P2 DVCPRO, 50, HD recording times chart?

[Noah Kadner]

Good starter article here:

https://www.dvxuser.com/articles/P2/

-Noah

[Brian Deviteri]

thanks for the link…

I’m trying to compile this comprehensive list, but I’m getting conflicting figures about the data rates for 720/60p, 720/30p, 720/24p, 1080/60i, 1080/30p, and 1080/24p. Does anyone know the exact MB/s or Mb/s rates?
Thoretically DVCPRO HD should all be at 100 Mb/s, but that does not take into account the varying frame rates and/or frame sizes.

Does anyone know the image size and pixel aspect ratio for 720 or 1080 in the various flavors?

[David Battistella]

Assuming you have 8MB of media cards or two 4MB Cards

Using AJA storage rate calculator and assuming two tracks of 48k audio
ALL NTSC

DV 25 @24fps 43 minutes APROX
DV 25 @30fps 35 minutesAPROX
DVC Pro 50@30fps 18 minutes APROX
DVC Pro 50@24ps 22 minutes APROX
DVC Pro 720P@60fps 9 minutes APROX
DVC Pro 720P@30fps 18 minutes APROX
DVC Pro 720P@24fps 22 minutes APROX
DVC Pro 1080i@30fps 9 minutes APROX
DVC Pro 1080i@24fps 11 minutes APROX

The cost of the storage is about 3600.00 us. Which gives you less storage than an 9 dollar master series tape in DV.
To put this in hours of storage perspective. I could purchase about 400 hours of high quality DV tape for the price of 2 P2 cards.
The relatively puny 60gig companion field hard drive is priced at about 1800.00. This would hold about 165 minutes of hd 1080i@24fps, that is the equivalent of about 400.00 worth of HDCAM tape.

Until we see radical price drops and much larger and very releiable field storage, with some kind of redundancy because there is no tape back up, I think that it will be limited to close to home type shooting scenarios.

David

[Jan Crittenden livingston]

Hi David,

The problem is that you are looking the P2 cards as storage. They are not. Those same two P2 cards will record as much video over time as you can record with 100,000 passes whis is vastly more than 400 tapes.

Additionally when you look at the time you have to spend in the edit suite digitizing, that too costs money so it really isn’t such a simple argument. It is all about a different workflow and never having to purchase aquisition tapes again. If you were working in DVCPRO HD you would quickly get to the point an equal amount being spent on tape vs. the P2 cards. Keep in mind this is not HDV we are recording here with long GOPs, compressed audio, and 4:2:0 color, this is DVCPRO HD which was designed for high end HD production.

Best regards,

Jan

Jan Crittenden Livingston
Product Manager, DVCPRO, DVCPRO50, AG-DVX100
Panasonic Broadcast & TV Systems

[Barry Green]

All 1080 modes use 100 megabit/sec data rates.

The 720p modes use (‘R’/60)x100 megabits, where ‘R’ = the frame rate. So 30P = (30/60)*100 = 50 megabits per second.

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[David Battistella]

Jan,

I realize that in my post I was looking completely at a storage times as the question was in regard to how much media the cards can hold and I think I gave a pretty accurate assessment of what they can hold (I am sure panasonic has better, more accurate nnumbers than this). I was looking at the P2 cards as storage because that is exactly what they are, reusable memory cards that “store” media.

I am always thinking of production workflows and I am fully aware of the cost of capturing footage and the benefits of not having to digitize.

I have been trying to figure out how I would integrate this camera in to a typical workflow I may face when I am shooting. I am sure that there are solutions to all of my workflow questions but here is an example of what I saw tonight while at a booklaunch here in Toronto.

I was at a live event and there was a single speaker on a podium giving a speech that would last anywhere from one to two hours. I watched the cameraman cover the entire speech, and then he had to get some B-roll of the crowds going in and out, maybe some exteriors of the venue and some interviews of people exiting the room. Then there is a formal sitdown interview 20 to 30 minutes with the author after the event, etc, you get my drift. That is a real typical night of production filming.

Now, I was watching this go down and I say to myself, OK, what if he was doing all of this with that new P2 Camera. Mt guess is he would shoot the whole thing DV with a tape. But let’s say on the outside chance that it had to be captured HD720 or 1080i. What would have happened? I figure you would have to have at least four to six 4mb cards, to cover the speech ( ihope that they are widely available for rent). I agree that it is doable, he can slip the cards out of the camera (we have yet to see how easy this is to do) and he can copy them to the 60 gig drive and replace the cards back in the camera once they have been downloaded and the speech is being recorded on the other card. Great!

So Scenario A with that camera costs you 9 dollars worth of tape and you might have one tape change.

But Scenario B, which I agree is a very cool and excellent scenario and will work really well, might require 2 to 4 additional P2 cards at 1750 each and and 1800.00 hard drive unit. What if it’s a 2 camera shoot!

I love the Panasonic DVX 100A that I own. I love the idea of the P2 camera and I think it is an enormously bold move for Panasonic to move this direction. I also love that the media is so reusable, and most of all I love tha there will be real TC attached to the media that is recorded. I agree that it is a LONG term investment that could pay for itself over time, but it is not a simple shift in thinking to go away from tape.

Tape is beautiful in the sense that you have an ultimate backup and archive. Like having the negative in film. This backup will inevitably be created, even in a tapeless world because the media will have to be copied and stored somewhere (a DVD is about 4GIG) . There has to be an archive. What do I reach for one year from now when I want to wacth the rushes of that speech? I will have o reach for that DVD that I created as a media archive. So there still will be time and cost in post of copying this full reez media to a third media storage solution. The tapeless world is not completely seemless because, there will always be a need for some form of media to revert to.

I am a fan of this format, I am looking forward to it. I just still trying to visualize it in more realworld scenarios and really breaking down all of the costs and time associated with it.

Thanks,

David 🙂

[Toke]

[Jan Crittenden Livingston] “The problem is that you are looking the P2 cards as storage. They are not. Those same two P2 cards will record as much video over time as you can record with 100,000 passes whis is vastly more than 400 tapes.”

P2 _is_ a storage, especially during the shooting and more so if you don’t have money to hire assistant to switch and purge p2’s.
What if you use tapes just like p2, just as a temporary storage?
You could use those 400 tapes 4000 times, how cheap is that?

[Jan Crittenden livingston]

David,

If I was going to shoot that event with the little camera I would send the signal out to a computer and just ingest that wat for both the long presentation and the 20 minute interview. Then the cutaways I would do on the P2 card.

The point of my post is that it is not long term storage and it is reusable. The cost of DV tape is just that DV tape. If we were working in DVCPRO HD that is the real comparison. People want to compare DVCPRO HD to HDV, it is not the same thing. Is it another low cost HD solution, yes, doe it have more compromises, yes. Some may feel that that is the way to go. I personally don’t.

Anyhow, not everything the camera records has to be on P2, there are other alternatives.

Hope that helps,

Jan

Jan Crittenden Livingston
Product Manager, DVCPRO, DVCPRO50, AG-DVX100
Panasonic Broadcast & TV Systems

[Jan Crittenden livingston]

[toke lahti] “P2 _is_ a storage, especially during the shooting and more so if you don’t have money to hire assistant to switch and purge p2’s.”

Toke, every production scenario has a solution and if you want to find one you will. There may be times that you rent a couple of extra P2 cards to give more time between P2 transfers, but in general in the sets that I have been on, ther is in general time. On an event shoot I would probably use a device like a Focus Enhancements Firestore, and frankly I would probably shoot it in DVCPRO50 and then if they ever wanted it upconverted to HD, it would do that very nicely.

>What if you use tapes just like p2, just as a temporary storage?

Well if you did that with Metal Evaporated tape you would be pretty sorry. ME tape is not that robust and your video would be riddled with droputs by about the 10 pass. But since its reputation is so bad I would be hesitant to go to pass #2.

>You could use those 400 tapes 4000 times, how cheap is that?”

More cheap than smart.

Best regards,

Jan

Jan Crittenden Livingston
Product Manager, DVCPRO, DVCPRO50, AG-DVX100
Panasonic Broadcast & TV Systems

[Brian Deviteri]

Jan,

Is there any word on if we can take the firewire out of the HVX200 and put that into a regular firewire external hard drive (Lacie, Maxtor, Western Digital, etc) for recording? Or do we have to go into a laptop then to an external drive? Or do we have to use a Focus Enhancements style external drive?

I think an answer to this part of the workflow will really put this into perspective a lot more for many people while they are considering this camera as their field recording solution.

Brian