Great news…now you just have to wait six months!

[John Mcclary]

Off another forum Nate Weaver finally nailed down the variable frame rate question – NOT TRUE.

“The camera writes 720p60 to tape, and duplicates whole frames (adding pulldown) to pad the 24p to 60p. It is NOT Varicam style where you have 60 unique frames written to tape, and you only see some of them upon playback. I should note it took a long time (all day) to get to the bottom of this. Asking the sales reps repeatedly resulted in a different answer every time. I only got an informed answer finally when I talked to Fredric Haubrich (of Lumiere HD), and he explained the situation to me. He would be the one to know, because he had the .m2t files from HD100 to prove it.”

So it does 24P,60P (which is GREAT) but no variable speed like Varicam. Still like it though…

John McClary

[Luis Caffesse]

Derek,

Glad to hear you’re getting work with your Z1.
We can agree on one thing, the most important thing is what you can use and make money with ‘today.’ It will be interesting to see how the market reacts when the HVX200 comes out, given that it offers true progressive and 1080. Hopefully Sony will eventually embrace progressive scan that way we can have some more competition in the marketplace. That’s always good for everyone.

As Jeremiah pointed out, I don’t think many are ‘waiting’ for HD.
I for one rent the VariCam off and on when I require HD. Unfortunately for now, the HDV post workflow is just too much hastle for me, and DVCProHD is already an established format with a proven workflow. Many of the post houses I do work with are already set up for DVCProHD, but I don’t know of many using HDV successfully right now. Hopefully that will change given the number of native HDV announcements from so companies this week.

Either way, whether it’s HDV or DVCProHD, HD is now well within the reach of many people, and that’s all that matters. I don’t think there is any reason to see HDV and P2 technology as a ‘us vs. them’ debate. For all we know Panasonic may have a P2 MPG2 based HD camera waiting in the wings, like the one they showed off at NAB last year.

Luis Caffesse
Studio 3 Productions, Inc.
Austin, Texas

[Dom Silverio]

[John McClary] “It is NOT Varicam style where you have 60 unique frames written to tape, and you only see some of them upon playback.”

Not totally accurate. When you shoot 24p with Varicam – it is also padded for frames in order to achieve 60p and 100 Megabits/s.

[Karl Holt]

this quote was about the the HD100 is the JVC camera, not the panasonic – the Panasonic does do varicam rates its even in the official PDF brochure

[Jeremiah Black]

you worte: “The camera writes 720p60 to tape, and duplicates whole frames (adding pulldown) to pad the 24p to 60p. It is NOT Varicam style where you have 60 unique frames written to tape, and you only see some of them upon playback”

The new Panasonic camera write varible speed to P2, not to tape. That’s the whole point of P2, you can easily do varible speed, because there’s no tape mechanism running at constant speed to complicate things.

jeremiah black
dual 2 gig G5
2.5 gigs of RAM
Decklink Extreme capture card