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Test of the HPX 2700 now online
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Yes, I agree. As a DP and Post-production editor, I was one of the first to use the DVX100 and FS-4 portable hard disk drive when they were first introduced. Now I will feel comfortable using the FS-100
attached to the HVX-200 without the P2 cards. My point is…that
I invested in using the technology when it was expensive., and now I can save hundreds of hours of ingest (capture) time for editing and archiving footage.Some DP’s are not experienced using FS (Firestore) drives with instant playback capabilities, and limit their efficiency when working with clients. Firestore now has a 250GB, this will provide approx. 6-8 hours of full HD capture, without drop-frames. Some cameras can also capture to tape simultaneously, with some limitations to formats.
Neil Seiffer DP/Editor
nseiffer@optonline.net -
It’s great to see Panasonic product managers reading this forum. I again would like encourage Panasonic to continue to develop high-end tape based cameras. I want to own the latest in camera technology, and I have the investment dollars to spend… if only an upgrade existed. I don’t want to be like my network buddies still using their Sony BVW-600s/400s. P2 has its place, but it’s not for everything. This is not about being afraid of tapeless production (I own a RED Camera too). In the 2/3″ video world, my clients demand tape and will continue to demand tape. I’d love to see a tape based 1080p Varicam… i’d buy that camera today.
Chris Bell
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I think people are forgetting that with these higher end cameras, they will literally format a hard drive and do a verified copy of contents over to it that’s plugged right in to the camera. No laptops or card readers. It’s a click of a button or two and away you go. The data is copied just as it is on the cards. You as shooter won’t have to worry. In the time it takes you to strike, the cards will be done. If you have a light setup that day, you can either arrange a fedex with the producer, or they wait. it is up to you you to set that expectation and educate your clients. The Producers that I know that understand the workflow will never go back to tape. If they are following the project through to the edit, they immediately see the benefit. Producers that don’t understand the workflow are scared of it. Some producers just don’t care as long as it all works.
Also, if you plan to work in the near future, you cannot run from a digital and tapeless domain. You can shoot to XDcam, but then you have to find someone with an XDcam deck or bluray drive. You can shoot HDCam, but then you need the deck (along with nay other tape format you shoot). The responsibility of caring and ingesting the media is falling out of the editors hands and on to the shooter. It’s a changing of mind set and a change in ability. Better or worse, that’s what it is. Instead of throwing your footage over the wall to an editor/post facility and have THEM take on the expense of renting or buying extremely expensive decks, or converting the footage to a standard that is appropriate, you are handing a format of footage that almost any computer can read and any NLE can ingest. It saves money in post and producers like that.
The handling of P2 metadata is another responsibility that can be handled by the shooter, if they so desire. If you’re good at it the producer (and editor) won’t be able to thank you enough. You will get jobs because of it.
If any of you cares about footage quality, there’s nothing out there in this level of camera that really comes close to AVCIntra (full raster 10-bit recording). As you go in to higher quality, the quality of course is on par with and surpasses AVC-I, but you pay for it.
I understand people’s tentativeness. It’s natural. Change is scary or something. But for those denouncing the workflow fail to see it’s benefits, haven’t tried it or had something go wrong without studying the workflow and testing and obviously have never or rarely talked to an editor. Yes, tapeless workflows involve a bit of proactive effort, but that’s what happens when you get a new format.
There are many opportunities to make tapeless a highly organized and efficient workflow. If you embrace that, you might surprise yourself and your clients at the possibilities. After all, this is a relationship based business, is it not?
Jeremy
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Jeremy,
I am not scared by tapeless. In fact, I’m 100% for it. Maybe I don’t understand completely how much time is involved. That is what is keeping me from going that way… right now.
Please explain the workflow of transfer and backup on location for shooting for example, 5 hrs of raw footage? You seem pretty ‘up’ on the process. Maybe, I’ve got it wrong in my mind what’s involved.
How do you transfer the files off the cards? Through the camera’s Firewire into a computer or do you use a Card reader?
You have to change cards during the file x-fer (5-6 cards?)
And how long would it take to duplicate all these files for a safety copy? (That can be done unsupervised correct?)
And how do you archive all your raw footage?
Thanks in advance.
Ernie Santella
Santella Film/Video Productions
http://www.santellaproductions.com -
I’ll use my last project as an example.
10 days of doc shooting in the middle east earlier this month. We shot 5-6 hours of tape a day for 10 days. I have at least 9 more trips abroad scheduled for this project. It’s a 10 hour HD documentary series.What is DVCProHD’s data rate …about a gig a minute? That’s well over 300 Gigs a day for a total of of just over 3 Terabytes of data for the trip. That’s a lot of data and a lot of HD’s, if you count protection backups…and I would double up.
How many P2 cards would I need a day (assuming we would only transfer at night) Lets say 2 sets of 32GB (10 cards @ $16,000)
How long would it have taken me to transfer that data and do a protection backup every night? (after a 10 hour day shooting in the heat)I have no idea…lets say 3 hours of OT per night. That would not make me happy, even though it’s extra income.
How many HD’s would I have had to take with me for the trip? (how many more cases and excess baggage charges for the P2 gear–P2 reader, HD’s, AC converters/adapters, cables, laptops)
What if I brought a data wrangler…extra airfare, hotel, meals, and pay. (about $6K) or hire one for $3500 locally (if I could find a qualified one that speaks english.)
I won’t ask about an HD not spinning up, a laptop that fails to boot (a macbook pro died on us last trip) corrupted files, bad cables, misdirected/lost luggage.
So how much extra did P2 cost me for the trip?
$16000 P2 cards (I know, a one time cost…out of my pocket)
$2475 Overtime hours for data transfers(or $4-6K for an extra body)
$600 Excess baggage
$5500 Hard drives, P2 reader, laptop and cables, travel cases.Total $8575-$28,575 extra for P2
That will buy a lot of logging/digitizing and a boatload of tape. And how do you store 35 terabytes of raw data over the life of the project and then securely archive it for years? My mind boggles at that thought…but it’s really not my problem.
As to the other posts: Metadata on a shoot like this? I doubt it. Running and gunning with a Firestore on a camera with a large brick and two wireless receivers? I don’t think so.Yes, someday soon we’ll all be tapeless. That transition is not something I fear or don’t understand. But right now there is some serious voodoo economics and omission of facts being employed by fans of tapeless workflow. The real fact is, the costs and the labor pretty much just shift from one place to another. Mostly from the post process to the field. Will I charge extra for that $16K of media, transfer labor and storage costs? You bet. Will I mark them up? You bet. Does my client want to trust a $100,000 trip to several HD’s bought at Best Buy? Not so far.
I can assure you that my clients have run the numbers and the considered the “workflow.” And for now, they all still prefer tape. And for now, so do I.
J Cummings
DP/Chicago
http://www.cameralogic.tv -
The 2700 is no doubt going to be a lovely camera – ironically, I already feel like I own 90% of it.
I own just about every current P2 device you can think of (HPM110 with intra, all the monitors, (10) 32gb cards and peripherals, 200a/800 cams & much more), including (2) HPX2000’s – one that has the AVC-Intra card added.
As far as I’m concerned, my 2000 with the intra card is the same camera as the upcoming 2700, minus a 2-position filter wheel (which is ironically on the overseas 2100), another HDSDI spigot, and the under/overcrank firmware that they make available on the cheaper 200/500 models. Okay – Film-rec and CAC too… but again, software, right?
From a technical sense, it’s the same front end, etc, correct?
So – pro-rate it. Where does the extra $10-$15K (conservative MSRP) come from? $15K list for firmware they put on $5k models, or the 2/3″ 500 that you could get last month for 8K?
I’m always happy to hear where I’m wrong. Yes – of course, this is the superior imager to the 200/500 – still, the same one as the 2000 though, right? So – would I expect similar images side by side with my 2000 and a 2700 in 720p or 1080i – yes (non film-rec mode of course). Can I shoot 40p with my 2000 – no. Can I overcrank 60p into the 110 at 24pN and get sloMo with the 2000 in the field – yes. I feel like I’m a software build away.
Personally, I think it’s nothing more than price/market protection of their tape-based varicams. As those still sell and eventually sunset, they can still keep the ’40ish’ price, and the stair-step in the product/pricing line. Panny was my first stop at NAB – I was really excited at first, thinking the 2700 was a 2.2 imager at the ’45k’ price point (a do everything cam). I’ve been trying to decipher the specifics since then, knowing quickly there after it’s the 1.1 imager like mine.
I really hope this 2700 hits with a (somewhat) relative and pro-rated street price to the 2000 (somewhat of a final beg to Panny sales), all things considered of course. Add a couple bucks – sure. Add enough that you could almost buy another 2000 – hmmmmm? I’m in the market for a 3rd or 4th bigger camera this/next year – would love to continue giving you all of my money.
I haven’t found a salesperson/dealer yet that disagrees with me once we get into the details.
Show me light…
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[Ernie Santella] “Maybe I don’t understand completely how much time is involved.”
There is now doubt that time has shifted in to the hands of a DP. Transferring cards is not an instantaneous process.
As far as how it’s done, there’s a myriad of ways. Mostly what I do (as I am the guy that transfers the cards on the shoot and then handles post) is transfer the cards using a verity of software. That’s all well and good, but not really good for one man crews or crews that don’t have a data wrangler.
So, if we do send one guy out to shoot and the shoot spans more than one card, you can actually put the camera in to USB host mode and the camera will format the drive to a fat32 partition, then start dumping off the cards and keeping the card structure. You can do this with a bus powered drive (i.e. laptop drive) with no extra power involved. The drives are small, light and relatively cheap. Much cheaper and less bulkier than 4 boxes of tape that you have to worry about. Download the HPX2000 manual and look up USB host mode. It tells you all about it and the different ways in can be done.
[Ernie Santella] “You have to change cards during the file x-fer (5-6 cards?) “
Not if you are going from the camera. The bigger body cameras have 5 card slots and it will handle it. If you shoot more than 5 cards in a day, you will have to switch cards, yes.
[Ernie Santella] “And how long would it take to duplicate all these files for a safety copy? (That can be done unsupervised correct?) “
Well, you can get tricky and use a bus powered raid1 drive array and have an automatic backup as it’s copying. Yes, unsupervised. You just have to make sure that it gets all the way through.
[Ernie Santella] “And how do you archive all your raw footage? “
Right now we use redundant SATA drives. They are cheap, hold a LOT of info and are easily searchable. This becomes an archive and this is where metadata comes in to play. For those saying that you have 1000s of tapes of archival material that you access regularly, you have no idea how much easier this will be in a tapeless format. It is all searchable and as long as it’s on a drive, it’s almost always online. No logging, no capturing, no hunting for timecode.
We have been looking into a more permanent tape backup system for deep archive, but haven’t pulled the trigger yet. We will be looking at a Quantum LTO system once we can get our hands on a demo.
Jeremy
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Things to note about tapeless. If I could keep the P2 cards as archives through an entire shoot of 6 weeks, then I’d be on board. But that’s way too expensive. Point 2: either I hire a data wrangler for 6 weeks at huge expense on a remote location, or I risk making transfer mistakes when exhausted from a long day of shooting. Point 3: hard drives are in no way archival devices. They are fragile. They also will fail sitting on a shelf or in use. That’s why we have a pricey Quantum Superloader3 LTO robot to archive to the government/financial industry standard archival medium. All our media is on RAID 50 Rorke HDX Galaxy systems and backed up to LTO3. We’re pretty thorough about this stuff.
All to say, we’ve been in the digital domain since 1993 and have been on the bleeding edge of many technologies, helping to push the industry to more efficient and cost-effective tools. The tapeless workflow fits for productions with a data wrangler, or with limited nightly transfers, but is a bad fit for the many situations described in posts above. When the flash storage price drops to make it a commodity, then those of us in a huge portion of the industy will go tapeless. Red’s CF approach, by the way, is appealing for the relatively generic media it can use from several vendors – competitive storage pricing pressures!
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Hey John. What frame size and frame rate did you shoot?
Alight, let’s go through it.
5-6 hours of tape is right about the load for 5 cards of 24pN footage for AVCInta 100mbps footage. (reminder this is full raster 10 bit footage, if you haven’t seen it, you won’t shoot DVCPro HD again unless you have to).
[John Cummings] “How many P2 cards would I need a day (assuming we would only transfer at night) Lets say 2 sets of 32GB (10 cards @ $16,000) “
No. I’d say you need 7 or 8 if you are planning 5-6 hours a day. You’d really only need 5, but it’s good to have backups. In real world prices, that means 8 32Gb cards will be around $12,000 (how much have you spent in tape over the years?)
[John Cummings] “How long would it have taken me to transfer that data and do a protection backup every night? (after a 10 hour day shooting in the heat)I have no idea…lets say 3 hours of OT per night. That would not make me happy, even though it’s extra income. “
Yeah, for 160 Gigs @ at a conservative estimate of 20 MB/sec via USB 2, you’re looking at about 2 hours. This can all be done when you get back to the hotel or where ever you are staying. Once you learn the workflow, it’s pretty easy and you won’t have to watch the paint dry. if you use a laptop with firewire, the speeds will go up and your time will go down.
I don’t think you’ll need the access baggage if you start carrying bus powered laptop drives, or even full size drives. They take up way less space than the 120 tapes you brought with you for your 10 day 6 hours a day record time. To me that’s a trade off. Also, those 120 tapes cost you…?…$3000?
As far as drives and cables, that won’t add up to $5500. For your whole trip, you can get 6 1TB hard drives (that’d be 3TB of RAID1 drives) for $1200 (about $200 bucks a drive).
[John Cummings] “And how do you store 35 terabytes of raw data over the life of the project and then securely archive it for years?”
Well, if this data is captured off of tape, you will have the same problem in the edit. All of that data needs to be online.
[John Cummings] “As to the other posts: Metadata on a shoot like this? I doubt it. Running and gunning with a Firestore on a camera with a large brick and two wireless receivers? I don’t think so. “
Yep, that’s up to you whether you take that on or not. In this situation, you probably wouldn’t.
[John Cummings] “But right now there is some serious voodoo economics and omission of facts being employed by fans of tapeless workflow.”
I’m not a sales guy. Yes it’s upfront cost, but it’s cheaper all the way around, no voodoo about it. It’s the change in workflow that people think will kill them, and that somehow relates to cost.
[John Cummings] “he real fact is, the costs and the labor pretty much just shift from one place to another. Mostly from the post process to the field.”
That’s exactly what I said. You don’t want that money? I’d like it back.
[John Cummings] “Does my client want to trust a $100,000 trip to several HD’s bought at Best Buy? “
I don’t see your point here. If you do it correctly, you can minimize your risk. Traveling around with 120 shoot tapes has it’s risks as well. For some reason, people seem to really fear that the information is stored on a hard drive rather than a tape.
So per your cost breakdown,
$16000 is really $12000, but you have to extend this over the lifetime of your camera, you will find that it’s much cheaper than tape. Your 9 other jobs will pay for the P2 cards and then some in spades, You would have spent more on all the tape. 120 tapes per trip (roughly $3000) times 9 more trips is $27,000 in TAPE! That alone will pay for your p2 media system with room for improvement (such LTO backups drives) but we’ll move on.
$2475 in OT. OK, take the money, still cheaper than paying $300 an hour in an edit suite to log and capture 60 hours of tape.
$600 in access baggage. I think we can say this is a wash.
$5500 in laptops/hard drives. again, not necessary to have a laptop, but perhaps you want one. Take that money from not buying all that tape and apply it to the laptop if you need it. Hard drives are cheap.
I just don’t see the argument here. Yes, the cost to you is upfront, but over the life of the camera, it is cheaper. You are also saving your producers money in post. Seriously, there’s nothing voodoo about this. It is the fear of taking the plunge that holds people back and not accounting for what they are spending in tape vs the upfront cost of data management.
Like I said, I’m not a sales guy. I use this stuff all day every day. No P2 is not for everyone, but once you (and your clients) see the benefit, it’s hard going back to tape.
Jeremy
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Shawn, now this is a different arguement entirely. And I totally hear you.
I don’t know, is it the same front end?
Jeremy
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