[Al Bergstein]

Thanks David. While I have no problem getting additional drives, and will certainly consider a tower since I filled this one so quickly, the follow up question is this:

Once I get whatever new drive I get, could I easily reassign my *raw* footage out to the external drives, erase the same footage that FCP currently points to and then repoint FCP towards that same file folder structure now out on the external RAID? I assume it’s a one time repoint and that all the rest of the project files stay put. I understand that you are not *supposed* to go moving files around, but since the original AVCHD is file structure based naming a top level folder and dumping the structure into it is simple. The thing I assume will happen is that I’ll get a one time “Media Offline” warning, I’ll point FCP to those files, and things will be back in business. Am I missing something here?

I’d be using FILE>RECONNECT MEDIA I assume.

Alf

[Al Bergstein]

All NLE’s are tools, like hammers, and saws. It’s the thing you make with them, not the tool itself. No one cares about what tool someone used to make a thing, beyond the people doing the marketing… being good with your tools is the only thing that matters.

night all…

Alf

[Al Bergstein]

I upgraded on my MBP last night, no problems. However, I’m writing this from my Mac Pro, and I have NOT upgraded this yet, for the very reason we are seeing on this board. Just waiting to see how it shakes out.

Alf

[Al Bergstein]

Chris, the question you need to make sure to ask is ‘what am I going to use this camera for”? If you have an answer to that, and it seems like the features are what you want, then go for it. As Noah states, technology is constantly changing and I doubt many of us will be able to afford 3D nor want to deal with it anytime soon.

Also if you look out in your timeframe, hopefully Pan. will do some minor updates to the camera. A good likelyhood is dual card slots, which the competition has, and I can tell you from experience would be worth me selling my 150 and upgrading for. That’s just one possibility. So buying that camera and using the heck out of it will be a good thing to do. Ultimately, I doubt that it will devalue enormously, and you can think of the loss in value if you do sell it as it’s “rental cost’ to you to use it. If you live in a major city, you’d be renting a camera anyway, and that would have it’s cost.

I’ve really like my HMC 150, and still think it’s a great camera for the price.

Alf

[Al Bergstein]

So as an owner of an HMC150, It does not have any better specs than the 1/2″ CMOS (which in some cases should be better, no doubt), better gain specs, and slightly higher shutter speeds. Sony VV 9.0c seemed to input my AVCHD with no problems, so not sure what your concern was.. did I miss something?

Let me ask a few questions that I would ask if I was upgrading…

What it does have is two SD card slots, which would be useful, but is that worth the price difference to you?
Is the viewfinder really better?
It seems to not have Genlock, that would be nice if I was upgrading. Why doesn’t it?
No timecode in or out. Does that matter?
Doesn’t really take me down below a rated 32 degrees. I would like to know that my ‘other’ camera could get me into really bad conditions under standard rating
No time lapse capability, I’d like that in a camera.
Is this 4:2:2 codec? (sorry, I probably should know this), but the specs I quickly looked up were uncler. If so, then I would probably compare a Panasonic DVCPro line of 4:2:2 based cameras rather than an HMC150.

But everyone loves my footage, so I don’t feel I need a “better camera” for my work.

Check out this footage as a thought. All shot on an HMC150. I’m quite happy with the quality, for half the price you are looking at spending. And this quality held up all the up to a 50″ screen, so I’m not feeling like it’s worth an extra $2000+

https://www.acousticsound.org for the small video. It’s in HD, so feel free to blow it up.

Hope this helps!

“Sony’s own statements on the subject are

Q. How does HDV and AVCHD picture quality compare?
A. The quality of AVCHD recording in the 9 Mbps (HD-HQ) mode is roughly equal to
HDV recording

(understanding that they’re talking about 25 megabits of MPEG-2 in HDV)

and

The MPEG-4/H.264 codec is a promising technology which is over two times more efficient than MPEG-2 or MPEG-4 codec technologies.

and even though Sony is the primary manufacturer of MPEG-2 based HDV equipment, they developed and promoted h.264-based AVCHD as:
the new HD digital video camera recorder format best suited for the HD era.

and, regarding the specific question of MPEG-2 vs. H.264, they indicated their future products will be going h.264 (including their own version of AVC-Intra!) with:

Sony B&P is developing a highly complex IC which will implement AVC Long & Intra GoP to be deployed in future products

So, apples to apples, h.264 spanks MPEG-2, and I think it’d be fairly impossible to find anyone who disagrees.”

Alf
Panasonic HMC-150 & FCP on MacPro Dual Quads, 12 GB 7.0.1 on 10.6.2

[Al Bergstein]

Does anyone actually know what the technical reasons would be for the comment above that ‘true 24p doesn’t look good on standard televisions”? Is that for outside the US where SD is still the norm?

Alf
Panasonic HMC-150 & FCP on MacPro Dual Quads, 12 GB 7.0.1 on 10.6.2

[Al Bergstein]

So just to update this, I did try creating bins to store each batch of shots, and it was very useful, but still had to go through each clip and log it, including renaming. In some ways I feel this is a better workflow, I know that it’s the ‘way that we did it in the old days”, but it costs time (and therefore money). I think that I agree that Panasonic should figure out a better way to save us from doing this manual effort. Something more meaningful than Clip 1, Clip 2, etc. Why not have an ability to name clips,
“ProjectName [variablename], clip #” that would give us the ability to insert any name we want into the clip. That seems like something from DOS 1.0 days.

In that world, my SD card would come out of the camera saying, “ProjectFoo Day1, clip 1” Is that so much to ask?

Alf
Panasonic HMC-150 & FCP on MacPro Dual Quads, 12 GB 7.0.1 on 10.6.2

[Al Bergstein]

This is timely. It’s been something I’m not happy about either. But, I just came back from a weekend shoot with over 300 clips. I have taken Noah’s advice, and started the project by bringing in all the clips into the L&T window, and looked through them before doing anything. I figured out that they basically were in a few groups that could be ‘bin’ related, so I created these bins, let’s call them “Performers” “Crowd scenes” “Vendors” and “Staff”. Now I simply bring the clips into the appropriate bins on transfer. I think that Noah is simply calling out an appropriate alternative to the agravating workflow that FCP seems to think is “normal”. I’ll certainly work this way on this project and see if it helps at all.

I agree that this is not optimal.

Alf
Panasonic HMC-150 & FCP on MacPro Dual Quads, 12 GB 7.0.1 on 10.6.2

[Al Bergstein]

I suppose it would be the use of a shotgun mic (technically known as a Line+Gradiant Condenser) as a hand held, making sure that the use of, say on my AT897 with the low-end roll off on and a good “softie” as a wind screen? You probably want to practice it to get it right for your setup. But you might try asking over in the audio forum. They are the experts on this.

Alf
Panasonic HMC-150 & FCP on MacPro Dual Quads, 12 GB 7.0.1 on 10.6.2

[Al Bergstein]

Zak, the monitor in the LCD, is not a monitor that has been tuned to be color correct, and neither are most non HD monitors. That’s a reason why the popularity of the add on monitors that you would plug into your HDMI port, so you can see very close to what you are outputting. But it still will be a good idea to do testing in advance of your just going into a studio.

I recently did that camera to camera with a buddy’s JVC high end camera, and we had very different color balance that, while close, could have been very far off for a client wanting to show a similar color product.

Ultimately, you need to go back to making sure you properly expose your footage. As we have mentioned, to blame the 150 for seriously underexposing your work, is just blaming the wrong thing.

Alf
Panasonic HMC-150 & FCP on MacPro Dual Quads, 12 GB 7.0.1 on 10.6.2