[Dan Riley]

Chris,

Congrats to you that you have a producer to go through and
pick the “good stuff”. What if, like me, I’m producer and editor?
What if I just shot a show 4 camera simultaneous timecode
over two days with 7 hours of tape per camera?
What if a scene had 10 takes and even though you have
circle takes you also had something good on camera 4
during the bad takes.
Yes, you go through and pick only the best takes.
But then you end up with 3 hours of tape times 4 cameras.
Can you see where I’m going here?

It takes days to capture.
It takes an afternoon to make all the multiclips.
This time must be reduced and can be reduced by
simply doing a data transfer from hard drive or disk.
Then as I pick scenes to use, they are already in the system.
I lay them down and I’m done. Your way I pick them
then I capture. This take double the time.
In the old days of not having drive space this made sense.

Different types of production require different kinds of thinking.
As a news editor for years I did what you did.
I sat there and pulled shots the producer liked
and got the piece edited in minutes not hours
and always made the feed. That’s not this.

Dan

[Dan Riley]

Walter,

If they took out the tape drive system and swapped it with a
hard drive the weight would probably be the same.
Why have a tape system in there anyway, it’s SD only.

My problem with this camera is that P2 workflow sucks.
If you are a real world producer, you have to have a
dedicated p2 store and a person there to operate it,
and a place to operate it,
unless you shoot is for 8 minutes.
This is going backwards to film days with that extra person
just handling that stuff.
If you are not very careful you can actually record over
what you already shot pretty easily.
In my world of interviews and studio shoots,
this is not viable. However, the camera itself may be
but not if I have to record to p2 cards at 2 grand a piece
and then wait 2 times longer than real time to get the
footage into FCP. Thus the hard drive questions.

Finally, you think that camera is heavy?
Have you shot with a DVW790 lately?

Dan

[Dan Riley]

michaelmk,

How many hours can the FS-100 record at 720 24p from the HVX200 ?
And how much does it cost?

Finally, do you think the FS-100 is a reasonable solution
for your use, or would you like to see a hard drive or
disk recording system directly inside that camera?

Thanks,
Dan

[Dan Riley]

Chris,

For me at least, the whole point of that camera is it’s not tape.
It records data files to disk which can be transfered to FPC
faster than real time, well at least in theory, via ethernet.
Of course you can hook up the SDI out of the camera and capture
(assuming you have a capture card). Or you can rent/buy the deck and do it
that way. But for me, I want to speed up the process
of getting pictures into FCP by using data files transfer.
Yes, I know you can buy little hard drives that tether
to the camera, but they are very expensive if you doing
4 camera multicam. And they only hold a 3 or 4 hours at
HD. That means constantly transferring. And what about
backup? That’s why I like the XDCAM HD disk idea.

If you are going to use XDCAM the same way
you use a DigiBeta or Varicam camera, what’s the point?

Just my two cents.
Dan

[Dan Riley]

Did someone say even with data transfer, it’s only 2X real time?
If this is true and Sony isn’t predicting faster data throughput
down the road, then this is not the solution I’m looking for.
I shoot 4 camera multi-cam shows, maybe 5 reels (60min) for each camera.
(These are simultaneous timecode shoots so one of the reasons
I liked the XDCAM HD is because I can feed external timecode in
like betas or DigiBetas or the DVCAM 570.)
I want to drastically cut down my capture time.
If the low rez proxies are watchable, I guess that may be
a solution for the roughcut.

Why does it take so long to transfer data from the blue ray disks?

Dan

[Dan Riley]

Andy,

What do the proxy files look like?
When Sony & Apple get the appropriate software done and those
files are available to dump into a Macbook Pro (for instance)
for an offline, would you do it?
I don’t want to go back to low rez 1990s style AVID looking
offline editing again. I presently capture my digibeta footage SDI
using the DVCPRO codec for offline and it works great.
Then uprez to 10 bit uncompressed.

I’m looking very seriously at recommending our HD upgrade path
includes shooting with the XDCAM HD 350 camera and deck,
so I’m following everyone’s comments.
I’ve already read a review in the Cow magazine that really
loved the picture quality versus the Varicam.
This is a big deal to us. We have many shooters who like
that camera, but I want a disk based transfer system going forward.

Dan

[Dan Riley]

35 MINUTES TO OPEN FCP?
What the heck kind of project do you have there?
Or are you saying, the load time is BECAUSE of
the Wave plugins ?

Dan

[Dan Riley]

You could also just hit the green visibility button on the video track
and this also will kill your renders.

Dan

[Dan Riley]

If you will, could you tell us about that demo at NAB?
Was this data transfer from a Sony disk deck ($15k I think)
with an ethernet connector to the Mac, and using that
beta Sony software? Or was this done some other way?

Thanks,
Dan

[Dan Riley]

If I read correctly, that express card port is way fast enough for fiber.
Someone only needs to make a card. No?

Dan