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NO p2 for me! Forget it!
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You could say P2 is not a format !
No need to buy a deck either !!
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Hi Graeme,
[Graeme Nattress] “News people regularly re-use tapes. They don’t seem to have a problem with it. …”
Just because that makes economic sense for TV news managers & executives doesn’t mean it’s an appropriate model for everyone else. Starting this month, Panasonic begins marketing P2 to essentially all video shooters & their clients, everywhere. Worldwide TV news field production is significant, but it’s a relatively small number of shooters compared to P2’s new emerging market. Is it possible — likley? — “the rest of us” answer to a somewhat differernt economic model than TV news?
[Graeme Nattress] “… As for erasing your original footage – wiping P2 memory after making a backup is no more dangerous than hitting “save” in your word processor, backing up what was in memory to hard drive, and regularly making CD backups. Everyone does this all the time. …”
However, most of us don’t _originate_ hundreds of thousands of frames of _original_ video frames per hour on our PCs & Macs with anywhere near the frequency equal to the amount of P2 acquisition soon to begin (lord willing! so Jan can retire early!) There’s a huge difference in quantities of original data we’re discussing, word processing or what have you vs. digital video.
Video data volume accumulates much faster than most any other type of date we commonly deal with. In the face of that, do we know if typical “reasonably priced” P2 transfer & backup hardware & software (and multi-vendor operating systems and multiple device drivers) will prove reliable enough to handle the task? It might be all good — that’s the word so far from some TV news organizations — but the jury is out concerning typical reliability AT THE SCALE OF emerging non-TV news P2 production.
[Graeme Nattress] “… With the current tape process there is NO BACKUP. At least with P2 you have to consciously make one. The weakest link in the current tape process is shooting onto tape. There’s no confidence record, you can’t just plug your data into a laptop to see if it’s all come out all-right. You don’t know if you had a head clog, or some dirt got in, or whatever. …”
I agree with you that P2 and videotape acquisition are very similar in terms of the kinds of things which can go wrong, unnoticed, during recording. But they are utterly different — in the case of non-TV news production — in that we rarely plan to routinely erase original videotapes. That’s a HUGE difference.
Also, my sympathies in advance to any videotape-based production executives (some of which are my clients!) and their staffs which do not follow data backup procedures such as I described earlier. It is at their peril if they don’t backup their videotapes at least once, eyeball-verify them at least twice, and secure them off-site at least once.
But, notice how the videotape people have one less task than the P2 people? The tape people only have to make at least one backup, not the two the P2 people must make, because the original tape is one of at least two copies.
[Graeme Nattress] “… You seem to be trying to make P2 meet higher standards of data security than everyone already applies to tape. …”
Tape, P2, hard drive, optical, paper & pencil, whatever: All require the same level of data management and data security, but with one big exception: The original recorded “object” is not preserved in the case of use-once tech such as P2 & hard-drive acquisition! So in almost all cases (except maybe TV news), videotape producers have one less worry concerning their data backup & security processes. And it’s a big one!
“Backup” does not equal “preservation”. Ask an archivist. It can come close, if people work really hard at it, but it’s not the same. And it only comes close if people put time & effort & money into it.
None of this means P2 isn’t worthy — it is. But it isn’t magic.
P2-style acquisition will work out fine, as long as people — oh well, you know the drill by now …
All the best,
– Peter
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Hi Peter,
You said: I know we could keep the dialog civil, and maybe even I’d learn a thing or two.
Ha! Ha! Ha! That is rich! No offense to you but I feel that this is probably wishful thinking. We can’t even keep it civil and they aren’t here. It is quite amazing to me that people can be so rude in their replies and I am not referring to anything you have said. I sometimes am tempted to ask, if they were standing in front of me would you address me that way?
>Now, back to our regularly-scheduled program, “The Thread That Ate The New Jersey Turnpike”, Chapter Two: The Doubters Have At It Again!, where our heroine (fashionably attired, gazing at her computer screen with a look of composure, but also with some disapproval) was saying:
Now I see there here you read that into my words, given me a great wardrobe, so perhaps I am just as guilty and didn’t put in enough melodrama, but if you were standing in front of me I would say pretty much the same thing, but you would see my face and know that I was just challenging you not dissing you. There is no way that I would sit and watch something frame for frame twice. I wouldn’t do it and frankly I think it is a little unbelievable that you wouldn’t find an easier way to do this.
>I hear you, but of course in most cases there won’t be World Bank class data management —
Okay so maybe the World Bank was too high.
A>s I said before, I don’t trust a computer any farther than I can throw it. Well, maybe a few feet further, but that’s my limit.
But I do check on PowerPoint presentations and other documents that I find would be outstandingly inconvenient if they were lost. I check the file manager in Windows to see if they are the same size and move on. Perhaps that fact is really that you are just not looking at is as data. I do back up as it is important to understand the details of data world, but once we are there, boy life becomes much easier.
>Sure, backup systems usually work wonderfully well most of the time. Let’s say they work correctly 99.99% of the time … actually, Panasonic might even publish a “9s” statistic for their new P2 hardware; if so, it would be interesting to see.
So far I have found the only time my back up system didn’t work was when I didn’t do it.
>as a result Jan will be able to retire early!
In my wildest dreams! Please!
>The result is potentially (yes: only potentially) a somewhat random scattering of a not insignificant number of irretrievably lost original recorded frames, all over the world. And that’s just what’s _automatically_ lost in the process of the _required_ step of backing-up the P2 cards.
Hey the back up is either a tape or data. You can ask which is more reliable. Frankly I find my computer and its back to be the more reliable. And I always know where it is.
>Whereas, if the original recording was done on videotape, all of the original frames — good frames as well as dropouts, creases, warped cassettes, and so forth — would be happily sitting on a shelf, waiting for an archivist to retrieve them.
Or it is simply transferred to another source and the archivist can retrieve a lot more quickly as the archive can be interface to the database and the database can be funded by the metadata.
> In practice, dropouts, etc. are fairly infrequent, so maybe videotape is 99.99% reliable? I don’t know. BUT MOST PRODUCTION WORKFLOWS DON’T REQUIRE ERASING THE ORIGINAL FOOTAGE. (Sorry for shouting, but that’s the main point.)
I have seen more dropouts on tape that I have seen in my computer. And if you are going to shout, count to ten. This is supposed to be a civil conversation. Remember? 😉
>Sure, TV news organizations may erase videotapes willy-nilly, but most other video production workflows don’t. And although I’m sure Panasonic will continue to succeed selling P2 into TV news, the new, additional market push is elsewhere — everywhere else — where almost no one routinely erases original work on videotape and film.
You are not erasing your work; you are moving the work to elsewhere.
>I think there’s an order of magnitude difference between those two scenarios, TV new vs. everything else.
I would say that you are correct, every arena has a workflow, but you keep looking at it from one view, and that is that you are erasing the work, no, you just moved it. Check it. Is it there? Yes? Then move on.
>Perhaps if we wrote 86,400 words per hour we might give it more thought. And care.
I do care and I do check.
>I’m not implying the Panasonic hasn’t given P2 enough thought or care, but rather perhaps its implications haven’t been well thought out by most non-TV news shooters.
Oh it has been given careful thought. The point is that you cannot approach it the same way as you do tape, or you will never leave tape behind. You have to do that paradigm shift thing. Think different! our friends at Apple say, I say think differently.
>P2-style media (including other frequently-erased media, such as hard drive-based acquisition) is long overdue. Managing the transition to it and reliably managing its dataflow will require a “World Bank”-level of effort if we’re to avoid losing irretrievable chunks of history and culture.
Oh I think that is extreme. I think that anyone that is in the business of working the reality shows knows what they go through and how many times the stuff gets copied and dubbed and put into this computer and transferred to that one, it is a data management nightmare. Hey the point is that if we just look at it from the perspective, if I want to manage this, I will figure out a way. And I could be a small station in Illinois, and independent in NYC or a production company doing a 14 show reality series in LA. If I want to figure out how to manage my data I will. Just like if I want to find that PowerPoint that I was working on yesterday. Now where did I put it?…
Please understand, I am not saying that your feelings are illogical, I am only saying that you need to think about things differently or you will not be able to make the transition away from tape.
Best regards,
Jan
Jan M. Crittenden
Product Manager, DVCPRO, DVCPRO50, AG-DVX100
Panasonic Broadcast & TV Systems -
Jan, are Panasonic going to be producing any kind of automated P2 to optical media backup device (with bit checking verification to keep Peter happy)? I’d think that kind of device, if affordable (and why should it not be?) would be a great seller.
Graeme
– http://www.nattress.com – Film Effects for FCP
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[Graeme Nattress] “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. “
I never said it was 4 times as efficient, I just reminded people that its not 4x as bad. MPEG4 is a very demanding codec to encode, MPG2’s got nothing on it. A real time MPG4 HD encoder would be much harder to develop (increasing costs) and consume much more power to run. Of the MPG4 HD videos I have seen (Microsoft’s HD WMV showcase which are essentially MPG4), they also have some serious problems encoding gradients (such as skys) and I for one am very happy they avoided it.
As for 4:2:0, I’m not sure what makes you say that as I have seen the Z1’s footage and when displayed properly it’s so far from ghastly its not funny. HDV 1080i 4:2:0 would have about twice the amount of colour info as 4:2:2 SD, yet everyone always raves about how beautiful the colours are in 4:2:2 SD….. With the pixels being so much smaller, the visual difference between 4:2:0 and 4:2:2 will be significantly less with HD than SD unless projected on very large screens.
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All depends on what you mean “Displayed Properly” 🙂
As for 4:2:0, and just about all other colour samplings, it’s not what it looks like when it’s displayed, as most displays don’t have the rez for 4:2:2 never mind 4:4:4 colour to appear any different, and all good output devices will smooth the chroma anyway, it’s what it’s like to work with, doing effects and such.
4:2:0 on progressive makes 2×2 blocks of chroma, and that’s not too bad at all. It’s a very reasonable compromise.
On Interlace, however, you get 2×2 blocks on a field basis, so that 2×2 block gets stretched out over a 4×2 area, interlaced with another 2×2 block, and as you can imagine, this makes it hard to deal with for compositing etc. That’s why I don’t like it. Not because of how it looks on display, but that it’s a right royal pain in the **** to deal with in post production.
As for MPEG4, it’s what HDCAM SR is using, so it’s not at all bad. And as for gradients – any codec at low data rates is going to do that. HDCAM uses 440mbitspersecond, so it’s very, very lightly compressed with a highly efficient codec. And yes, it’s also highly expensive.
MPEG2 has just about proven itself for delivery, but even today I get DVDs that are poorly compressed. There’s very little room for manuever in it’s SD DVD data rates, and HDV’s data rate is very close to the edge also. A 50mbits MPEG2 for HD acquisition would make total sense, but I’d still want to edit it uncompressed.
Graeme
– http://www.nattress.com – Film Effects for FCP
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I left for 10 minutes and all hell broke lose, its like we’re talking about religion here.
I work on a healthy mix of peanut productions and cumcumber sandwich productions.
I don’t buy any gear generally. I rent the Varicam for a week and I rent the deck for a couple days to digitize the tapes.
If there’s some great long form Hard Drive docking system going to be apart of this camera, well then I guess I’ll wait and see.
Cutting film out of the movie and still industry makes sense, Film beautiful but very expensive and scary stuff. Its prone to scratches and dirt and damage and weave and flicker and bad processing or handling etc. etc. etc.
I think HD tape has shown to be cheap and less dangerous. Flash Cards work for still guys because they’re doing very little data acquition in comparison.
I don’t do it anymore but for awhile people were using tape backups of their harddrives, is that “tape” bad too?I don’t have a “data management” staff, although I could go on and on about nimrods erasing drives and data or crashing systems that lose hundreds of hours of work. Or people BLOWING over files because they “Thought” or “they were told” the stuff was backed up already. We’ve all been there. Productions are always sleepless environments.
Paranoia Squared = P2
There’s a lot of toys you can have on a show, cool lenses, cool cranes, cool locations, but you’ve got to have your basics covered first.
I’m sure in time I’ll relook at the issue, but I hope these type of threads help get us better workable gear, cheaper.
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[Jan Crittenden] “Ha! Ha! Ha! That is rich! No offense to you but I feel that this is probably wishful thinking. We can’t even keep it civil and they aren’t here. It is quite amazing to me that people can be so rude in their replies and I am not referring to anything you have said. I sometimes am tempted to ask, if they were standing in front of me would you address me that way?”
Thank goodness it’s civil here most of the time. The COW is a great place! And yes, people “say” the oddest things online, compared to “real” life. Ahem, my comments excluded of course. >cough< [Jan Crittenden] “… if you were standing in front of me I would say pretty much the same thing, but you would see my face and know that I was just challenging you not dissing you. …”
No offense taken, and I hope none was perceived. I was just imagining you reading my rant, with a _look_ on your face, you know, that subtle “Are you out of your mind?” look? 🙂
[Jan Crittenden] “… There is no way that I would sit and watch something frame for frame twice. I wouldn’t do it and frankly I think it is a little unbelievable that you wouldn’t find an easier way to do this. …”
Well, I might watch every frame in a backup copy (in addition to electronically verifying it) if a recording was important — and which ones aren’t? — and I was about to erase the only other copy — the original — and one of the copies wasn’t “off site” yet. Even if I made two backups, I’d watch all of at least one of the backups before I erased the original recording. Darn straight. I’d like to believe other shooters would do the same, but I could be wrong.
I’d like to believe a client would pay me or someone to do it, but, damn, now I know I’m wrong … 😉
The “easier way to do this” would be my using a backup system I believe to be essentially 100% reliable, but I’m not a believer yet. It could happen. Heck, I might even buy an iPod one of these days. 🙂
[Jan Crittenden] “… You are not erasing your work; you are moving the work to elsewhere. …”
If it walks like a duck, talks like a duck … it is a duck. Of course, to quote “my” President, “I suppose that may depend on what one’s definition of “is” is?”
So you may be right. Or should I say, “You is right.”?
[Jan Crittenden] “… you keep looking at it from one view, and that is that you are erasing the work, no, you just moved it. Check it. Is it there? Yes? Then move on. …”
Well, yes, when I look at it one way it’s like looking down over the edge of a high cliff (!), but of course I could instead simply adjust my gaze ever so slightly upward, and instead see nothing but a beautiful bright blue sky, and then walk forward, into the future, if only but for a little while … 😉
OK, so I made my backup (or 2 or 3), and I see there’s a little icon thingee that indicates the backup is All Good(TM). But later, me and several thousand users (out of a total of 30,000 times that number) later discover to our horror that 500 megs or 5 gigs or 100 gigs worth of backup is for some reason unknown to us Not All Good(TM) due to some software glitch in version 1.0b or whatever.
I worked in technical support at major software vendors for several years, and I’ve seen worse happen in terms of frequency — but thank goodness none of my customers were dealing with 100s of gigs worth of data each! I definitely don’t want that TS job, thank you.
But the preceeding senario won’t be as big a problem if people follow my backup procedure, because they’d know their video backups were good, because they watched the _video_ (not some smiling icon or a flashing “OK”) before they erased the original recording.
[Jan Crittenden] “I do care and I do check. … Oh it has been given careful thought. The point is that you cannot approach it the same way as you do tape, or you will never leave tape behind. You have to do that paradigm shift thing. Think different! our friends at Apple say, I say think differently. …”
I know you care or you wouldn’t be here, and I appreciate that.
The dawning of the P2 Age does not herald-in a change in the laws of physics or norms of good table manners. It does however offer cool new ways to do old things. It also creates new opportunities for bad things to happen to good people — especially if they’re not careful how they use this shiny new cool tool.
Myself, I look forward to the day — perhaps soon — when someone will approach me with the remark: “Is that a P2 card in your pocket, or are you just glad to see me?” 8)
All the best,
– Peter
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(serge) I want my Panasonic 24p HD camcorder under $10k hopefully under $5k and I want it to record on TAPE…. If its on 4gig P2 cards its just a toy to me, not a functioning real world device – too bad.
So, let me get this straight- you want a professional HD camcorder that records to tape for 5k? Well, I want a Ferrari for 5K, but it’s not going to happen, because it’s too expensive of an item to sell at that low of a price. The 8 pairs of record heads in the varicam’s tape transport cost $800 a pair- that’s $6400. And that’s what it costs PANASONIC to build, not what they charge us for it. So, your infanitle tantrum about demanding an HD camera for 5k reveals a tremendous disconnect with reality on your part. It’s not so much that the new P2 camera is just recording to P2 for fun, it’s that it HAS to record to P2, otherwise there’s no way we could get an HD signal on a palmcorder. In order to record to tape you need an entire tape transport and record heads and a camera twice the size, and it isn’t possible to MAKE this camera for 5k, much less SELL it for one. Look at it this way: If you want DVCPRO HD/24p for under 10k, it HAS to be a P2 camera. So either buy one or don’t, but quit crying in forums.
Plus, I thought you were a big, big professional with dozens of feature films under your belt, and you’re telling your max budget is 5k for an HD camera? You say you’re concerned about shooting on a “toy”, but yet you want your “professional” camera to come in at 5k? Is this a joke? Just remeber that the P2 was invented by the same company that invented the Varicam you love so much, so let’s just wait and see, and in the meantime let’s all assume they know what they’re doing.
jeremiah black
dual 2 gig G5
2.5 gigs of RAM
Decklink Extreme capture card -
>>>>>>Cutting film out of the movie and still industry makes sense, Film beautiful but very expensive and scary stuff. Its prone to scratches and dirt and damage and weave and flicker and bad processing or handling etc. etc. etc. <<<< Oh please, film has been used for 100 years, used on thousands of productions. It still have a superior image and will outlast any tape format as an archival format. Sure it's fragile and accidents happen, but anyone with any experience knows how to handle it. Film won't be around forever, but what replaces it won't be HD, it'll be something higher than 2k, have the same or greater dynamic range and will be the new high end format to covet.
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