barring a scratched disk it’l probably have better longevity than tape. One can access points on a disk near instantly compared to tape shuttle. One will be able to copy a disk or any section to another disk much faster than real time. Even if the first BluRay burners are $5000 and 50GB disk $50 each, it’ll be more cost effective and time efficient archival than DVCProHD tape.

See this news release from Panasonic
https://forums.creativecow.net/cgi-bin/new_read_post.cgi?forumid=105&postid=855298
although it’s about replication, my hunch is that’s not the only BluRay use they’re working on.