I’d like to discuss the SPX800 P2 camera

[Chris Baldwin]

Two more things I’ll add to my last post…
As far as credability of the SPX800 check this out. Anyone see more hype than reality?

https://www2.panasonic.com/webapp/wcs/stores/servlet/prModelDetail?storeId=11301&catalogId=13251&itemId=94952&modelNo=Content10192005101139789&surfModel=Content10192005101139789

And as far as workflow (and I can’t believe I haven’t realized this before) but one can always use a lunch break to begin offloading P2 content to hard drive so the second half of the day footage doesn’t have to keep you past the end of the shoot too much for its transfer.

There’s no way of shooting on one p2 card and offloading from another p2 card while both p2 cards are in the camera is there?

Thanks,

Chris

Chris Baldwin
Shoulder High Productions
Media of the World; For the World!
https://www.shoulderhigh.com
newsletters@shoulderhigh.com

[Jeremy Garchow]

Hey Chris. We just went through this decision ourselves. We looked long and hard at the SPX800 and the SDX900 and we decided to go with the SDX900. Why you ask? First, we just weren’t ready for a tapeless workflow quite yet. Archiving and backup were major considerations. the project we just finished has just over 30 hours of footage, archiving all of that would have been nightmarical (yes I just made that word up). Tape is still the most convenient way. This might start a flame war, but for our purposes and workflow, tape is best for now.

Second, we do a bunch of graphics work and often need to work in 8 or 10 bit uncompressed. Shooting on the 800 would lock us to the DV50 codec. Don’t get me wrong, it’s a great codec, but after multiple generations and graphics passes it starts to fall apart. Digitizing off of tape in 8 or 10 bit alleviates most of this. Also, converting the DV50 stuff to a high resolution digitally would work, but then you lose all reference and timecode to the original clip. It would be a hassle to rebuild a project if you ever need to do that, and we do have that need in our workflow. With tape, you can select which format to digitize in and bring it back in automatically through your NLE and rs-422. I’m sure some type of workflow will exist like this in tapeless someday, but not currently with P2.

No matter what you do, buy the best lens you can afford, preferably an HD lens. We decided to go with Fujinon HD glass and boy was it worth the money. I was editing a project the other day that was shot on a 900 (not ours) and had a “cheap” lens on it. The picture was not as sharp as the Fujinon HD lens. Also, if we do decide to buy a Varicam or equivalent, we now have to buy the body and not a new lens.

We also got a fully populated SD93 deck and it’s been working great. Ya gotta love the SDI workflow.

Maybe perhaps we’re “old school” in thinking, but we have some pretty tight turnarounds and tapeless looked really nice as we wouldn’t have to digitize, we could just start editing. It’s music to my ears. Since we needed the extra bits we decided tape would be the best way for us to operate given the current status of tapeless workflows.

Now, do I want to get an HVX200 for myself? Absolutely. I’ll deal with the tapeless format in HD for that price. Plus, it’d be for my own personal projects, not the paying gigs at least for a while.

if you want to discuss anything else, please write back.

*Disclaimer* I am not bashing the P2 workflow. I love Panasonic, they have allowed me to achieve things that I couldn’t have with any other acquisition solution. We made these decisions based on our current workflow, right now. Please don’t get mad at me because I did not choose P2.

Jeremy

[Chris Baldwin]

Hey Jeremy,

I really appreciate the feedback and commend your personal risk of bodily injury for admitting to not being ready for P2 just yet.

I really want to go P2 though and I’m willing and I have the opportunity to put together the workflow together now. I’m concerned as hell about archiving and would love to hear what all the great solutions are.

But I have to admit as much as I’ve researched on the camera, the P2 format and DVCPRO50… I didn’t understand what you meant by the DVCPRO50 format not being up to the 8 or 10 bit compression… I’m not sure how I missed this important feature but I need to be educated here. I had heard that the SDX 900 better than DVCAM25 for keying and compositing. So the DVCPRO50 that comes in as P2 MXF is different(not as robust) as the Digitized from tape DVCPRO50?

Yikes… fill me in!

Chris Baldwin
Shoulder High Productions
Media of the World; For the World!
https://www.shoulderhigh.com
newsletters@shoulderhigh.com

[Chris Bell]

I hope Panasonic offers an archive device for the P2 system. I have been in discussions with several clients, and this is a major issue for them. Firewire drives are cheap but do not have the reliability of Tape. DVDR does not have enough capacity.

Chris Bell

(waiting at home now for my HVX to arrive)

[Jeremy Garchow]

Well, it’s like this. For those reading please see my previous disclaimer.

When you shoot with the 800, the files will get recorded to P2 as DV50 (the SDX records dv50 as well, it just goes down to tape and not p2). Then when you bring the P2 files into an editing system, they will be locked to that DV50 codec. Like I said, DV50 is a pretty sweet codec for most purposes, way better than dv25. It’s 4:2:2, it’s not a file size/resource hog, and it looks great. One of the reasons we chose NOT to go with the 800 is that we would be locked to that codec (at least for anything that we shot) for our graphic and animation work. For instance, we shoot stuff and then we edit it, and then we bring it into after effects to do cool stuff. Out of After Effects, we can render out any codec we want, but when the footage is digitized @DV50, we see a lot more lossiness in the video portions of our rendered projects. The loss is lessened when we digitize the footage in uncompressed. With the 900 and a deck, we can digitize our footage at 8 bit, or 10 bit, or dv50 for ‘offline’ (not that DV50 is an offline codec by any means), or whatever codec we want for whatever that particular project needs.

When you digitize dv50 footage at 8 or 10bit it doesn’t magically make the footage look any better, but the codecs are more robust in terms of multiple generations of animation and graphic output which is normal to our productions. The DV50 codec (in our experience) did not hold up as well as we would have liked. The DV50 format is really sweet, and we absolutely love how it looks. We just weren’t ready for the current ‘limitations’ of P2 (or any tapeless format for that matter). But one person’s limitations is another person’s freedom. Maybe for you, the P2 workflow will work out great.

Also, there’s the subject of archiving which has been discussed on this forum many and many a time. We couldn’t figure out a way to archive our footage without spending a bunch of money on some sort of redundant RAID system that would eventually get all filled up. One guy didn’t trust putting his footage on firewire drives cuz he’s had too many die on him to trust them and the price would start to get pretty high over a short time. He didn’t want to spend that much money on something that he wasn’t going to back in return, which led us to thinking if we could charge for storage somehow, but it’s not fair or feasible to any of our clients. We talked about putting it all down to tape at the end of the project, and then *bing* you’re right back to where you started. That’s pretty much when the decision was made so we figured, why not shoot it on tape and live with digitizing footage for a while until ‘bulletproof’, high capacity, ultra cheap storage is flying off of the shelves at your local corner store (think DVD-R)? We then bought the 900. We love it, love it, love it. We are always looking to embrace new technology that helps us along, we just weren’t comfortable enough to embrace this one.

Did I mention I’d get an HVX200 though? Can’t beat that system at that price. I’d figure out a way to make it all happen.

Hope this helps

Jeremy

*Repeat Disclaimer* I am not bashing the P2 workflow. I love Panasonic, they have allowed me to achieve things that I couldn’t have with any other acquisition solution. We made these decisions based on our current workflow, right now. Please don’t get mad at me because I did not choose P2.

[Ralph Keyser]

Jeremy,

I think we would have made the same choice that you did between the SPX800 and SDX900 at this very moment in time. You’ve summed up the pros and cons well. The cameras are the same, of course, so it really is an issue of fitting it into your workflow.

I do have a question for you. I was surprised at the concern about loss of timecode in a digital transcode of DV50 to something like uncompressed. How would you go about doing the conversion?

BTW, I would second the comment about lens selection for either of these cameras. It really matters, and I’d expect to spend more on the lens than the body.

Ralph

[Jeremy Garchow]

[Ralph Keyser] “I do have a question for you. I was surprised at the concern about loss of timecode in a digital transcode of DV50 to something like uncompressed. How would you go about doing the conversion?”

You only lose the timecode if you bring in a dv50 clip and then transcode (through quicktime or other means) to an uncompressed file (which is not a blight on Panasonic or P2, but on quicktime).

If I bring in the DV50 off of tape to uncompressed the timecode from the tape timecode comes with it. Also, I personally prefer the look of the footage digitized through SDI to an uncompressed format. Firewire transfers are a little more ‘dirty’ to me, but maybe I’m just a snob.

Does this answer your question, Ralph, or did I miss what you were trying to say?

And Chris, Ralph is right. Spend just as much or more on the lens. You’ll be H-A-P-P-Y. Better yet, see if you can go to a rental house and setup the camera with different lenses and see what you like after you have recorded and brought the footage into an NLE.

Jeremy

[John Frey]

Nice, informative, polite post by people cool enough to fully explain their workflow – even good grammer and spelling.

John D. Frey
25 Year owner/operator of two California-based production studios.

Digital West Video Productions of San Luis Obispo and Inland Images of Lake Elsinore

[Chris Baldwin]

Wow…

I feel like the hammer was just dropped on me (and P2) today…

I went back and read the “Archiving” thread in the P2 forum from the end of Jan06 and together with this thread I have the feeling that there is simply no way to justify making the investment in P2 based equipment and workflow.

https://forums.creativecow.net/cgi-bin/new_read_post.cgi?univpostid=857154&forumid=193&postid=857225&pview=t

I can get around the loss of timecode issue and I can embrace the added time of transferring media to the final edit suite’s hard drive(as opposed to log & capturing)…but I have yet to see a rational archiving system and workflow.

It seems to be the nail in the coffin. I even understand the high cost of P2 acquisition media. But until archiving becomes as cheap as tape or cheaper, I don’t get what we’re even talking about all this for.

I mean Jan, Gary anybody! How do we archive? I’m even talking about working in DVCPRO50 SD still at this point.

I’ve heard burn desired clips to DVD-R – 4.7gig or 9gigs for dual layer. Let

[Chris Baldwin]

In light of John’s last post I should probably amend my last post.

I think I must have some wires crossed and that there are some solutions out there.

I would love to hear the recomendations.

Chris Baldwin
Shoulder High Productions
Media of the World; For the World!
https://www.shoulderhigh.com
newsletters@shoulderhigh.com