Barry Green
Forum Replies Created
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Any NTSC miniDV camcorder will play back NTSC DVX footage. Sounds like you’re trying to play an NTSC tape in a PAL camera, and that’s not likely gonna work.
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Get the most from your DVX camera. The DVX Book and DVX DVD are now available on ebay and at Amazon (https://www.fiftv.com/db) -
Lots and lots of films have been shot on the DVX series of cameras. Some have gone on to some rather notable success; there were five DVX films in the theaters at the same time last year (Murderball, 9 Songs, The Aristocrats, November, and “Mad Hot Ballroom”.) Murderball was nominated for an Oscar, and won “Best Cinematography” at Sundance in the Doc category; “November” won Sundance’s “Best Cinematography” prize too.
Plus there are probably hundreds of direct-to-video films that have been shot on the DVX cameras.
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Get the most from your DVX camera. The DVX Book and DVX DVD are now available on ebay and at Amazon (https://www.fiftv.com/db) -
The HVX has a DV25 tape drive on it, so you can shoot directly to tape if you want.
Downconverting is for downconverting 720p or 1080i/p footage to DV tape, internally.
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Get the most from your DVX camera. The DVX Book and DVX DVD are now available on ebay and at Amazon (https://www.fiftv.com/db) -
I’ve used ’em both, it’s hard to imagine two more different products. The Marshall is a small on-camera monitor with admittedly low res (800×480) but it does very well, perhaps the best HD monitor at its price point.
The Panasonic 17″ is twice as expensive, 4x as large, twice as much resolution, has a built-in waveform monitor and split-screen capability, and is just better in every way. But it’s also twice as expensive and 4x as large! So if you need an on-camera monitor, the Marshall is the only one between these two. If you want a field monitor, the Panasonic is much better, but it’s more expensive and bigger and heavier.
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Get the most from your DVX camera. The DVX Book and DVX DVD are now available on ebay and at Amazon (https://www.fiftv.com/db) -
Never de-interlace progressive-scan footage. You’ll just throw away resolution and ruin the frames.
The DVX and HVX scan their chips progressively and create true progressive-scan footage. Use an editing program that knows how to “remove pulldown” and you’ll get exactly what you want — pure and proper progressive-scan footage.
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Get the most from your DVX camera. The DVX Book and DVX DVD are now available on ebay and at Amazon (https://www.fiftv.com/db) -
Check your version of FCP, P2 HD won’t import into version 5.0 or below, you’ll need to upgrade to at least 5.0.4 and preferably (vastly preferably) all the way to 5.1.2.
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Get the most from your DVX camera. The DVX Book and DVX DVD are now available on ebay and at Amazon (https://www.fiftv.com/db) -
[Shane Ross] “Bus powered drives run at 5400RPM, enough for DV but not for DVCPRO HD. Connecting that drive to a MacBook Pro will not make it able to play back 1080i footage.”
5400RPM is fast enough to play back 1080, it may depend on other factors but on my Core 2 Duo 2.00GHz laptop with 5400 RPM SATA drive it plays back 1080/60i, 1080/24p, and 1080/30p in full-screen without a hitch.
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Get the most from your DVX camera. The DVX Book and DVX DVD are now available on ebay and at Amazon (https://www.fiftv.com/db) -
[Shane Ross] “OK…that is all well and good, but who would edit right off the card? That is needed for production. You need to offload the footage to something so that you can edit.”
Well, no you don’t — that’s the “old way” of working, the concept that you need to transfer the cards over to a hard disk. We only put up with that right now because the card sizes are small. As soon as the card sizes get large enough, the whole process of “offloading cards” and “transferring footage” and “unwrapping/rewrapping” can all just go away.
Let’s look at the extreme: let’s say you had two 128GB cards. Each card is capable of holding 5 hours of 720/24pN. So in-camera you could have 10 hours of footage — that’s enough to hold all the footage for an entire 90-minute feature film, shot at about a 6.5:1 shooting ratio! In-camera, all at once. Why would you want to edit off a hard disk, when the cards can deliver six streams of high-def in realtime?
Not even a five-disk G-RAID can handle that; they only support up to 3 streams “guaranteed”. Because they’re solid-state with no moving parts and no head seeking or anything, the P2 cards can handle six streams of 1080, and probably 15 streams of 720/24pN, right off the card.
Transferring/offloading is only necessary now because of the small card sizes; as card sizes grow (and as NLE manufacturers start to embrace the power this gives us, rather than trying to patch us into their existing tape-centric workflow) you’re going to see a huge shift in the way projects are done. We’ll shoot to the cards, edit off the cards, even master back to the cards, finish an entire project without ever offloading or transferring or using a P2 Store or a laptop or anything! Then, archive overnight.
You’ll have every clip of your footage available to you, throughout the entire production process, instantly. Need to check a prior take for continuity? Just play it. Need to match up framing with a prior shot? Play the prior shot, take a still-frame on your 1700 monitor, and then match up the frame size, eyelines, and lighting. It’s all there, instantly accessible, on the cards.
In fact, I suspect that feature shooters would be able to have an editor take over at the end of the production day, who can cut all the day’s work together during the night shift, so when the crew comes back the next morning they can view finished scenes. Not “dailies”, not raw footage extracts, but actual finished scenes. As soon as the day wraps they hand the editor the cards, and the editor starts cutting immediately. No capturing, no logging, no digitizing, no marking in/out points, no defragging, no anything. Just plug in the cards and edit. In the morning, hand the cards back and the production goes on their merry way. Of course you could be nice and archive them for the production crew too, but I would leave the raw footage on the cards as long as possible.
A new dawn is coming, as soon as the cards get bigger, and as soon as NLE manufacturers get around to providing this MXF functionality. EDIUS does it brilliantly; Avid is mediocre at it, and Raylight brings it to mostly to Vegas. Axio does it for Premiere Pro. Really FCP is the only one left out in the cold right now, and sooner or later I’m sure they’ll get up to speed. Once FCP goes live with MXF files on the timeline, you’re going to be able to do things quicker, faster, and better than ever before. It’s gonna change everything.
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Get the most from your DVX camera. The DVX Book and DVX DVD are now available on ebay and at Amazon (https://www.fiftv.com/db) -
The dates are not messed up, although some people do seem to get confused by it.
There are two special offers in play: one for people who bought between January 1, 2006 and September 30, 2006; and the other for people who bought on or after October 1, 2006.
For those who bought between 1/1/06 and 9/30/06, their special offer is a free copy of The HVX Book + CD.
For those who bought from 10/1/06 through 3/31/07, their special offer is the book/CD plus a free 8GB P2 card. The card got added to the offer for those bought starting in October, and is not offered to anyone who bought prior to 10/1.
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Get the most from your DVX camera. The DVX Book and DVX DVD are now available on ebay and at Amazon (https://www.fiftv.com/db) -
Where’d you see a PDF?
Everything I’ve heard of it says it’s a 2/3″ version of the HVX200, so 1080 & 720 at 24p/25p/30p, plus 720 at variable frame rates up to 60p, plus 1080/60i & 50i (as it’s a switchable “world camera”), plus DV/DVCPRO25/DVCPRO50 in both PAL and NTSC, plus HD-SDI and TC IN/OUT and GenLock.
At Government Video Expo they were tossing around a ballpark price of around $16,000. The only official statement I’ve seen was on the Japanese Panasonic website, where it said “under 200,000 YEN”, which translated at the time to around $17,000.
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Get the most from your DVX camera. The DVX Book and DVX DVD are now available on ebay and at Amazon (https://www.fiftv.com/db)