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Need Advice Purchasing a Camera
Hey all,
Not sure if this is the right forum to post in but I am going to purchase a camera for my company on Monday. I need a little help differentiating between a few models and need some suggestions on what to purchase. I am currently looking at 3 different Panasonic models.
The HPX170, The HVX200A and the HMC150.
My first choice is the HPX170 however p2 cards are sooo expensive which makes me want to lean towards the HMC150 which records on SDHC cards.
Basically I want the best quality camera I can get, that records on a card and has variable frame rates so I can achieve super crisp SLOW MOTION effects and Fast motion affects since I will be filming alot of action sports.
My budget is $5000.00
Any suggestions on what to purchase? It doesn’t have to be a Panasonic either i can be Sony or anything else.
Thanks!
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5 Replies
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The HPX and the HVX are very similar cameras. The HVX200 has a tape drive for recording SD only. If you have no plans on recording to Tape get the HPX170. The HPX has HD SDI out verses the Component on the HVX, the HPX lighter and has a longer warrantee.
I feel the P2 cameras would be better quality because of the codec and compression rate.
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I too recommend the HPX170. The HMC150, while shooting to cheaper cards, shoots to AVCHD which means that will have to transcode every single frame to ProRes, a process that can take a while. You will make up the cost of in transcode time that you would have spent on P2 cards in a few jobs. DVCPro HD is native to FCP so FCP just has to rewrap the files to a QT movie instead of transcode.
Are you close to a VAR that can setup a demo for you?
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I have been using the HVX-200 for years and just recently got some P2 cards.
I would reccomend this camera, and I hear the HVX-170 is the same with
no tape drive.But I donno the price of the 170, so can you get that and some cards for $5000?
The P2 cards really interface nice into FCP 6.
I am all the way in the middle of the Pacific Ocean
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Thanks for the advice guys. My next question is, can I record in slow motion with any of these cameras?
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All three cameras will record up to 720p60 footage… 60 FPS will allow for some nice slow motion in post. The HPX/HVX allow many odd frame rates in between the standard rates for more flexibility in speed; this might be advantageous over the HMC150 if you do lots of slow-mo shooting.
As already mentioned, the HPX/HVX both record to a more robust and easily editable format… that’s what I’d get.
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