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I wonder can the P2 cards become bigger (data storing wise) and down to $40 for say 40mins.Then just treated as tapes/DVD,s
No problem with the extra data wrangler on the crew,or mucking around with HD,s in hotel rooms till 4am.
Then wouldnt the P2 camera,s be better than the XDCAM? esp if they make just one Varicam with all the bells and whistles.
I,d have thought it would be worth Panasonic to heavily subsidise the P2 card costs,to make their format the dominant one.. then put the price up 🙂 -
Robin,
Yes, all good points, but according to Moore’s Law which predicts price decrease for such a product it will take so many years for that equation of $40 for 40 minutes to occur that there will certainly be other cheaper faster and more capable storage systems (holographic?) in use by then.
JS
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Yes I guess if they could,they would have by now.
I waited ages for the PDW700,which always seemed to just around the corner,while renting mostly the HDX900 for HD work… and then woke one day and smelt the coffee.. and rushed out to buy the HDX900 that I had already spent so much money renting!!!
Hopefully will get at least the money back on the HDX900,bought last Oct,and most likely make some money.. and then buy the PDW 700 .. when its become as popular as I thought it would be originally.
Just should have got the HDX900 at least a yr earlier.. the price of procrastination !! or avoiding the $50,000 door stop. -
Hey All
My two cents….of course I saddle up with Tom and Erich. Which is how we owner operators work in the documentary field. 5 cards shoots 12 hours…big deal!!! On an extended shoot in a foriegn country with power coming off a back up generator that runs for 6 hours a day…what good is that. Those 12 hour cards will have to be dumped and re-used 3 times. Who is downloading…who is doing double back-up??? I think there is a big difference between shooting in a city…or your own city with your own post house nearby…so you can throw your cards into a reader and download…and shooting in the “field”…and by field I mean a place without running water….or power …or ..you get the picture. Again, don’t get me wrong ….I am not anti- panasonic or anti – sony as I own and operate both an f-900 and a Varicam. I also am not anti-solid state as I finished a big series for A&E called JACKED! which was shot with three crews a night on EX1 SXS cards. But that was shot near my office and we were able to download every night and get new cards out for the next days shoot every day. It was also only possible because of the inexpensive SXS cards which we needed in bulk to equip 3 crews shooting approximately 6 hours a night. Again, P2 would have been too expensive. On the PDW 700 front and the SDX900 the problem with those cameras are they are both at this point not considered GOLD by some networks. I love the Sony PDW 700 —but no over cranking….and no 24p at this point. I mean what was the thought process – The earlier XCAMs had over cranking but this one doesn’t? Huh????? Does that make sense? No…of course not. And like I said don’t even get me started on the P2 Varicams. How are you saving money on tape costs, when you have to either hire someone to do the downloads in the field or work someone to death and then you have to archive at the end. And again…maybe this isn’t known to some…but you have to deliver not just the finished film.. but all the footage. Where is the savings now??? Anyways…my 2 cents…keep and eye out for my Kilauea:Mountain of Fire film for PBS Nature on Sunday March 29th. Shot on the SONY 900 and EX1.
Kevin Bachar – http://www.pangolinpictures.com
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I am a freelance DP and owner of a small rental house. In my area, the HDX900 is the de facto HD camera of choice. However, most of my clients ask for our FireStores and bring their own hard drives on set. Once they see the advantages of file based recording, the tapes are only used for archival purposes.
Ater buying an HPX170, I am more of a P2 fan than before.
The reliability of solid state media, not having to do realtime ingest, rent a deck, clips being so easy to find at any point are all pluses. My editors won’t let me into their edit suites with tapes in my hand anymore.As far as P2 card pricing vs. SxS, a 16Gb SxS card is $745, 16Gb P2 is $800, 32Gb SxS is $1425, 32Gb P2 is $1400. Using AVC-Intra 100 and 720/24P Native, you can get the same amount of recording time as SxS(80 minutes), and this at 10-Bit, I-Frame 4:2:2 vs. 8-Bit, 4:2:0 Long GOP of XDCAM EX. With AVC-Intra 50, 720/24PN, record time is 160 minutes. 1080/24P Native with AVC-Intra 50 is 80 minutes, just like SxS/XDCAM EX.
What I have found is that those who don’t like file based recording are those who haven’t used it. All of the DIT’s I hire do data wrangling as part of their day rate, so file based recording is a net savings for my clients.
Jeff Regan
Shooting Star Video
http://www.ssv.com -
Dear Jeff,
Did you read my post? You mention a set…which is precisely what I was saying about what some people call being out in the field and what people like myself, Tom and Erich consider the field. Sorry but for us …the set…doesn’t come into play. As for DIT’s…well let’s see on my “set” I have the DP, Sound and Director. No room for a DIT in the tent. P2’s have their place…but shooting in the “field” docs is not want of them…yet. And as I stated I am not afraid of solid state my series JACKED was shot on it. Also parts of my Hawaii film for PBS were shot on the EX1 so …sorry it isn’t fear it is what works and what is practical for shooting real in the field documentaries and not set work. Not saying one is more important or better or anything like that just saying you don’t use a hammer when you need a screwdriver.
Kevin Bachar – http://www.pangolinpictures.com
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Kevin, my sets often consist of race tracks and runways and beaches and salt flats. You don’t have to have AC power to do FireStore or P2 or SxS transfers.
Often, my sound persons are also DIT’s, not on a narrative, but doable for a doc.
My points stand, you don’t have to be on a stage or in a hotel room for data transfer, P2 cards are priced similarly to SxS cards, you don’t have to hire an extra body as a data wrangler, tape is not part of the future of field acquisition.
Jeff Regan
Shooting Star Video
http://www.ssv.com -
Jeff, There are some like you who have adapted well, and that’s great. There are also many who have responded in this thread who are not ready for some reason, maybe good reasons. You are right in that the future is not with tape but… P2 is also not ready for prime time (so to speak). Its not mature, and most in the main stream are not using it. Mini camera production has gone in the flash direction because you couldn’t get higher quality recordings from HDV tape, and that was the main driver towards flash. We have high quality recordings in 2/3″ tape systems so the driver (to change over) isn’t fully cooked yet. The cost of P2 (or SxS) media, and to change over cameras, and systems in general is a big expence and therefor a big problem in a bad economy, and its not getting better anytime soon! Also the choices of Panasonic’s 2/3″ products are confusing and not on mark for the needs today.
So this transformation that will happen eventually may have to wait till the next advance in flash medium (or holographic) or whatever, because most of the people in the full size pro market are not buying it from what I can see. I would guess 2 years minimum before we can say most productions are not using tape. If the economy tanks for a long time it could be longer then that. Many tape cameras and decks are working happily with no reason to change, because the (no-brainer) incentives are not there. Give it time we will all understand what you have discovered but it will be cheaper, easier, and make sense to everyone, and then this conversation will no longer exist. Just the fact that there are so many nay-sayers tells the story of a cameras and decks that work just fine.
When the HDX-900 came out half the cameramen I know were lined up to buy them, and many more have bought since. Now that was a product movement that made sense and had legs! (Even though it killed many peoples Varicam’s value)
I know a lot of people in 30 years as a free lance cameraman and I don’t know one person that has purchased a P2 Varicam… not one! Its the wrong product…. or bad timing…. or both!
best, E
Erich Roland
http://www.dc-camera.com
HD camera rentals, Washington DC
(and Cameraman) -
Erich,
A look at my market, the SF Bay Area would tend to validate your posts, just a few 2/3″ P2 cameras in the rental market, however, one only needs to look at the success of the RED ONE, and EX1/3 and the dozens of HVX200’s, the latter of which, of course, use P2 cards. This speaks to the adoption of file base recording. I was offering it to my clients in 2006 with nNovia HDD’s for my DSR-450WS DVCAM cameras.
The reality is that the F900R and HDX900 are the last of the 2/3″ tape cameras. Panasonic took my market from Sony comprehensively, there are no XDCAM HD cameras in the rental pool.
Aside from HDCAM SR, AVC-Intra is the best codec going, and the same P2 cards get to be used for it. Panasonic needs to get traction with this codec, which is why they came out with an under $10K camera with AVC-Intra and the P2 Portable.
Two P2 Varicam models is a mistake, and so are $50K 2/3″ cameras at this point, in my opinion. The game will go to inexpensive large sensor cameras with cheap solid state memory, but in a more user friendly, more refined package and workflow than RED or Scarlett. This is Panasonic’s opportunity and I believe we will see some more offerings from them at NAB. The days of any format/codec or camera that will be viable for 8 or more years are over.
Jeff Regan
Shooting Star Video
http://www.ssv.com -
Hi Kevin,
For your extreme “in the field” shoots, where you have no running water, and generator-supplied power, I bet you can still make P2 work. It doesn’t take much power to run a small 2.5″ raid 1 enclosure off a laptop or P2 Mobile.
Also, solid state backup drives will also come of age in the next year or two. Right now, you could assemble 500 GB of solid state, palm-sized backup storage for about $1000-$1100. Since the drives are solid state, they are very low power, very rugged, and very secure. That gives you another 10-20 hours of media backup that you can perform in the field. In a year, you’ll probably be able to buy a terabyte of solid state storage for the same price. So that’s 20-40 hours of solid state backup capacity in an enclosure slightly bigger than a 2.5″ drive, which doesn’t need its own power source. And if the cameraman is worth his salt and has prepped his scene files before the shoot, the footage already has reasonable clip names and basic metadata baked in, which will definitely come in handy for editing. And if a producer or assistant producer has some downtime during travel, he/she can use a 2.5 pound P2 Gear/Mobile to watch the media and further annotate it for editing later. Plus, the team doesn’t have to carry 20, 30, 40, 50 blasted tapes/xdcam disks around as well. And no poor SOB in the editing room has to log one tape after another once the footage is back to civilization.
Anyway, I think it’s also worth asking: out of all the videography that happens in the world, what percentage of it happens in extreme situations where you’re basically living in the wild, away for electrical power for days and days at a time? I have to think it’s a pretty small percentage of the whole, and it doesn’t seem fair to judge a camera format based on how it serves an extreme situation which many shooters rarely encounter…especially when that same format (p2) beats alternative formats (like tape) in many shooting scenarios that are more commonplace.
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