Old Varicam Is DEAD!!!!! RIP 27H

[John Cummings]

RIP.

Funny that it took TWO new Varicams to kill it off…

J Cummings
DP/Chicago
http://www.cameralogic.tv
HDX-900/HDW-730S/DXC-D50

[Ernie Santella]

They better not kill the HDX900. I’m sticking with tape for a while.

Ernie Santella
Santella Productions Inc.
http://www.santellaproductions.com

[Helmut Kobler]

Jeez, I’m not sure what to think of this. I’m working for a major production company that has been producing about 50 shows a year for networks like Discovery and The History Channel. They still shoot tape off Varicams and HDX900s, and seem far away from making the leap to tapeless. I know of a bunch of other production companies that are the same way.

As much as I love P2 (other than the stubbornly high price…why no price cut on 32GB cards after 15 months?), I wonder how the format is doing outside of the news networks that have adopted it. Seems like a slow adoption rate, which makes killing off the traditional Varicam all the more interesting.

Maybe it wasn’t’ selling very well anyway, given the popularity of the HDX900…

[Ethan Sigman]

I heard today that panny wants small p2 off the market and is taking a couple hundred trade in on 4’s and 8’s toward 32’s…..

i was also told by a rental tech recently that when they send out hvx’s with 4 16’s instead of 2 32’s, their customers are annoyed. color me an early p2 adopter but i guess i don’t really see the big deal anymore when 750gig drives are $100, it is $200 redundant. I know drives are less than ideal, but tape cost, camera repair, and decks are much further from ideal. I think a 32g gives me like 84 minutes per card in the 2700 in intra, i would prefer to offload to my sonnet f2 drives a couple times (bus powered field raid) than carry enough tape to shoot 420 minutes. I leave my drives in the hotel room, and travel lighter. tapes cost money and take up space, decks cost money, tape carriages break. i would rather take on the democratization of video into the IT world than pay for another proprietary deck that will be outdated in a few years exactly like the long line of predecessors- fool me a thousand times…shame on me…..

incidentally, i bought an 8 gig flash stick at the “rat shack” the other day for 12.99. that’s half the cost of a blu-ray disc, and you don’t need a burner. if you could buy a few hundred of 32’s at the same price in bulk, you could back up to flash sticks soon almost as cheap as blu ray, slow transfer but no spinning disc……..

neither tape nor sxs cards are raided inside, so your data is safer and more portable on p2. if you ammortized the deck cost into p2 cards, you come out ahead, and someday, the cards will be both better and cheaper than tape.

lastly: one word: INTRA

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

[Chris Cardno]

I agree, the HDX is the most popular camera we have and I’m not seeing a massive tidal wave of change towards tapeless yet although we’re getting more clients that are interested. If they discontinue the HDX they’ll be making the same mistake they did with the SDX900, which is still working, still in-demand and still a fantastic SD camera.

Gone too soon…

Chris Cardno
Visual Edge Productions
Bethesda, MD

[Robin Probyn]

and someday, the cards will be both better and cheaper than tape.

Yes then I,ll sell/use as door stop.. my HDX900… until then like everyone else I wont.. Wasnt it Gilet that gave away the razor blades to make people buy the actual razor..

[Ernie Santella]

Just a question. Is there a P2 card reader for down-loading into your computer? Or do you guys use the camera with Firewire/SDI out?

Seems like it would cool if there was a standalone card-reader unit with an eSata/FW800 port to quickly down-load to a hard-drive. Maybe this is my Million-dollar idea!!!

Ernie Santella
Santella Productions Inc.
http://www.santellaproductions.com

[Jim Carswell]

Duel Adapater is what you are looking for.

Jim Carswell
Spyhop Productions, Inc.
Savannah, GA
http://www.spyhopproductions.com

[Ernie Santella]

“Duel Adapater is what you are looking for.”

I was thinking of some sort of lightweight, portable box that has a couple of P2 slots and an eSATA/FW800 output. That would be great for travel/location work where you don’t have to drag around a fragile laptop to dusty environments to download cards.

Even offer an option of an internal HD drive. Now, that might make me consider getting into P2.

Ernie Santella
Santella Productions Inc.
http://www.santellaproductions.com

[Chris Cardno]

Ernie, the new P2 Gear, the HPG20, will:

* Take an HD-SDI input.
* Have 2 P2 card slots for recording.
* Convert your footage from ANY HD camera into whatever Panasonic HD flavor you’d like in real time as you shoot.
* Allow you to dump to a hard drive AND verify the date on the drive with real time playback.

We ordered ours the minute it was announced, it should extend the life of our tape based HD cameras and also gives us the ability to give a client a tape archive and digitized footage at the end of the day. Effectively, it turns our F900R into a 3700, our H series Varicam into a 2700 and our HDX900s into HPX2000s.

Oh, and Jan promised a bracket to attach this box onto the back of your camera, enabling hand-held work, albeit at a 5lb weight cost.

What’s funny is that this box actually makes the discontinuation of the tape based Varicam a bit of a mistake — Panasonic has created a way to extend the life of the product and allow us to placate clients with both a digital and “hard” copy of their footage at the end of the day. Plus, like I said above, our H series is now a 2700 so we’re not in the market for that anymore. Ummm…oops?

🙂

Chris Cardno
Visual Edge Productions
Bethesda, MD