[Andrew Johnstone]

I had not looked at/heard of that Anton Bauer ElipZ battery before and although I like the look of 7 hrs of shoot time, is there a better way to mount that thing on the camera rather than on the camera plate? Are there any other battery systems available for the HPX250?

[Andrew Johnstone]

After some careful consideration, I ended up with the Panasonic HPX250 and I have to say I am very pleased with it. The images are excellent and the AVC-Intra 100 codec is important if, like me, you need to be able to offer a kit that is approved by broadcasters.

However, there are issues with the camera. My biggest bugbear are the zoom and iris rings that have no front and back end. The stop and focal length are displayed in the viewfinder and within a few days of shooting I can now live with this. However, shooting quick handheld POV pickups/cutaways (following feet walking – that kind of shot) without the ability to set the focus to a specific distance can be annoying. Without glasses on (at over 40, my 20/vision has deserted me – boo hoo!) I cannot reply on the LCD screen on any camera for critical focus and need to use the viewfinder or resort to my mental Kelly wheel for focal distances (anyone still use one of those btw?). I know that the Canon XF305 has similar issues with the lens. The plus point for the Panasonic is that the lens response has no perceptible squashy electronic lag on it like the Canon.

Another issue for me is battery time and record time. the AVC-Intra codec chews up a lot of memory on the very expensive P2 media and a lot of memory in your post production workflow. I am shooting on AVC-Intra50 (more than adequate for most documentary applications), but I am aware that I could have better results if I were shooting AVC-Intra 100 all day long. The battery life is very poor. I have 2 x high capacity SWIT batts and ever these are not enough for a days work. I shot an hour of material yesterday in 4 hours shooting and used one battery. Not good.

But let’s face it any machine that costs less than £4k is going to have some issues. If I have to buy another battery or two, that is an affordable expense. Overall though, I’d recommend this machine, principally because the images it makes are excellent and that’s the bottom line really.

[Andrew Johnstone]

I have a similar issue at the moment, running FCP 7 on Snow Leopard.

I have just shot a load of material on my new HPX250 and the imported images in FCP seem appreciably darker than on the camera’s preview screen and the chroma levels do not appear to be so great… I appreciate that I should not necessarily trust the camera’s monitoring, but at the same time how else do we judge exposures! I checked with a colleague in London who cuts regularly for broadcast and the only tweak he suggested was to check user preferences and that FCP was importing gamma settings from ‘source’. FCP can apply different gamma settings to the image if you ask it too, but the default gamma settings at import is ‘source’.

My monitors are calibrated using Eye-one and the images are bang on for photo with a gamma setting of 2.2. Setting gamma to 1.8 is an old mac trick and is now officially ‘wrong’ as far as I can tell. The images I am importing can all be tweaked using scopes and 3 way colour corrector, but this is the first time I have had this issue. I have previously only shot and imported from Sony systems. This is my first foray into the p2 workflow. So perhaps the issue is something to do with the P2 workflow/import?

I am used to my images always looking better in an online FCP studio where they have super fancy monitors etc, but I have never had a noticeable difference in Chroma/gamma levels right out of the camera before.

thoughts?

[Andrew Johnstone]

Good simple explanation about how to manage this process. Thanks

Andy

[Andrew Johnstone]

Absolutely invaluable post. I have been struggling with this for a couple of hours and had not fully understood that by holding down that on/of mode button on the camera was essential to get into “PC mode” as opposed to just viewing the files on the cameras screen in thumbnail view…

I am not sure if I have missed something, but have see no Panasonic documentation about how to achieve this. Pretty rubbish if you ask me!

[Andrew Johnstone]

It is very difficult to make a decision about which kit to invest in, as it seems that everyone has a good reason for their own choices.

My criteria is to be BBC compliant, so this then rules out the Sony EX1 (which requires the nanoflash plugin. Yes there is lots of material screened on the BBC that has been BBC seem to be investing heavily in Canon XF305 for all their ‘in house’ projects, which makes this a top pick. But having played with one, I was very unimpressed with the focusing mechanics – similar to what I recall the lenses were like on the Canon Xl1 I used 10+ years ago – and was unimpressed with. from what I have read, the Panasonic lens function is mechanical, as it should be for accurate manual frame size adjustment, focusing etc.

But Canon’s Codec is not as heavy as the Panasonic P2 AVCIntra (1GB/min at AVCIntra-100) and the LCD screen is massive.

This focus issue (noted above in this thread) on the Panny is an issue if you’re a heavy zoomer and the battery life, menu and LCD also seem to be issues. P2 cards are also hideously expensive.

On the plus side the Panasonic is supposed to be great to handle and the images look great. The material I have seen from the Canon looks much thinner, with less colour depth and I have noticed this on a few clips viewed on the net. The Panasonic is also about £1800 cheaper (enough to pay for an extra P2 card and a battery or two).

Examples:

Canon: https://vimeo.com/15089085

Panasonic:
https://filmmakingnaturally.com/an-iowa-morning-testing-the-panasonic-ag-hpx250/

But again a lot of this misses, the point, what we really should be doing is making films. Either camera will do for that!

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[Andrew Johnstone]

I’m very glad that I found this thread as I have been secretly going nuts.

After 10 years away from being behind the camera (pretend to produce and direct instead) on my last project I was all but budgetless and had to shoot/direct/produce etc. all by myself. It was actually great fun and I I was feeling pretty good about what I shot. Back in the studio, I fired up FCP and all my enthusiasm and thoughts like “I’ve still got the old magic” crumble to dust as I looked at a bunch of images which seemed a stop or so dark. Never mind, “I’ll fix it all in post”..(!!).

Anyway as part of the project I had to dig out some material shot last year by my usual cameraman. All that stuff seemed dark too. A one off I thought and then I checked the files in QT. Completely different story. The images seemed fine, perfect exposures etc. I have now just checked the images I was worried about from my recent shoot in QT and bingo, perfect.

It’s a mixed blessing of course. A) the images are fine by B) am going to have to fork our for FCP3 now? I was rather hoping I could avoid doing this for the moment, but it appears not.

Andy