P2 vs. DVCPRO HD tape

[Rich Rubasch]

Ok, so I had three hours of 720P footage on a SLOW USB drive from a client. It took nearly 6 hours to log and transfer all the clips. I just double clicked them all and added them to the cue.

Then I strung them out onto 1 hour sequences matching the footage. Since the source timecodes were sequential I set up the start timecode in the sequences and they had continuous unbroken timecode that matched the source clips.

I output the three 1 hour sequences to DVCProHD tape. Took about three hours for the output.

So now I have three one hour tapes with essentially a clone of all the footage with matching timecode. We can delete the material on the hard drive and use it for a new project.

We will use this broll footage now in an SD project (DVCPro50) with some interview footage shot on a Varicam (tape). So having the tape is valuable now to upload just what we need at DVCPro50. Later, these tapes can be valuable as broll in an SD or HD project, and they can be stored with the other original Varicam tapes so the project stays together.

There have been quite a few posts about P2 workflow issues, but for us, getting this footage onto a tape that can be used later as SD or HD without having to warehouse a bunch of hard drives makes a lot of sense. The importing of clips has to be done regardless, so the extra time of basically outputting the footage and the cost of a tape is worth the peace of mind having a tape as a source.

Final thoughts…

I might be unique, but we do projects for other production companies….we are sort of a boutique with special skills. We plug into many different workflows. Hands down I’d rather have a tape than ANY hard drive. I think shooters and production guys are the ones saying “tape is going to be dead” like a broken record. Post guys and gals want a tape.

I have received 720 P footage (which is way less resolution than 1080i) because the shooters only had two 16 gig cards and 1080i “takes up too much space on the cards”. The rest of the project was 1080i on tape from a HDX900.

“Tape is cheap” seems to apply these days over those cards that no one seems to have enough of.

Then, when we get a hard drive from a client with P2 footage, it is usually one of those super cheap USB only deals that have the slowest transfer times ever! Now it’s the post house’s responsibility to transfer that footage all day. Now if I had Firewire 800 drives that’s another thing…

Dan suggested that the P2 card means “instant ingest for editing”..,in my 17 years of experience there is no such thing in this industry as “instant”. Please do not tell your clients on the shoot that this new fangled camera you’re lugging around makes the post process “instant”. We will be upset when you hand us your $89 USB drive with 250 gigs of P2 card footage and the client expects “instant” gratification.

We are still editing an awful lot of SD around these parts. I like both ProRes and DVCPro50 for our SD projects. I prefer a tape to digitize from. I only take what I want, at the resolution I want. If I have a 1080i project and I have 720P tapes, I can let the deck or the KONA card do the conversion to the right format. Doing it on the FCP timeline or in compressor is much less “instant”.

Many people suggest hard drives for back up. Great. But I will guarantee that after you have about a dozen or so hard drives on the shelf you will be back wondering if there is a better way than to keep buying up these hard drives…and how do you catalog all those drives? And should you start charging the client for those drives? A $30 tape is understandable, but now you want to charge me for a $200 hard drive? That might fail? How many posts do you read about failed hard drives? How many for a failed tape? ANY?

I’m feeling like an old fogey writing this, but I trust tape, it is versatile for SD or HD projects and it is cheap.

And please don’t EVER call the P2 workflow “instant”…honestly, it’s just not.

Rich Rubasch
Tilt Media

[Dan Geller]

I wish the 3000 had tape built in as well as P2. Tape is king for long-form work, field documentary work, work that a client needs in hand to take away. Hard drives fail – even just sitting on the shelf. We do ingest everything to Rorke HDX arrays, so that’s great for redundant and fast near-term storage. For studio long-term archiving, we have LTO3, but that’s a clumsy way to create a non-flash based near-term asset.

Yes – having a Panny deck or Kona card up/down/cross convert in realtime is also a huge advantage. P2 and other flash media could be fine if prices drop drastically so that it becomes the equivalent of tape – write once, never record over it. I see why news stations like P2 because they often do record over their tapes and are dumping daily to NLEs. I see why feature film sets can deal with flash recording because they have the budgets for an IT person to be shuffling and archiving on set or overnight. But for the many, many of us in documentary production we don’t want to shoot all day only to stay up all night getting data off cards to drives or tapes. And for corporate productions, where footage often needs to go to a post-house right after the shoot – tape again makes more sense.

That’s why we’re shooting our current documentary on the HDX900 – renting it – and have delayed our Red order and not jumped at the Panny 3000 either. If Flash gets super cheap, then tape can be proclaimed as dead for field acquisition – though not for archiving (LTO3/4, etc.)

[Al Hodges]

Very cool thank you. I think Im ready to switch to my P2 after reading; this post was more helpful than the companies site.