Barry Green
Forum Replies Created
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[toke lahti] “Isn’t it as optimistic as to expect $42k camera format (dvcproHD) in sub-$10k camera? “
Yes! It is! And that’s exactly the point of why P2 is so great — it lets you have that. The cheapest DVCPRO-HD product on the market is the AJ-1200HD tape deck, at about $25,000. DVCPRO-HD tape heads run about $800 per pair, and you need 16 of ’em, IINM. So that’s a lot of expense. But by using an off-the-shelf PCMCIA connector, a part that’s been mass-produced in laptops to the point where it costs a few pennies each, they’re able to store DVCPRO-HD data for pennies instead of tens of thousands of dollars.
The only reason we *can* expect DVCPRO-HD in a camera this (relatively) inexpensive is because it’s recording it to P2.
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[Guy Barwood] “I would be more interested in just a DV tape transport as a fall back, and common standard capture amoungts the mass’s. Use P2 for non DV if you like. What I wouldn’t want however is DVCPRO (PAL) at all. As it is 4:1:1 most of my needs would requrie conversion to DV (4:2:0) or MPG2 (4:2:0) and that’s not a pretty picture. “
I think that’s likely what they’ll do. There’s been plenty of speculation/conjecture on another forum, and at one point it was announced that a Panasonic product manager had actually confirmed that there would be DVC Pro tape in the HVX. Which I guess was disproved, but it made no sense — for handing a tape over to a client, you want DV, not DVCPRO. Yes DVCPRO has plenty of advantages, but not for the type of buyer who’s going after a camera like this. I think what you said is what we’ll get: DVCPRO-HD on P2, and also miniDV on tape.—————–
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The color palette can be pretty much anything you want it to be. As an example, here’s a composite shot I did where I set out to emulate a dozen of the Magic Bullet Movie Looks, using only the in-camera settings:
https://www.icexpo.com/dvx100/TwelveMPLooks.JPG
All of those were done with in-camera settings, no post-processing whatsoever. So the color can be whatever you want it to be.
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I totally agree with Peter on this one. I think a miniDV tape drive would be a “free” option to include, and the camera would be better for it. I don’t think it’ll record DVCPRO-50 or DVCPRO-HD to tape, but I do think it’d be better if it had a miniDV tape drive. I get many jobs (usually convention/event coverage) where they ask for DV tapes at the end of the shoot. Currently I do those jobs on the DVX, and all is fine, but why wouldn’t I want that same capability in the HVX? DV delivery is nearly universal in production companies and post houses nation/worldwide.
Remember Panasonic’s marketing slogan for the DVX was “make a living, flip a switch, make a movie.” I am very confident they’ll include the “make a living” option in there — why wouldn’t they? And if they don’t, well, I think it’s a mistake, but not a terminal one.
Eventually people will start wanting those types of jobs done on HD, but for now, and for the foreseeable future, there’s still going to be a ton of miniDV jobs done, and delivering a tape at the end of the shoot is an established workflow. With High Def I expect to supplant the tape with a hard disk of the day’s footage, but as long as people want to receive tapes, I as a businessman have to be able to deliver them.
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I think his point might be that it might be a little optimistic to expect a $20,000 tape drive in a sub-$10,000 camera.
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Those look about right to me, as far as what I know, for 720. Don’t know about 1080, it may all be stored as a 60i stream, so all 1080 recording methods may occupy the full 100mbps.
As far as what *is* supported, all we know is 720/24p, 720/30p, 720/60p, 1080/24p, 1080/30p, 1080/60i.
As far as what *is not* supported, we don’t know anything yet about what isn’t supported. We may see variable frame rates from 1 to 60fps like the VariCam. We may see PAL, NTSC, HD25P, HD50i and HD60i all in the same camera. We don’t know. Panasonic has been very tight-lipped about what the camera cannot do, all we know is a few things that it CAN do. But it would be way premature to say that it can’t do anything that isn’t on the “can” do list, as they have to keep a few surprises in store for NAB’s announcement.
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[toke lahti] “Barry, dvcproHD-codec is just 4 dvcpro-chips in a same board, just like dvcpro was 2 of those. [/quote]
Well, DVCPRO is one DV codec; DVCPRO50 is two of them. But by ganging them together you can reduce compression and increase color sampling. That qualifies as kind of “new”, doesn’t it?Especially when the alternative is MPEG-2, which has been around for over 12 years, and which is itself only a modest extension of the original MPEG-1, which has been around since 1988.
There are more modern codecs, yes. But have you seen VariCam footage? What exactly needs to be improved there? It’s absolutely fantastic. And, as Graeme said, by keeping the codec the same, they gain cross-compatibility with all the other DVCPRO-HD products, of which there are at least four, plus decks, etc; all the installed base of all the DVCPRO-HD hardware (plus, of course, FCP-HD and Avid Express HD) all give you existing, off the shelf, functionality. Compare that with HDV, where no editor has a fully integrated system yet, although Apple and Avid are supposed to both announce HDV compatibility soon.
I know it’s incendiary to say, but I’d go with the tried, tested, proven, and installed system that delivers fantastic results, vs. a brand-new implementation with no installed base, no proven edit/delivery system, and that delivers half the color and its own bag of compression artifacts and variable-resolution motion artifacts, etc.
[quote]Can you come up a logical explanation, why this new p2-cam does not throw away repeated
frames to better use of it’s very short recording time?[/quote]
I would go on record and declare that there is no reason, and that it will in fact throw away the repeated frames. That may or may not have been confirmed by Jan, but — come on… it would be asinine not to. The Panasonic engineers appear to be pretty bright, don’t they? I cannot fathom how they would do something as stupid as to record duplicate frames when there’s no need to. I was a programmer for 15 years, I know a little of how these things work, and I will GUARANTEE* that there won’t be duplicate frames stored on the P2 media.Now, if there’s firewire streaming, I would expect that the duplicate frames will be streamed. That only makes sense, to keep the camera’s data stream compatible with the AJ-1200HD firewire DVCPRO-HD deck.
But for storing on P2? I’ll bet a hundred bucks, cash money, that in 720p mode it will *NOT* store repeated frames. Now, as far as 1080/24p, I’d guess that’d be stored in the same 2:3 or 2:3:3:2 pulldown system as employed on the DVX. DVCPRO-HD has no provision for recording 1080p, so they’ll probably have to do a similar recording style as they employ on the DVX. And if that’s the case, then yes, there’s the prospect that a “duplicate” frame may be stored in that case. I don’t see why it’d be necessary, but frankly I’m not arguing — it’d only amount to 20% wasted space, vs. the 2.5x longer recording time we’ll get in 720/24p. And I’m not arguing because — hey, we’re getting 1080/24p! Some filmmakers’d sell their left kidney for that. (and, yes, I can hear the anti-P2 crowd saying that some filmakers may *have* to… har har).
*guarantee details: if the HVX200 wastes P2 space by storing duplicate frames on the P2 card when shooting 720/24p or 720/30p, I’ll hand out $100 cash money to the first person (and only the first person) on the NAB floor who proves it to me.
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[toke lahti] “Shouldn’t it be easy to have any kind of frame rate with solid state recording?
Or does the decade old dvc-codec somehow restrict the development. “What kind of statement is that? I mean, first of all, the “decade old” codec under discussion here is not even four years old. The first DVCPRO-HD product on the market, the VariCam, was first introduced in 2001. If you want a decade-old codec, you’d have to look to MPEG-2, which was introduced in 1993.
Secondly, the VariCam is the one and only product on the market that specifically DOES support variable frame rate recording at any FPS.
So yes, the answer should be obviously that the codec, and the P2 medium, should be able to encode at any fps. Now it’s up to the CCD and the camera to see if it can scan in at those variable frame rates.
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What Noah’s referring to is that the exact same post was put on DVXUser, on CreativeCow, on DVInfo, and maybe on other forums as well.
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It’s a DVX. Rich Lee is fairly famous on DVXUser for adding that screaming zombie in all sorts of ads and videos, to scare people to death.
There’s nothing legit about the ad, it’s merely an attention-getter to suck people in so that when the zombie hits, they’ll freak out… 🙂