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I keep reading this camera will record onto miniDV?
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I totally agree with Peter on this one. I think a miniDV tape drive would be a “free” option to include, and the camera would be better for it. I don’t think it’ll record DVCPRO-50 or DVCPRO-HD to tape, but I do think it’d be better if it had a miniDV tape drive. I get many jobs (usually convention/event coverage) where they ask for DV tapes at the end of the shoot. Currently I do those jobs on the DVX, and all is fine, but why wouldn’t I want that same capability in the HVX? DV delivery is nearly universal in production companies and post houses nation/worldwide.
Remember Panasonic’s marketing slogan for the DVX was “make a living, flip a switch, make a movie.” I am very confident they’ll include the “make a living” option in there — why wouldn’t they? And if they don’t, well, I think it’s a mistake, but not a terminal one.
Eventually people will start wanting those types of jobs done on HD, but for now, and for the foreseeable future, there’s still going to be a ton of miniDV jobs done, and delivering a tape at the end of the shoot is an established workflow. With High Def I expect to supplant the tape with a hard disk of the day’s footage, but as long as people want to receive tapes, I as a businessman have to be able to deliver them.
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[Barry Green] “I think his point might be that it might be a little optimistic to expect a $20,000 tape drive in a sub-$10,000 camera.”
I think you have chosen to ignore the comment he origonally made is preparing that reply.
“If panny would sell 100,000 cameras of those, then those 16 heads’
price would be less than 1/10 of what they are today.”Not saying he is correct, but no saying he is wrong either.
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Isn’t it as optimistic as to expect $42k camera format (dvcproHD) in sub-$10k camera?
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Sure the price would drop, but the price of the P2 cards will drop more dramaticaly, and remember putting a tape deck in the camera means we need a tape deck for the studio, doubling the cost of use. Either way, even with some mass production behind it, a DVCProHD tape format camera is an expensive proposition.
Graeme
– http://www.nattress.com – Film Effects for FCP
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I’ll bet by the time P2 drops to a price many of us in the special events business can afford it, this camera will be a well outdated model and Panasonic could have moved to a pure P2 product line.
What stops you using the camera as a player? It works fine for me now. My cameras don’t get used enough to worry about one record and one play per tape as I currently work.
I would be more interested in just a DV tape transport as a fall back, and common standard capture amoungts the mass’s. Use P2 for non DV if you like. What I wouldn’t want however is DVCPRO (PAL) at all. As it is 4:1:1 most of my needs would requrie conversion to DV (4:2:0) or MPG2 (4:2:0) and that’s not a pretty picture.
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The short and simple answer is this: Panasonic needs everybody to buy P2 cards so that the profit centre moves, like all modern manufacturing, from the device to the consumable. It also needs the volume to increase so that costs will get down to the sweet spot where the retail price becomes generally acceptable. The future is tapeless. I don’t think anybody could argue with those statements. Since you will need a couple of 4GB P2’s for recording DV100HD, the whole raison d’etre of this camera, then those cards represent four times as much sense and value if you are recording DV25! There is no point in a MiniDV drive. Panasonic are trying to ween you off tape drives, not provide comfort blankets.
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[Guy Barwood] “I would be more interested in just a DV tape transport as a fall back, and common standard capture amoungts the mass’s. Use P2 for non DV if you like. What I wouldn’t want however is DVCPRO (PAL) at all. As it is 4:1:1 most of my needs would requrie conversion to DV (4:2:0) or MPG2 (4:2:0) and that’s not a pretty picture. “
I think that’s likely what they’ll do. There’s been plenty of speculation/conjecture on another forum, and at one point it was announced that a Panasonic product manager had actually confirmed that there would be DVC Pro tape in the HVX. Which I guess was disproved, but it made no sense — for handing a tape over to a client, you want DV, not DVCPRO. Yes DVCPRO has plenty of advantages, but not for the type of buyer who’s going after a camera like this. I think what you said is what we’ll get: DVCPRO-HD on P2, and also miniDV on tape.—————–
Get the most from your DVX camera. The DVX Book and DVX DVD are now available at https://www.dvxuser.com/articles/dvxbook/ and at Amazon (https://tinyurl.com/54u4a) -
[toke lahti] “Isn’t it as optimistic as to expect $42k camera format (dvcproHD) in sub-$10k camera? “
Yes! It is! And that’s exactly the point of why P2 is so great — it lets you have that. The cheapest DVCPRO-HD product on the market is the AJ-1200HD tape deck, at about $25,000. DVCPRO-HD tape heads run about $800 per pair, and you need 16 of ’em, IINM. So that’s a lot of expense. But by using an off-the-shelf PCMCIA connector, a part that’s been mass-produced in laptops to the point where it costs a few pennies each, they’re able to store DVCPRO-HD data for pennies instead of tens of thousands of dollars.
The only reason we *can* expect DVCPRO-HD in a camera this (relatively) inexpensive is because it’s recording it to P2.
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Get the most from your DVX camera. The DVX Book and DVX DVD are now available at https://www.dvxuser.com/articles/dvxbook/ and at Amazon (https://tinyurl.com/54u4a) -
[Vincent Rice] “The short and simple answer is this: Panasonic needs everybody to buy P2 cards so that the profit centre moves, like all modern manufacturing, from the device to the consumable. It also needs the volume to increase so that costs will get down to the sweet spot where the retail price becomes generally acceptable. …”
Hi Vincent: In general I agree with the gist of what you said, but I don’t believe the only result is that Panasonic won’t include a DV25 miniDV tape transport in its new P2 palmcorder.
No matter how “affordable” P2 cards are by the time this cam ships later this year, chance are very good P2 cards will be significantly more expensive than equivalent recording-time capacity miniDV cassettes. And that price disparity is likely to continue for quite some time. Sure, P2 costs will decrease, but it may take several months (if not a year or more) until most “pro” and “prosumer” users would say “P2 is now cheap enough” compared to tape.
Meanwhile, the P2 palmcorder they bought in 2005 may be able to use inexpensive miniDV tapes for all the things DV25 is good for. Regardless how many P2 cards they might use & buy, more users will probably use & buy tape than P2 cards (certainly quantity-wise). And many of them will buy Panasonic tape. So either way, Panasonic wins.
I don’t think selling a P2 palmcorder without a tape transport will “force” people to buy large numbers of P2 cards. Instead, it may marginalize the cam due and result in low sales. A P2-only palmcorder might be very useful to a certain number of people, but possibly a far smaller number of people compared to how many would’ve preferred a cam with both P2 and tape.
And, as I said earlier, since including a DV25 miniDV transport in a cam costs Panasonic & the end user essentially nothing, why not include it?
However, I won’t think Panasonic would be making a “mistake” if the cam is P2-only. It’s All Good(TM) to me. If I have a use for the cam I’ll use it; if not I won’t.
In a few more days we’ll get a better idea of what Panasonic is thinking, too.
All the best,
– Peter
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I was seriously considering the Sony HVR-Z1U until I read the specs (minimal as they are right now) for the Panasonic AG-HVX200. For my workflow purposes, if this camera does not have MiniDV tape support, then, as unfortunate as this sounds, I will have to turn this awesome looking camera down right away. For me, and for a lot of folks in video production, MiniDV is part of our daily workflow. Yes, this may change in the future, but in the meantime, we need to still have the MiniDV option onboard, even if we don’t utilize it on a day-to-day basis.
The production budget I work from will only allow me to have one camera at my disposal. At times I am called in to to tape a business meetings for my client archives and occasionally to stream to remote offices. For these events, they need me to shoot on MiniDV and there is no need for me not to… the tapes are cheap, I get two channels of audio, and if I ever need to grab an audio sound-byte or video clip for the web, it doesn’t look bad at all. This type of real low-budget “production” does not even come close to requiring all the HD/HDV latest and greatest.
For all the other real work I do and location shooting, yes, I will eventually want HD/HDV quality at 1080 or 720. But I need a versitile tool that will help me do my best work in any situation. MiniDV is part of this versitility and I need to still have this support as I migrate into the HD world. Anyone else feel this way?
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