Brian Deviteri
Forum Replies Created
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I’ve read that most of us cannot expect to see larger format capacity optical disc drives (ie Blu-Ray or HD-DVD) until 2007. I’d expect the blank media to cost around $5-15 per disc after a year or so of the drives being released since lately I’ve been able to find some DVD+R DL discs for about $6-8 on occasion (if they don’t sell out before I get there). But that’s meaning somewhere in the 2008 ballpark for the majority of us to get a larger format optical disc drive and blank media at an affordable (profitable) level. Can you wait that long? Maybe, but at what price? How many clients will you loose to other vendors?
The DLT tape solution is worth considering, but a company I do work for looked into that awhile back and it was cheaper to just use external hard drives for backup at that time for their purposes. Have the prices come down at all? For my backup right now I always have the miniDV tape on the shelf and the CD-ROM I burn of my project files (without the media) to go back to if I need it. This works for me and I’m sure there are others who do something similar. When I need something beefier, like saving the media files, I’ll burn onto multiple DVDs which is still economical (at times) for DV footage or else I bite the bullet and throw it onto an external hard drive if I know I’ll need it again in the next few months.
What other options are there to save these files from the P2 for archival purposes?
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[Brian of Influx media] “Most people with XL1s, dvx100’s, and the sonys of the same style most likely wont justify five extra grand for a new camera (even with those great features).”
Yeah and the cost of the P2 needed to effeciently work with the camera might throw a lot of us out of the game entirely. At least with tape, it’s cheap enough to work with, VERY cheap to archive, and really quick in the field. I just can’t wait until we get the details at NAB.
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I can echo your concerns. I remember when I started shooting digital photography and media cards were SOOO expensive that I was able to get a 16mb and a 32mb one. At the highest resolution I was getting like 8 or 12 pictures a “load” and dumping off to computer often.
Yes, hard drive space is cheaper now, but still, it’s not as cheap or quick in the field as tape. There’s something nice about having a relatively cheap tape on the shelf that you can always go back to for your footage and to archive on. With these P2 cards, how am I supposed to shelf my materials? My external drives are going to run out of space quickly and then what, retire them to the archive? What happens when they won’t spin up 2 or 3 years from now? This whole scenario has me a little concerned and hesitant about the process. At least with the FireStore and similar hard drive recorder attachments I can always have a “tape backup” of the files to go back to if I ever need to. And tape is REALLY cheap compared to a hard drive or multiple flash drives… Anyone have a solution here? Burn each 4gb P2 card to DVD? What about when you have 8gb or 12gb of data to burn? How will that work?
I’m really excited about this announcement, but in practical and cost-effective terms, what does this mean for all of us? Yeah, we all want to adopt an HD/HDV workflow eventually and these “cheaper” cameras can let us do that. I personally am also hesitant about shooting to MPEG-2 and editing that. It’s almost like why not just run your camera into a DVR in the field and then dump that huge hard drive onto an external one before you begin post.
Anyone else have comments or concerns like this?
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How can we really “believe” you on this one? I guess we will all know in a few days…
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the networking things might be screwing you up royally. also, something else to consider is your firewall settings… many times a firewire connection can become firewalled and that can cause the camera to not communicate with your system.
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I think you are really being too hard on Steven with this one. If you are going to quote him, at least give the quote justice – “24p is highly overrated anyway. I agree they should fix the problem if they can. But there are other issues that have been addressed and are working just fine. Like HDV.”
Steven, like all of the rest of us, wants to get the most out of our product as possible. This 24p bug has been sent to Adobe numerous times by everyone and I agree, Adobe should release a fix for it, but maybe they can’t figure it out yet? Maybe they don’t want to release a 1/2 @$$ed fix. This is the same reason why Avid will not support HDV until the summer. They wanted to get the cameras, TEST the software and make sure everything works before it was released. Thankfully, according to many people, PPro 1.5 can handle HDV just fine with the proper plugins.
As for 24p, MANY software applications do not properly support 24p yet. For some reason, it has been bugging them for a long time. The results aren’t prefect and there are issues that need to be worked out with 24p. Maybe the issues lie in the structure of the file setting itself, maybe they are part of the codec, maybe they are related to the NLE. Whatever the case might be, PPro at this current moment does not “properly” support 24p on many user systems. I personally think that if you want to edit 24p footage, PPro is not the NLE system to be using. I’ve read too many complaints about the results. Until the kinks are worked out, I would use another NLE for 24p.
But getting back to my original questions…
will PPro ever support the DVCPRO 25, DVCPRO 50, and DVCPRO 100 (DVCPRO HD) codecs? will PPro be able to read the files from a P2 card and edit them natively? -
I’ve been filling them out, e-mailing Adobe as much as I can, and basically demaning support in Premiere Pro. Even if I do not purchase this new Panasonic HVX200 P2 camera, I still want to be able to edit the footage in my NLE if I have a client that has material shot in this form. I would hate to have to change my NLE just to get DVCPRO HD and DVCPRO 50 support.
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I too agree that the tape days are numbered… and yes, direct to disc acquisition in some form is starting to become more mainstream. But still, many of us need to migrate to the tapeless acquisition formats.
Having miniDV on board for those times when you need to shoot in DV mode and hand a tape to a client at the end of the day, that’s really important for many people. Having to convert everything to files and then dump to tape at the end of a shoot can be a huge waste of time, more expense, more equipment, and a loss of business for many people. Tapeless acquisition is great for a direct to edit situation, but many clients still want something in their hand at the end of the day, even if you will be editing the shoot. Many clients have grown to accept miniDV, which was difficult at first for a lot of them. Accepting a huge file right off the bat in addition to “changing the format” will just be more than many of them can handle at one time.
I for one, surely hope that we can get miniDV support on this camera. If not, then I really think a lot of us will be left looking at other HD/HDV camera options or else holding off on the migration until it becomes more cost effective.
I can honestly say, I have never been more anxious for an NAB product announcement before.
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Yeah, I’ve used that “video out” to a deck workflow before mainly for very long meetings on a 1-camera shoot when I need some redundancy for a tape change. But why should I not be able to preserve my workflow and do exactly what I do right now with new equipment? I think others are expressing these same concerns that I have. Yeah, I can hold onto my old miniDV camera that has definately seen better days, but if I can sell that as a used camera for a few bucks, I can put that money towards a new HD/HDV capable camera. If this HVX200 is capable of shooting on miniDV tapes, then my camera package can be a lot more compact and the camera truly can function as a “swiss army knife” of sorts. Isn’t that what most of us are looking for when it comes to a camera anyways?
Here’s the main problem when it comes to purchasing… I can go out and get a Sony HDV camera (Z1U) that will record DV, DVCAM, and HDV. And with FireStore’s FS4 supporting HDV in a few months, I don’t even need to worry about shooting on tape there either (unless its for backup). I’m not a $10,000 – $15,000 camera production on a daily basis. When I need something more expensive, I usually rent the equipment or hire a local crew to shoot it for me. I’m looking in the sub-$10,000 range for working with HD or HDV content and I need to slowly migrate towards that HD/HDV workflow, which will take time with many of my clients. If the price is right with the HVX200, then I think this might be the best camera on the market at the time when I am looking to purchase. But only if it will protect my current workflow and not end up costing me a whole lot more to do what I already do now at a reasonable cost.
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I hope your speculations about miniDV support are right on this one…
Anyone know how Premiere Pro 1.5 would work with this camera and the whole DVCPRO HD, DVCPRO 50, DVCPRO, and P2 issues? That’s my editing system and I really do not want to change it, but the advantages of this camera are looking better and better the more I hear about it.