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NO p2 for me! Forget it!
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Valid points Jeremiah, but you’re getting a little personal and heated. Fully understand, as some comments on the forum do sound as iif they’re almost designed to provoke reaction.
Respectfully,
Graeme
– http://www.nattress.com – Film Effects for FCP
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[Graeme Nattress] “HDCAM uses 440mbitspersecond”
That’s quite a nice high data rate, especially for MPG4. The samples I have seen are the samples really to demo the concept of HD with MPG4 at low data rates (like 8Mbps), and from what I have seen that is just too much compression even for MPG4.[Graeme Nattress] “A 50mbits MPEG2 for HD acquisition would make total sense, but I’d still want to edit it uncompressed. “
Can’t argue with that, but I guess one of the the idea of 25Mbps was not just for compatibility with existing DV transports etc but also to seperate the HDV market from broadcast markets without killing it before it even starts by making it too low a bit rate altogether. Otherwise why wouldn’t 720p use the full 25Mbps it has available to it? -
Absolutely – protection of high end devices from the sales of cheaper consumer / pro-sumer products is a fine art, and one which mostly works. I think it failed with DV, but not by much (as DV was ever-so-slightly too good) but will the same mistake be seen to have been made with HDV? Who knows?
Graeme
– http://www.nattress.com – Film Effects for FCP
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Gramme,
Your point on news outlets having no problem rerecording over source tapes really means nothing due to the fact news stories are temporary.
P2 is the ideal recording format for news outlets where re-using the original source media is a requirement. An average 90 sec daily piece does not require more than a maximum of 40 minutes of source footage.
In the world of commercia,features and broadcast long form programming the current expectations for a producer are for the camera masters to be an asset which can be used long term.
When the price of P2 drops to match tape stock I can foresee many tape based producers considering a switch. Ultimately it will be the clients and producers who must live with the perils of any new technology that will make the final decision regardless of any marketing hype that attempts to convince them to switch their current workflow.
Tony Salgado
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I see it purely as a workflow issues, not a cost issue of P2. It just makes total sense to me, to be shooting with a lightweight, low power, no moving parts format. And It also makes sense to store footage for the long term on some kind of magneto-optical / optical storage, and all that I can see that’s missing, is the workflow between them. Digital Photographers have this workflow sorted, but I’m sure they were sceptical at first. P2 is very much ahead of it’s time and it may take a few years for the workflow to catch up, but it will. In the meantime, it means a camera that is probably about $10,000 less in price than the equivalent camera with tape drive would be, and we don’t need to spend another $20,000+ on a deck, assuming we’re happy backing up to optical media. To me, that’s over $30,000 I don’t need to spend to be up and editing high qualilty (assuming the camera and optics are as good as we hope) high definition video.
Graeme
– http://www.nattress.com – Film Effects for FCP
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I think choosing the media is just about expenses.
Card reader is cheaper than optical drive which is cheaper than tape drive.Using solid state for acquisition might be a bit more reliable than optical
disk, but then you have one more workstage for dumping the memory card to
optical disk.In couple of years price for a 50 GB bluray disk will be something like $2,
so hd or solid state can’t compete as an archival format for at least a
decade or so. I’m not sure even if hd will ever be reliable enough for
archiving.My bet it that summer 2006 one TB of bd costs $50, hd $500 and p2 $64,000.
So the question is do you acquire straight to disk or through the cards.PD-disk might be a bit big in the camera, but think about 72 Mbps of
1080p24 for 40 minutes and not with 60% of it as a total waste.
And that’s 80 minutes with double layer.Why is that, lots of people are telling that you can have only one bitrate
with tape system (dvcproHD) and that’s why you have to dump that 60% of
recorded data, but when card based system arrives, it just keep on dumping?
At the same time sony can record with 5 different tape speeds and bitrates
with hdcam…Btw, sony has had a dvcam deck many years that can transfer data with 4x speed.
So they could easily release quite cheap dvcamHD camera with 45 minutes of
recording time. But they won’t because they will be getting better profits
out of selling PD-disks than tapes.Anyway, I’m happy to get anything progressive 16:9 above 25 Mbps under $30k.
And then if we could bet more color depth out of these cameras than 8 bits.
That’s sooo 80s’…
Getting signal out of dsp before compression would practically just be installing
the hd-sdi-socket, but of course not, we need something like Reel-Stream to do that.It’s nice to have great improvements with video cameras, but if you are not an ENG-shooter,
we are still so far away from optimal digital cinema cameras.
Maybe there are only big enough markets for cameras that have these “full auto” buttons… -
I shot a couple of films on Varicam Panasonic HD that are going to be at upcoming festivals.
Indigo Hearts – Beverly Hills Film Festival.
http://www.beverlyhillsfilmfestival.com April 16th, 10pm. Clarity Theater.Shattered Day – Dances with Films Festival.
http://www.danceswithfilms.com in early May.Check them out at my site http://www.rojakfilms.com. Just to show that I do all kinds of productions. Zero and up, mostly zero.
I really enjoy the Varicam, there is already low end competition in tape HDV it may not be there yet, but its dangerously close to the untrained eye. The argument that I have unrealistic expectations about tape in Panasonic may be valid, but HDV is doing it, maybe not as high end, but its HD. A lot of people I know are shooting DVX100a and are very happy and its not HD.
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I think that while HDV has the potential to be the DV of HD (encoders will be optimised for even better performance with time), there seems to be a little war going on to provide a step up from HDV for the same HDV prosumer market. The only one so far not clearly playing this is Sony, but Panasonic and JVC seem intent in providing higher end options than HDV at around current HDV price points. That’s where the waters are really doing to start to get fuzzy and it could become harder and harder to tell the difference between a $6000 camera and a $80,000 camera unless your watching it on a 20,000 projector 😉
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I’m going to apologize up-front for not reading every post; if what I say here has been stated already, it’s because I stopped around the 30s, to share my insights with you.
My biggest fear with P2 is the same fear that realizes itself every few months or so in my Final Cut Pro workflow. Corrupt files and disks. There was quite a bit of talk about checksums and whatnot; what happens if the checksum comes back stating there IS a problem in the file? It’s been my experience, that, unlike tape, I can’t isolate that problem and save the rest of the media. In tape, a dropped frame at worst ruins a shot. Even a tear in the tape can be repaired. In digital format, a glitch in the file (or storage medium) usually kills all of it. That’s a high price to pay for a single error, and I’ve paid it quite a few times. The saving grace in all of it has been that I had the original tape to go back to and redigitize the material. However, with P2, I have to make a successful transfer to tape in order to have that assurance. Otherwise, I’m still working with a digital copy where simple corruption can be both irreversible and catastrophic.
Someone made the analogy to photography, and Office documents. There is a difference here as well. If, say, 3 blocks of data are corrupted amongst 12000 photos (totally random numbers here) you lose the individual photos that were corrupt, but the rest is salvagable, accepting that the rest of the storage medium is fine. With a video file, in today’s world, you lose any video that had part of it’s file in that corrupted area, even if 90% of the data (frames of footage) are not corrupt. While I won’t say you can’t get these back, have fun doing it. Basically, with digital files, your collateral damage potential jumps signifigantly.
As a final note, there is a lot of talk in this thread about backing up your data. I’d like to point out that the #1 method for backing up data in the corporate world is to back it up to tape, because of the cost + reliability of tape. For now, those two factors seem to outweigh, at least to me, the P2 benefits.
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Tape is certainly used to back up large amounts of data, but only large business use tape, Small businesses use optical disc based solutions, and as optical discs become cheaper and larger, this is the force that will drive your video backup solutions.
And sure the digital photographer might take many thousands of photos, but that’s to get the 20 or so that count, and loosing one of them is like you loosing a footage tape worth of video that has a key shot on it, surrounded by outtakes. Sure, it’s not a direct analogy, but don’t dismiss it either – to each individual there is data you cannot bare to loose, whether it be video, images or words.
To me, the weakest part of the “tape” solution is the very moment of capture to tape in camera itself, where a dropout could clog your heads for minutes and you could not be recording anything useful at all, or the tape could get scratched by a piece of dirt on a roller or part of the mechanism. I think we’ve all had something like that happen. That’s the first key point of danger with tape that P2 eliminates, and after that, backups are in your own hands, just as they are with tape.
Graeme
– http://www.nattress.com – Film Effects for FCP
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