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[Ethan Sigman]

ok, my last one on this one. i think we agree much more than we diagree. opposite sides, but close to the middle-in fact, we can team up and be “ideal”- let me know if your in the big apple;)

i would summarize my argument by saying that while p2 is expensive, it is empowering in new and exciting ways and creates many subtle time and cost savings that make it actually cheaper than it appears when applied to a volume of work. I think panasonic attempted to address both your combo cam complaint and the field offload complaint when they gave you the “gear” and the “110”. the gear will attach to your camera (albeit, perhaps awkwardly) make it a combo cam that records intra, and simultaneously lets you use your deck to play your archive through the gear to get meta on your legacy footage. it also does byte for byte offload verification. the 110 has 6 p2 slots that do byte for byte verified, automated, field offloads, will edit and hook up to a satellite or drives. don’t forget the p2 store, the belt worn verified 60gig drive- though i don’t own any…

I don’t think Panasonic believes tape is “going away”…. they will sell parts for their decks so they can run as long as there is call for them to justify repair and it seems they believe it will live on in the rental market for a long time. i just don’t expect them sell the two cams side by side with great success and the reality is that it is cheaper to make the solid state cam. car manufacturers don’t sell the old model anymore either, it just sort of seems reasonable, though perhaps not required. tape transports are high precision tolerances, they cost a lot to manufacture and are prone to break. not to mention to cost of tape stock. i would point out that the original varicam sold for 70 grand, plus the cost of the deck which i might be overestimating somewhat but, regardless, it pushed the price of the camera toward 100k, and it had a 1 year warranty. a new 2700 lists for 40k and comes with a 5 year warranty because solid state is seriously reliable. consider the cost of ownership with no repair costs ammortized over 5 years. to me it is like when i got a digital still camera, even the first one that shot to the 1.44 mb floppy disks. it only fit a couple pics, disks weren’t that cheap, had to be backed up etc, etc, but you could delete your bad ones, offload the good ones, and re-use the disks and i shot my face off with what felt like no marginal operating costs compared film. it didn’t look like film but shooting more pictures for less money was the way to shoot more overall.

I agree tape is great for some things and p2 is a compromise in some ways also, i just argue that it saves you time and money too and the features in the “pros” category of p2 are the features that have more “mojo” with me, making the “cons” a worthy price. cheers, catch you on the next one.

Ethan

http://www.EZSproductions.com
http://www.productionmeeting.com/profile/EthanSigman

[Kevin Bachar]

Dear Erich,

I think what happens on some of these threads is the difference between what you and I consider shooting out in the “field” and what others consider “field” production. For shooter/producers like us the “field” means jungle, in tents, powering off a 20 year old honda generator that only runs 6 hours a day to conserve fuel. While for many others the field is out in their city and back to their facility or hotel room at the end of the day. This is where P2 cards and tape diverge. I’m not sure where my savings are on the P2 front if as some broadcasters still require a tape based delivery. So I’m saving time on ingesting into my NLE at the head of the post, but then I’m making 50 to 80 tapes at the end for delivery.

Again, to make it clear. I am not anti solid state. Our series for A&E Jacked! was shot with three EX1 cams and we shot in Newark and handed off the cards to be dowloaded every night and then back out again the next day. I couldn’t imagine shooting it any other way. I’m also not anti Panasonic as I own a Varicam as well as a SONY 900.

The fact is I would love the Panasonic Varicam 2700 if the P2 cost the same as the EX1/3 SxS cards. But they don’t. I would also love the PDW 700 if it shot variable frame rates and was classified as Gold by certain networks. But it isn’t. To make a purchase for a less than top of the line camera does not make sense for me or many other owner operators. So the HPX 500 or 300 or the Panasonic 3000…or the PDW 700 don’t really work, because so many clients don’t look at them as the best. And the truth is if a client will accept a lesser format but I offer them the F900 or the Varicam they will never say no, but there is no way to make that work the other way. My two cents.

Kevin Bachar – http://www.pangolinpictures.com

[Thomas Kaufman]

Guys, I have to chime in for a moment. As long as the cost of P2 cards remains as high as it does, and as long as the material shot on P2 needs to be archived in some less-volatile format, I do not see any cost savings. If a producer adds a crew person in charge of data wrangling, the cost is higher still.

Of course, the price of P2 will come down. But to make it feasible, we need a P2 card that can hold 30 minutes of material and cost about the same as a 30 minute tape. It’s all about the hand-off. Now, some shooters will edit their own material, and for them P2 may be a good thing. But I’m a just a shooter, and at the end of the day/shoot, the producer takes the material and walks. I have friends who shoot P2, one of them saw a problem in the field — a card wasn’t reading correctly — the producer wanted to take the shooter’s P2 card with him. My friend said fine, and didn’t get his card back for about 6 months.

I see Panny’s efforts at P2 as their wanting to stay ahead of the curve. That’s good. But I do feel we’re being forced to accept P2 when it serves Panny’s interests better than it serves our own.

The idea of a camera that does both makes a world of sense. Probably why we’ll never see it.

Yes, the day will come when we’re all shooting tapeless. Expensive decks will be a thing of the past, CF cards will be cheap, and back-up archives will blend seamlessly into the post chain. But until then, could we hold off on trumpeting the “death” of Varicam?

Cheers,

Tom Kaufman,
DP

[Helmut Kobler]

Tom, what happens if the producer brings his/her own P2 cards, and simply hands them to you when you’re ready to shoot? That way, the media resides on the producer’s property, and they take it with them at the end of the day. Problem solved. It requires a change in the way things currently work between *some* producers and freelancers, but that change brings many benefits.

I’m working for a production company that puts around 50 shows per year on networks like History and Discovery. They spend a lot of money on DVCPRO HD tape (which they buy and supply to their freelance cameramen across the country) and could save half of that cost in the first 1-2 years simply by buying a bunch of P2 cards (even at today’s prices, which are likely to drop by NAB). This company would also save a ton of money by seriously downscaling the tape dubbing room that runs 12 hours a day.

Yes, archival would be treated differently than simply putting a tape on a shelf. But even small companies are beginning to put SANs in place, and creating a long-term backup strategy using LTO-4 tapes would not be a big step beyond that.

Imagine: 5 64GB P2 cards hold 12 hours of 720P material. They come back from the field and are plugged into a 5 card P2 reader, which offloads the video in a single hour onto a blazing fast, ultra secure RAID 6 SAN, which every editing station can access. At the same time, the footage is automatically converted into small MPEG-4 proxy files, with timecode burn, which are instantly emailed to any producers attached to the project, along with a transcription company. These proxies also get quickly incorporated into a database of company-wide footage, so any employee can see any shot the company has ever recorded, right from their desk. At some interval, the project also gets backed up to an LTO-4 tape (800 TB per tape…ie, 12.5 hours of full 1080 footage). When the project is done, everything is again archived to a couple of tapes (as opposed to 40 or so tapes), and those sit safely on a shelf somewhere, up to 30 years.

This is all very possible now, at affordable cost, and more and more companies are going to go this way in the next couple of years. And P2 tech works FAR better in this sort of scheme than tape, or even XDCAM disk. It’s a different animal, and it doesn’t work if you try to force it into the same tape-based workflow that’s been used since….what, the 70s? It requires a different workflow, but if you’re willing to make the investment, it can definitely pay off.

[Thomas Kaufman]

Helmut,

You raise some valid points here. And I don’t mean to say that P2 has no place in the grand scheme of things. With example you mentioned, I can see P2 working well for that producer. I did a P2 shoot over the summer that was much like what you’re describing.

But in your example, who is doing the data wrangling? If it’s the producer, does s/he have enough hands on deck to allow her/him the time to load P2 cards onto a hard drive? And if the answer is yes, would that producer have saved money by shooting tape and not needing as much help on set?

As to savings, I’m not sure that the amount of money you save by not having to use tape at the front end of the shoot is more than the amount you’ll have to pay in storage at the back end.

I have no doubt that, someday, we will all be shooting direct to cards/disks, it makes sense this will happen. Bu the lack of standardization means the market will have to shake out some formats while others survive. As an owner of Panasonic products, I have a vested interest in their survival. That’s why I’m disturbed by their totally tapeless line-up of cameras.

Just one camera guy’s opinion, of course!

Tom

http://www.thomaskaufman.com

Tom Kaufman,
DP

[Helmut Kobler]

Hi Tom,

As for the data wrangling, that’s exactly why I mentioned 64GB p2 cards in my example. With 5 of those cards, you can shoot for almost 12 hours at 720 (30p). At 1080, it’s a little less than 6 hours. That’s a lot of footage, and many productions would have a hard time filling it all up in a single day. Given this, the field producer wouldn’t have to worry about data wrangling. They simply bring the cards back to the office at the end of the day, and then do the transfer and erase the cards there (or the post guy does that).

I realize not *all* productions can work in 6 or 12 hour blocks at a time, but a lot can. For instance, at this company I work for, I recently tracked the typical number of tapes a field producer brings back from a shoot (these shoots take place all around the country). It’s very very rare that a producer brings back more than 5 hours of taped material at a time (10 DVCPRO tapes), so that would easily fit within P2’s 5 card capacity. I also think a decent P2 cameraman is going to be able to get his/her shots using less hours/minutes, thanks to P2’s ease of erasing bad clips, and the interval recording features which let you keep recording into a buffer constantly, but hit the record button only when you see a good shot taking place. If tape-based shooters had these features, I think they would come back with even less tape.

So what about the times when a producer is away from the office for more than 6 or 12 hours worth of footage. In that case, the cameraman can take along a Raid 1 drive (two mirrored disks in one enclosure), like this miniature one that uses 2.5″ drives:

https://www.cooldrives.com/2usb2alrahdd.html

Or this one that uses 3.5″ drives:
https://www.icydock.com/product/mb662us-2s.html

There are plenty of other options.

Anyway, just dump the cards off to the drive directly from the camera. Or you can take along a P2 Gear or a laptop and avoid using the camera as the drives. Any cameraman in the digital age should be able to handle this, and it woudn’t take long to train a field producer.

I guess I just don’t see the big deal with making this work. With 64GB cards, so many productions can get away without data wrangling during the day.

One more thing: I really have my doubts that a Panasonic tape/P2 hybrid would sell. It would require a tape drive like a Varicam, plus all the circuitry that supports the cards as well. That means it would be bigger and heavier than a normal camera, the ergonomics wouldn’t be great for one format or the other, and it would certainly cost more. You wouldn’t get a 5 year warranty either (God I love that…5 years!). I think when faced with those compromises, most shooters would simply choose a “pure” solution–either tape or P2.

But that, too, is just one guy’s opinion! 😉

[Thomas Kaufman]

Helmut, you make a good case for P2. But if you’re out in the filed shooting P2 all day, who is it that downloads the cards at night, prior to the next day’s shoot. If you’re doing documentary television production, then you know what a slog it can be — often days run over 10 hours. It’s too much to ask someone who’s been out in the field all day to stay up for X hours more and transfer that material to hard drive, then go out again the next day. So, I guess I’m asking, in a multi-day shoot, wouldn’t you need either a data-wrangle on location, or someone back at the hotel to do the transfer to hard drive?

thanks,

Tom

Tom Kaufman,
DP

[Erich Roland]

Helmut, All your P2 arguments make perfect sense, but your talking to mostly camera guys who come from a different place. Your trying to convince folks who somewhat don’t care, and are just trying to make a living. It’s not a question of convincing me what’s better, in fact I shouldn’t give a hoot one way or another, I do have an opinion but it really doesn’t matter what I think (ok, Id rather not do transfers in the field). If you haven’t worked as a freelance cameraman you may not get our point of view and long establish way of doing this business of shooting other peoples projects for a living.

What matters most to us…. is that we have the equipment available to service our client’s format choice for their project, and it needs to fit our business model. I don’t want to be in a position where I have to convince a client anything. You see, a large share of this business is serviced by freelance (independent) cameraman, and the client who hires us usually dictates what camera they want to shoot and/or what format to shoot on. Those who support P2 in this thread are most likely either Post people or independent production companies where they can shoot whatever they choose. Many freelance Camera folks can only afford one very expensive full size camera, and probably another mini system.

For the last 6 years or so most of the work I’ve done (and what my clients ask for) is shot with the Varicam or F900. Things have shifted a bit in the last 1.5 years may now be split between the HDX-900 and the Varicam with a bit less going to the F900. Here on march 1st 2009, easily 95% of my clients still ask for these cameras with tape recording. I know a lot of people who do the same thing I do (freelance camera), and everyone I have talked to about this (with very few exceptions) feel the same way about they’re tools, they will buy what they’re clients ask for (if they can), but the cost to change is expensive and they have to be very careful, the risk is high when there are too many expensive choices available and a wrong move can hurt the freelance camera person badly. The margins are thin and getting thinner, as we have more choices for our clients. Many have bought into mini-cam systems, and spent money to run into the same problems where the client wants the other brand then what we have bought. before it was only the Sony camera or the Panasonic camera, now there are multiple choice within each product line and this is confusing for all.

Most camera people in this business took a long while to upgrade from standard def cameras to HD cameras because it was a huge hit with expensive lenses, etc. Many are still paying towards the High Def upgrade having bought into a Varicam or HDX-900. The idea that they already need to buy another (45-65k) expensive camera body for the occasional 2/3″ P2 request is not in the realm of possibility right now with a bad economy and too few requests for 2/3 inch P2. To sell the tape camera and buy a P2 camera would be suicide at the moment for most. This is why nobody (that I know) is buying these 2/3″ P2 cameras Panasonic is offering. I don’t know one person who owns a P2 Varicam, not one! (I know ONE guy who bought the 2000, and that’s it). And if you could afford just one, you need to get the very best model so you don’t cut out the higher end requests. You can always give away a better camera, but never can we bring the lower end camera to the high-end format shoot, it wont work!

I also run a small rental house and I have had very few people want to know when I’m getting a P2 varicam, and the (2) P2 2/3″ cameras we did buy have sat mostly. Show me the demand and I’m a buyer. If the clients wants to rent chisels to make wood cut images I’m a buyer of chisels. With no demand, I’m holding onto whatever cash I can to survive a tough economy.

Bottom line, my opinion comes from what my clients (who produce television shows) want. From my seat at this game it looks to me like many (or most) have adapted to P2 or SxS in the small camera market segment, but most 2/3” camera producers have not changed to flash recording. Full size camera production is a different market. There are thousands of great tape cameras owned by excellent cameramen, and thousands more 1200 and 1400 decks installed in producers edit suites and the whole system of using these tools still works just fine with little incentive to change. Will these producers and cameramen eventually switch to newer tech? Yes absolutely, and maybe it’s the first choice on the list of anybodies next big expenditure, but my guess is it’s not for a few years because… it’s a big expenditure! With this very scary economy what ever is working will likely keep working the same way it’s been, because this way of producing TV is not broken.

Early adapters tend to pay the highest price when the systems are not fully mature (as flash is not). My guess is the next round of improvements from the manufacturers will bring the flash system further into maturity and the costs further down, and have MORE of the production population on-board, but until that time its too early for most of the folks I know. I wouldn’t be surprised at all if the P2 medium itself is just a transition peice of hardware, and we soon see a new, faster, cheaper, larger capacity flash medium of some kind that may even have more of a industry wide acceptance so we don’t have the old beta vs. VHS or P2 vs. SxS wars. P2 was tossed out of our fancy new Mac books on almost the same day it was introduced by Pany… go figure that bit of unbelievably bad timing!

Hello Panasonic…. P2 flash is too expensive in this year Two Thousand and Nine! Guess what…. Compact flash cards are very available and becoming very cheap by comparison (and they do the same thing) we can all see whats going on here!

Canon Mark 2 is the newcomer (at the bottom ladder rung) and Red is already changed scarlet in response to this market threat. it will be interesting to see how Canon adapts and how this new idea affects things going forward all the way up the product lines of all video cameras going forward. If I can make a better looking image spending 10k with a full set of fast prime lenses, why should I spend 65k for a body and another 25k for a High Def lens???

Helmut, I disagree that a combo concept would make a much bigger camera. The HVX-200 was only very slightly larger then the 170 without tape drive. In this day and age they stuff more and more into smaller places, microchips etc. Soon (if not already) they probably could design all that’s in a full size 2/3” camera body into a much smaller form but professionals want a full size, shoulder balanced camera , so the demand to shrink the camera mostly lives at the mini camera segment. With an HDX size tape drive and only 2 or 3 P2 slots, this combo camera is a “no-brainer” that would have been selling right now during this transition period to newer technologies, when nobody (en mass anyway) is buying the new Varicams. Bad call by Panasonic in my opinion.

The other smart way to go (for the next move) is a breakaway 2 piece system like Sony has done in the past betacam albeit a bit clunky then. It could be much slicker with current/next technologies. Some of the high-end gear is there already with drives that mount like a film magazines, etc.

We could have a camera (front section) and hang a recorder on the back, then you can swap out the camera or the recorder. We could have 2 different levels of camera front ends with a 2.2-mil sensor camera, or the mid level 1.1-mil sensor, and then 2 or 3 different back-end recorders with P2, Tape, Hard drive (or the next new thing).

This idea makes perfect sense in this 2009 but the manufacturer wants to sell us new cameras every time a slight improvement in the recorder comes out, and a new recorder every time an improvement to the camera section arrives. Guess what… many of us are already hanging hard drives off the back of our tape cameras… and soon the new P2 recorder coming out will be offering more of the same. The future is here now, but the solutions are much clunkier then it could be if designed properly. This 2 part idea would sell like crazy because you’re somewhat protected from improvements making what you’ve just bought obsolete next week (we are all afraid of this), then we could just sub rent the recorder for your camera if the client wants a format you don’t have, or rent the higher end camera section for the one job if most of our work comes from mid level 1.1-mil pixel clients.

I believe Panasonic is stretched way out with too many products that don’t make sense. A 2-piece system makes perfect sense today but the marketers want to sell us more crap we don’t need, and is too specialized. This tough economy will punish companies that sell stuff that don’t make sense. We will see I suppose, the next few years will shake out the weak, or the “not too clever” where the marketer rules.

(Wow, way too many words).

As always, just one guy’s opinion.

Peace, ER

Erich Roland
http://www.dc-camera.com
HD camera rentals, Washington DC
(and Cameraman)

[John Sharaf]

Gents,

This is a great discussion, and one unfortunately that the manufacturers needed to hear long ago, but alas, despite the pro forma meetings they did sponsor with end users (I’ve been to some) they rarely listen.

There is no dispute that we as freelancers have to buy into the cameras and formats that our clients dictate (mostly net news clients) and the recent history of that segment has shown that they’re the laggards in this area and the freelancers have had to stake out their own territory as many of us have done with the F900’s and Varicams.

I’m still pissed at Panasonic for dividing the Varicam business with the X900; they should have just lowered the price of the Varicam to $25K and then introduced a 1920×1080 Varicam 2, but despite all the “advances” in technology, apparently this was not possible. I agree with Erich and others about the disservive that continues to the freelancers with the two current P2 Varicams and told everyone I knew at Panasonic last April on the floor of NAB when I first saw what they had in mind. I told them they’d never sell any of these cameras I believe that I’ve been proven correct. I understand that they’ve “given” units to Panavision and other rental companies. This is not to say that the 3700 is not a great camera, it is, but cameras/formats must be client driven not determined by the marketing department, despite recent successes with that formula.

I know this is a Panasonic forum, but I do find it interesting that there has been no mention of the new 2/3″ HD XDCAM from S**Y. It’s propriatary media is cheap, permanent (50 years) and can be screened/digitized with a $3K reader. The camera itself benefits from the mature chipset and DSP from their best OB camera (HDC1500) and shoots 1080, 720 and SD at all speeds including PAL (with the final addition of 24p with software option soon) and has already been adopted by CBS and I expect will be by NBC and ABC as well (I understand that ABC has bought five already to supplement their need for more SD XDCAMS because they realize how ill-advised it is to buy more SD cameras). I own three of these cameras already myself and am very happy with them. I know that the MPEG2 422 GOP format is “stunted” and no rival for AVC-I or DVCPRO100 for that matter, but it is perfectly fine for television (and obviously lesser uses like the internet) and at least eliminates the horizontal down sampling that even the mighty F900R does in recording to HDCAM.

I would suggest what several others have eluded to in this discussion, that P2 is likely to go the way of the dodo (M2) precisely because of the cost of the media and the need to process it for use and archiving.
Furthermore the PDW700’s lower cost (than Varicam and F900) will stimulate it’s acceptance, and despite the difficulty in actually getting delivery of the camera Sony has somehow managed to produce almost 4000 units worldwide already (see release notes for version 1.24 software). This is probably the reason that they’re so hard to get; users throughout the world, notably broadcasters in Italy, Germany, Japan and elsewhere have jumped on this camera for the two reasons that I find it so attractive – low price, permanent/cheap media. P2 and tape for that matter, step aside or get rolled over in the deluge.

JMHO,

JS

[John Cummings]

Good point about the PDW.

It’s a very versatile camera and comes closest to the ideal of having one camera for many customers. Unfortunately, The PDW700 itself is a compromise. The XDCam at it’s current specs can only be regarded as a “mid-level” HD camera. It is what it is and I applaud Sony for it.

While the idea of going back to a “dockable” camera system seems like it might be worth another look, the reality of getting these manufacturers to agree on anything would be akin to herding cats in a thunderstorm. Too bad…there are possibilities there.

Here’s where I think Panasonic can do better…

1. Combine all the features of the two present Varicams into one camera.

2. Then they should come up with a large chip PL mount version for all of us that are tired of jumping through expensive and cumbersome hoops to get a shallow depth of field. That’s where all the action is right now. It doesn’t have to look like a science experiment gone bad…just the same great shoulder mount camera with a twist.
Isn’t that the logical next step for the Varicam?

Something like that would likely drag me into the P2 camp.

J Cummings
Cameralogic/Chicago
cameralogic.tv
HDX-900/HDW-730S/DXC-D50