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

[Donatello]

” Will producers shell out the Varicam rates when the HVX will “do, roughly but not exactly the same thing”

Producers that normaly would rent the Varicam NO they will not shoot their project on HVX 200 because “roughly “isn”t good enough for their projects .. the codec may be the same BUT 1/3″ CCD’s just don’t give you teh same image as 2/3 ” CCD’s … they are paying for quality…

the DVX uses the same codec as 2/3 DV25 camera’s and it has a very nice image BUT it didn’t away with 2/3″ camera’s .. most of the camerpersons i know make their living with 2/3 camera’s ( most carry a hand size camera for B roll) … the HVX is aimed at those that can’t afford a 20K + camera .. it’s for persons that bought the DVX, XL2 etc to move up to HD at a affordable entry price .. bottom line IMO 90% of those that buy the HVX 200 ( or HDV) are buying it because of the PRICE .. if they had the choice to shoot varicam or HVX ( for same rental price) IMO 90% would go varicam .. for myself i prefer handsize camera ( i’ll give up some quality for the size- and YES once the HVX becomes available i have my CC ready ) … but if i want/need the extra quality i’d rent Varicam or shoot film ..

[Videofame]

Read this.

The serial digital interface, SMPTE 292M[1], defines a universal medium of interchange for uncompressed HDTV between various types of video equipment (camera’s, encoders, VTRs, …) at data rates of 1.485Gb/s (and 1.485/1.001 Gb/s). Source formats transfered by SMPTE 292M are SMPTE 260M, 295M, 274M and 296M. Source data for these formats are 10-bit words, sampled at 4:2:2. In this memo we specify how to transfer SMPTE 292M over RTP.

I think there are actual HD standard NOT relative standards. If you have the ability to output 4:2:2 HD-SDI you are consistent with the SMPTE 292M broadcast standard.

I love Runway Fashion Shows ;-}

[David Battistella]

Donatello “the codec may be the same BUT 1/3″ CCD’s just don’t give you teh same image as 2/3 ” CCD’s … they are paying for quality… ”

But the HVX can offer them 1080 images albeit from a 1/3″ chip? So would you want Varicam slomo at 1080 instea of 720. It’s all realative. An example. If you read the American cinematographer article about collateral you will see that they started out using the Viper system to record, but as they got into production they started to put more and more shots on tape. Now I am sure there was alot of technical debate with Viper over HDCAM,, yada yada yada. But in the end the production shot very littel viper and much much much more tape. So those producers and film makers that wanted viper, sacrificed the quality for speed and ease of use ehich ultimately were the important factors to telling their story. Here is a real world Hollywood motion Picture Scenario:

Pay close attention tot he progression in these paragraphs as it goes from pre-production nervousness to what actually happened the first day of the shoot.

Quoted from the August 2004 issue:

[David Battistella]

Here is the link if you want to read the whole article, It’s a good one.

https://www.theasc.com/magazine/aug04/collateral/index.html

David

Merry Christmas

[Ryan]

The D5 decks that most places use are Panasonic decks that already have that codec built in. So I would say that DCProHD is already here.

I worked at a place that was running the panasonic deck 5 years ago.

[Toke]

[David Battistella] “

[David Battistella]

Thanks Toki,

Could you see the F900 stuff vs the viper stuff in the final film? It seems like they still managed a very decent look to the whole film and a seemless one at that. I guess I was trying to say that if you mix the HVX and the Varicam for a film the big difference will be if you use the Ziess Primes and that will be the way to make the Varicam look far superior to the HVX.

David

Merry Christmas

[Toke]

They had hard work for designing the look so that the difference does not show.
One key aspect was to lower the shadows so that the noise wouldn’t be so noticable.
Only bad thing is that to match two different pictures you have to lower the quality to the level of the worse camera.

One problem to fix cameras with different gate/sensor sizes is DoF.
In Collateral when they used overspeed filmcameras with f2.8 with normal speed digital cameras with f1.3 side by side. This was done to achieve similiar DoF and film had to be pushed 3 stops. (Well, the other option would have been to get lots of light and lots of NDs in front of digiprimes.

Same way it will be hard to match hvx’s DoF with bigger cameras.

[Thomas Mathai]

You shouldn’t give your camera originals to your client.

The first thing to do is to make backups of your original media. This will vary depending on your budget and needs.

You could look into a tape backup system that may be expensive but provides ease of use.

You could back up to DVD-R or other hard drives since those are cheaper options, but probably need to be babysat to ensure that all the media is currectly archived.

I have no idea of the reliablilty of hard drives for long term storage.

Is it possible a hard drive can sit on a shelf for years , then be plugged in and everything works fine?

You should have 2 or more firewire drives you can shuttle back and forth between you and your client.

Make sure that you and your client can mount these drives on each of your systems, especially if you are using different OSes.

You can read an NTSF drive on a Mac, but you can’t write to it. Windows PCs can only see Mac HSF+ drives with MacDrive installed.

Both Mac and Windows are see Fat32 formatted drives, though there has been times when some data isn’t visible when mounted on a Mac, but is visible when mounted on a Windows PC.

Firewire drives, no matter how sturdy a shipping case they are in, will eventually begin to fail. I get client firewire drives daily and there is always a point when the drive will either not mount or isn’t working properly.

On the other note of the Varicam. I would still go with a Varicam given a chance. There is a lot to be said about better glass and electronics. The codec may be the same, but that is only one part of the whole.

Even with DV, I never heard anyone say that a PD150 was just as good as a DSR-500.

I take an educated guess that a 720 image uprezed to 1080 from the varicam would look just as good as an image captured in 1080 from the HVX200.

Of course this is using high quality image processing tools.

[David Battistella]

Toki,

No arguement from me on D0F. there is no way that you’ll get similar DoF with the HVX, but with carefull planning and lighting I think it will be possible to get very acceptable results with the HVX. It seems that if they went to this extent to match the 900 that it must be a pretty important component to their workflow. And it was so important that it was nessesary to degrade the quality of the image from the better camera’s so that they would have the freedom to use the tools they wanted to use.

That is smart film making. They took all of the tools they wanted to use and made them work together to make the film. It’s great that they had so many options and so many choices to make. Going back to my orginal point. It will be interesting to see if people go with a Varicam and an HVX or maybe just two HVX’s or Two Varicams. All of this depends, to a certain degree on budget of course, but I might go for the camera that records 1080 and then work take a lot of care with making that 1080 image look as good as it can with the tools and budget I have to work with.

David

Merry Christmas