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NO p2 for me! Forget it!
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I think the key issue here Serge is that Panasonic would not have been able to deliver a 24p DVCPROHD cam if they had gone for a tape option. I’ve read several times that the tape transport in the Varicam is what makes it so expensive. getting 100mbps to tape is not a cheap thing. So the ONLY way you can have this cam cheap is if it records without a tape mechanism. Go and spend $40K or whatever on the varicam if you like tape but we cant expect that same set-up for $6K.
Panasonic have an opportunity to deliver an uncompromised HD image (i.e not HDV) to a wider audience. I think it is a bit ahead of it’s time, workflow may be difficult – but it’s just going to get easier as the years go on and it’s going to be the best image qualitly you’ll get from any cam in this price range.
For what it’s worth I have the same reservations as you. I can film conferences all day – 10 hours, on my own. I have no time to be backing up data every 5/10 mintues. It’s me in the field having to film everything as and when it happens, unexpectidly. I can’t ‘plan’ for downtime to transfer…. This cam would NOT work in that situation. Especailly if I shot DVCPROHD and then the client wanted all the tapes – which happens. No, this is a real problem.
However the benefits of the cam, 1080p 4:2:2 colour space make me really think about using it for the short films I make. It isnt perfect. You think I want to stop every 5 mins to back-up my P2 card? No. But I could do it. Is it worth it for the quality of the footage I’m going to get compared to any other offering out there???? We’ll see at NAB.
Who knows, some third party may come up with a portable device/ HDD to record direct to. For me that would be a great option.
Serge, I do not disagree with you at all. When I first heard about the workflow I thought Panasonic had gone mad. It isn’t very practical right now, and it isnt for everyone. Yes it’s expensive even if I buy 2 4GB cards with the camera. But am I prepared to accept this inconvenience to get affordable HD? If I could afford it I’d buy Varicam, but I cant!
I’m waiting to hear the NAB reports as the price of P2 is going to be a MAJOR factor in buying this camera. Who knows what Panasonic have planned. We know SD cards are very cheap, so I’m sure Panasonic could manufacture them for much much less than they are currently selling. 4 1GB cards will cost you less than $350 so $1700 to sandwich them up is some mark-up. Panasonic may cut this price enormously just to get people buying into P2. The DVX100 was a runaway success and you can be sure they will want the same thing from this camera.
If I had 30 mins of DVCPROHD 1080p for a reasonable price then thats a workable soltuion. Lets see what they offer and how long we have to wait.
For clarification how many minutes of DVCPROHD 1080p 24/25fps would you get on the 4GB/8GB card?
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Karl,
As Jan said in another post, sorry, NAB.
Gabriel Costache
Sales Engineer
Panasonic NZ Ltd -
I still don’t get you Peter. News crews regularly wipe over old tapes. You can see this in the increase in dropouts in news programmes.
Now, you say about backing up the video twice. This doesn’t get done today as standard practise. The cameraguy tapes the event and at the end, might wind the tape back a bit to see if it’s worked. Then you have a mastertape, that gets digitised to edit from, and the master either gets stuck on a shelf or wiped and re-used. Similarly, if you’re an indie movie maker, documentarian, whatever, you shoot the master tape, wind it back to check a bit, and get it into your edit suite and stuff it on the shelf. At no point do you check the whole tape until it’s too late to go back and shoot the once in a lifetime event again.
No what’s different with P2? Well, shooting direct to memory has got to be more reliable than shooting direct to tape. Then you shove the P2 into your NLE, and then take that P2 and dump it’s contents to tape, to disc, to hard drive, whatever. Yes, when you wipe that P2, the video is gone, but if you’ve made an unattended backup to tape, both that and your NLE would have to fail for you to loose anything, whereas in shooting direct to tape, which is not always reliable, you’ve lost your footage before you’ve even began!
With digital video, it’s either 100% perfect or 0%. I don’t see why dumping a P2 to tape is going to be any less reliable than the current standard, which is just shooting direct to tape. By keeping your deck in a nice, controlled, office environment, where you can lavish it with the care it needs, rather being bumped up and down on your shoulder in all environments, I can only think that shooting P2 and dumping to tape would be MORE reliable than the old way of doing things, rather than less. And yes, accidents will happen, but they happen now. I can only see this reducing accidents.
As for destroying the original – remember, when you’re out videoing stuff, the “original” is the unique event you’re video taping, and that can never be repeated, and in that sense, under no video capture mechanism do we get to keep the original event, only a copy of it on some ephemeral media, be it tape, disk, P2 or whatever. And if you count the “orginal” as the master recorded copy, with digital video, every dub is a clone dub and is as an equally valid master as the original.
Remember, when video tape first came out, it was re-used as it was so darn expensive. If they wanted to keep something, they did a tele-recording onto film. That didn’t stop video tape taking off to become the norm, and the high price, initially of P2 won’t stop that taking off either.
I guess what I’m looking forwards to is not having to wait for tape to get up to speed after hitting the record button!!
Graeme
– http://www.nattress.com – Film Effects for FCP
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1TB = 217 DVDs, not 1 million, or about 83 miniDV tapes.
The hard drive stuff is all about getting the video into your NLE as fast and as easily as possible. It’s not about long term storage.
If tape is so smart, cheap and simple, why do the BBC, of all people, have bother playing back D1 dubs of old quad recordings as the D1 decks are giving up the ghost. Come on – tape always has been iffy, and sure, an 80s Umatic might play back today, but the tape was so big, and the quality of the video on it so low, the tape would have to practically deteriorate to dust before you’d notice anyway.
Graeme
– http://www.nattress.com – Film Effects for FCP
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Maybe Serge is still editing tape to tape in a linear suite 🙂 That would certainly explain why he likes tape.
Hey, I like tape, I have shelves full of the stuff. But just as I remember adopting NLE early on, and just as I made the mistake of not getting into digital video earlier, I’m ready to embrace solid state recording ahead of time!
Graeme
– http://www.nattress.com – Film Effects for FCP
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I don’t think a 15 frame GOP MPEG2 is 4 times as efficient as, say, DV, never mind a 6 frame GOP. It might just reach sort of DV quality on images with less movement. If they really wanted to use an efficient codec, why did they not use MPEG4?? Because they want to keep the cheap cameras lower quality?? As for chroma sampling, 4:2:0 is just about acceptable on progressive video, but quite ghastly on interlaced.
Graeme
– http://www.nattress.com – Film Effects for FCP
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Fact is tape will die at some point, P2 is the start of it, but it’s going to be a long and painful death. For almost all the work we do at our company (Longform doccos, event programs etc) P2 workflow doesn’t add up. I love the idea of it, and we’ll probably get one, but it will take a while before it ticks all the right boxes for us.
Steve Connor
Cardinal HD -
Steve, that’s a very wise response! Let’s hope some of the as yet unnanounced things that Panasonic will announce at NAB will help all our P2 workflow dilemmas.
Graeme
– http://www.nattress.com – Film Effects for FCP
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Am i missing something ?
At less than $10k you will get your money back so quick on a few paying jobs, i cannot see how you can go wrong.
When i bought my FCP Uncompressed HD set up it paid for itself in a few weeks doing SD work, if i had bought the Avid Nitris HD i would still be working for the bank !
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[NICK B] “At less than $10k you will get your money back so quick on a few paying jobs, i cannot see how you can go wrong. “
I completely agree Nick.
As I mentioned in another thread, I think we need to keep in mind that to shoot the same format right now would cost us roughly $85,000 (Varicam and Deck).DVCProHD at under $10K is fantastic, and while the workflow may not be ideal for some productions, I think it’s obvious that this is a groundbreaking offering from Panasonic.
I look forward to hearing all the details in few days.
Luis Caffesse
Studio 3 Productions, Inc.
Austin, Texas
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