[Barry Green]

If you use the camera to offload a card directly to a firewire drive, the camera has the ability to perform a verification step (where it re-reads the info off the drive and compares it to the card, to make sure it got there).

I believe the P2 Store has the same capability, although not sure.

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[Barry Green]

[Ron Shook] “are these top of the line $20-30k Zoom lenses really capable of resolving much more than 1000 lines?”
Certainly. But it depends on how big the target is.

See, the thing is, it’s line pairs per millimeter that matter, but it also matters how many millimeters there are to work with. Take the example of 35mm film — there are 24 millimeters of width available in the full-aperture Super35 frame. So if you want 1,000 lines resolved, that’s 500 line-pairs total, divided by the 24 available millimeters, means you need the resolving power of about 21 line-pairs per millimeter.

Now let’s apply the same concept to a 2/3″ CCD. A 2/3″ CCD has a width of about 9.6mm. If you want 1,000 lines (or 500 line-pairs) to be resolved, you’d have to have a lens that’s capable of resolving over 52 line-pairs per millimeter. Yes, the lens has to be 4x as sharp (twice horizontal, twice vertical) to resolve the same amount of resolution on the smaller video CCD. Most high-def lenses are designed for 2/3″ cameras, and I believe I’ve read that they typically aim for around 85 lp/mm for high-def lenses. Standard-def lenses typically aim for more around 30 lp/mm.

So now you want to look at high-def on a 1/3″ chip — Obviously that’s a much tougher task. Now you’ve only got about 5.25 mm horizontally to work with. And with the Canon and Sony claiming 1080 pixels vertically in a 2.95 mm height, to resolve that fully you’d need a lens capable of resolving 183 line-pairs per millimeter!

And then, you start getting into issues such as diffraction. Put one of these high-def 1/3″ cameras at f/2, and yeah, you may get 600 or 700 lines out of it. But stop it down to f/11 and now you’ll be getting more like 400 lines. We’re starting to run into the limits of optics designs and complications actually due to the size of the wavelength of light here. I doubt we’ll ever see high-def cameras with sensors smaller than 1/3″; even Sony’s littlest consumer model has a 1/3″ sensor, and Sanyo’s new super-cheap consumer model actually has a bigger sensor, it’s 1/2.5″.

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[Barry Green]

Correct. The HVX has a setup setting for P2 also, for 0 or 7.5. But it only affects the analog outputs. On the card it’s always recorded at zero, but on the analog output you can choose to have 0 or 7.5.

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[Barry Green]

It’s a different workflow so you have to disassociate yourself from the whole concept of “video tape.”

A P2 card is, for all intents and purposes, a hard disk. It’s not a videotape kind of thing. You don’t “capture” video from the P2 card, it’s already captured and digitized. The data on a P2 card is what you’d expect to have after capturing a video tape, if you see what I mean.

So at that point, it’s all data on a hard disk. How do you back up hard disks? Typically with data tape. DLT, or LTO, or SAIT, or the old Travan, or Exabyte, etc. Data tape is the mainstay of archiving mass quantities of data worldwide. Data tape is what’s used to archive bank records and all sorts of things. Well, P2 data is just a bunch of computer files, just like spreadsheets or databases or word processing documents. So you can back all that up to data tape, just like you would any other computer data.

And backing up to data tape has significant, tremendous advantages — it can be 3x faster than writing to video tape, it’s bit-for-bit accurate, and it preserves your project exactly as you had it when you last used it. You can restore your project completely and go back to work at any time, whereas if you back up to video tape, you’d have to then re-capture all your footage. And backing up to data tape preserves all the metadata, whereas going to video tape discards all the metadata.

And, finally, data tape drives are vastly less expensive than video tape decks. A DVCPRO-HD video deck with firewire input will be around $25,000; you can get a pretty killer data drive for under $5,000 and some decent choices under $2,000. And data tape is less expensive per gigabyte than video tape too.

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[Barry Green]

European HDTV will be broadcast at 25p or 50i.

US HDTV isn’t. It’s broadcast at 60i, 60p, 24p, or 30p.

So the US version shoots 1080/24p and 1080/30p and 1080/60i and 720/60p, for use with US ATSC televisions.

The European version shoots 1080/25p and 1080/50i and 720/50p, for use with European/EBU televisions.

So yes, you most definitely want to get the version of the camera that works with your territory’s television system.

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[Barry Green]

You can read some of the reverse engineering things that the CinePorter/Spec-Comm people are finding. The P2 card is not just a memory RAID, it has a lot of computation that it needs to do (as Jan alludes to). A microdrive doesn’t have any of that capability.

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[Barry Green]

Yes.

You can do it on a G4 too.

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[Barry Green]

Wouldn’t matter — these drives do something entirely different than what the CinePorter/FireStore do. The CinePorter and FireStore allow for live capture, without having to be recorded to P2 first. A regular firewire drive can only be used for offloading the contents of a P2 card.

So a CinePorter or FireStore would allow for one continuous take of, say, 90 minutes. A regular firewire drive like those Lacie’s doesn’t allow for anything of the sort. It just lets you offload your P2 card contents.

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[Barry Green]

Yeah, and data tape backup is vastly superior than video tape backup for many reasons — not the least of which is that you get to preserve the metadata and the clip-based individual-file nature of your projects, and it’s 3x faster. And the decks are so much cheaper, and the tape is cheaper per gig too.

But it’s not video tape. If someone absolutely positively needs a tape that they can play in a video tape deck and watch video footage from, then the DVCPRO-HD tape deck is the best way to go for that, since it will preserve the data 100%. It’s a digital transfer from the computer to the deck.

But data tape is the far superior solution for all other purposes.

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[Barry Green]

The DSR250 doesn’t have access to better lenses though — it’s a fixed-lens camera using the same lens as the PD150 does.

You could connect the HVX directly to the BetaSP deck using the component video outputs, that should certainly work… the HVX can output DVCPRO50 (DV50) over those ports, or you can have it automatically downconvert its high-def signal into NTSC component output.

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