Making the jump to the HVX 200…is this the right setup?

[Marcus Van bavel]

You might also look at Raylight w/Premiere pro, there’s at least one
Fox station using it for TV news and they seem to be happy with it.
https://dvfilm.com/raylight

[Jeff Heywood]

It seems interesting but what I like about the Axio is its ability to work real-time without any kind of transcoding. I’m basically juggling between the Axio and an Avid and trying to figure out the field to post workflow that’s best.

[Marcus Van bavel]

Sounds good, but for the record Raylight does not transcode, you can drag DVCPROHD MXF files directly into the project. see https://dvfilm.com/raylight/raylightHelp.htm#pluginPremiere

The main difference between Axio and Raylight is that Raylight relies on CPU power (at least dual core for multistream playback) rather than the add-in card, that’s why you could probably buy about three systems running Raylight vs. one system running Axio.

[Accountneedsrealnameupdate]

Personally, I find it easier to leave the P2 cards in the camera and dump them to a computer via the USB cable instead of using the PCMCIA slot, but that’s assuming you are working alone and can spare the time. Using the camera as a firewire host and dumping to a firewire hard drive is another option. I’ve done the PC shuffle a few times and I think I’d go with a P2 store if you’re planning on doing a lot of it. Sure wish they’d release the 16 GB P2 cards, a 30+ minute ‘film load’ would solve a lot of my problems. We have a couple of FS-100’s and I cannot say enough bad things about them. Spend your money on more P2 cards and come home with all of your footage.

What is your final deliverable? You said that you deliver content to a great many screens, but you did not say how it gets there. If you are rendering out to a file for media servers, as we do, instead of going to tape, I would go with Avid. We started using the software only version of Avid Xpress Pro HD when we first got our cameras and it’s worked out great. If you need to play out real time to an HD tape deck, then I believe you really ought to step up to Media Composer with an Adrenaline, but that puts you into a whole new price range, so the axio might be the best bet. I have to admit I’m not that familiar with that part of Avid’s line, so maybe someone can correct me if I’m wrong about this. I guess the other, and possibly most important factor is whether or not you have experience with either PP or Avid. I would stick to what you know, but if you’re going to learn a new NLE, I think Avid is a more marketable skill, but I’m sure their are many here that will disagree.

Best of luck!

[Jeff Heywood]

Our final output is, for the most part, a file for media servers pushing HD.

Some of our stuff will be for EPK’s, but strangely most stations around here prefer getting a DVD.

In all my reading, I didn’t realize the HVX could just transfer files off to a firewire drive.

As far as the Avid versus Axio thing goes, it seems there are a lot of things the xpress is locked out of. They keep wanting to sell me the mojo, but realtime SD preview is something I just don’t care about. I’d like realtime HD preview and I can get it with Axio. I love Avid. It’s always been my favorite edit platform (though I have strayed). I’d dismiss Axio outright if I had clients to impress because, really, at least around here Premiere Pro, doesn’t impress clients. But, we’re in house and I’ve used the system before with great success cutting a behind the scenes DVD for a game. I like the realtime preview out to an HDTV monitor for both PP and After Effects.

I don’t know truthfully. I keep flipping back and forth. I’ve got my one big shot to spend money and buy the right things. After that, it will get much more difficult to fix any mistakes.

[Barry Green]

If you’ve got the budget, and you like Premiere Pro, I’d definitely go Axio over Avid. Avid doesn’t do several things that the HVX does; 1080/24p for example.

For P2 integration Axio is amazing. It really integrates the P2 workflow the way that it’s “supposed” to be done. It even goes a step further than other solutions because it actually integrates the P2 metadata into Windows Explorer, so when you open up a card and look at a clip you can choose to see the timecode, user clip name, scene number, take number, etc. right there in your explorer window. It also cross-references the MXF file over to the icon, so when you look in your “video” directory it substitutes the generic MXF icon with the actual clip thumbnail picture. Very, very nice.

But not usable on a laptop.

Now, Raylight on the other hand, is dirt cheap, and gives Premiere (and Vegas) full native MXF integration. Not quite to the same degree with Windows and whatnot (like Axio does) but then again, it’s not $4000. And Raylight works on the laptop! So you may want to end up with both.

With both solutions, the whole process of copying to a hard disk can just disappear. You can edit right off the cards. Shoot the footage, edit the footage. No waiting, no file conversion, no unwrap/rewrap, no nothing — just shoot, plug in the card, edit. Maybe not so practical a workflow with today’s tiny cards, but with the 16’s coming out in a couple of months (hopefully) and rumors that we might have 32’s coming out by the end of this year, well, that starts to change everything. Editing right from the cards is going to become a priority. Raylight offers it right now for Vegas and Premiere Pro; EDIUS and AXIO do it perfectly, and Avid can do it to some degree. Hopefully Avid’s next revision will “get it right” in time for the larger cards.

The other great thing about Raylight is that you can download a trial copy of Premiere Pro and a trial copy of Raylight. Try it out on your system. If it does everything you need, you just saved $3000 or so on hardware. But Axio will always have more realtime capability and it also has the hardware monitoring, something you can’t have without a hardware board.

Bottom line is: if you want to use Premiere Pro, and can afford Axio, that combination offers the most-integrated, most-powerful P2 workflow possible. It’s not cheap, and some people don’t like Premiere Pro, so you have to make sure it’s right for you. But if it is, if you want Premiere Pro, Axio is the tightest integration system that delivers on all the promises that P2 makes. EDIUS is a close second, it’s really neck-and-neck, the only difference being that a) you can get a software-only version of EDIUS or you can spend for the hardware, and b) Axio integrates the P2 metadata into Windows, whereas EDIUS doesn’t. Next-most-integrated would be Raylight with either Premiere Pro or Vegas — it’s really fantastic what Marcus van Bavel has done. Quite a bit further back would be Avid; Avid at least lets you edit off the cards, but its hard-disk editing workflow is a tad goofy IMO (having to copy the audio and video files separately to C:\Avid Media Files\MXF\1?!?!”) and it doesn’t support all the modes. Next-to-last, for P2 integration, is FCP. The new importer for FCP is nice and certainly better than before, but having to transcode to a custom file format is sooooo 2006. Works fine for today, but when we’re ingesting 32gb cards any editor that doesn’t have native MXF support is going to fall to the back of the pack.

—————–
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)

[Jeff Heywood]

Wow that’s a thorough response. Thanks much. That smooth workflow is what I’m looking for most of all. I really don’t want to mess around and I want to do things as quick as possible. We’re in heavy demand and we’re behind already and we haven’t even started.

It’s good to hear that it is working well with mxf. I was on alpha drivers using the system this summer and there were some hiccups, but not bad considering the drivers weren’t released.

With the HVX we are semi-regularly out in the field, so until the dream P2 cards come out we do need a smooth system to quickly offload. The P2 store or a laptop is probably going to be the way we go.
I guess the problem with the laptop is that you can’t verify, or can’t do it as easily as on the p2 store.

[Barry Green]

P2 Genie’s supposed to be getting an update to add CRC verification, so that’ll take care of the laptop verifying situation…

—————–
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)

[Accountneedsrealnameupdate]

Just want to clarify a couple of points. In Avid Xpress Pro HD, you can edit directly from the cards. Data on the cards looks just like data on a media drive, their is no difference. Once you have the clips up in media tool, you can use the ‘consolidate’ command to copy the clips to your media drive. You do not need to do that ridiculous copy to avid/blah/wtf nonsense that they have in one of their online tutorials. I never understood why they told people to do that. It must have been an early work around.