[David Battistella]

Duh?

Thanks Guys. It does have to be the 29.97 (8-BIT) output.

David

[David Battistella]

Hey Gang,

For what it is worth I just went with a HUge 420 4GIG FIber channel drive and an ATTO Celerity card. The 4 TB drive was expensive and in a riad three you loose about 1TB of storage. At 80% capacity I was looking at 380MB/sec. The drive is a tank, it weighs 100 pounds it has dual power spplies and dual fiber.

I looked at it as a future proofing purchase. I looked hard at SATA Raids too but after my IDE drive experiences in OSX I wanted to go with something very relaible, with redundancy build it because recapturing a few terabytes of material is not a one day thing. That’s many hours on those drives and I want that to be protected storage.

Very reliable, very fast and not much more than a SATA riad.

David

[David Battistella]

Brian,

I am thinking about it fromthe same perspective you are and in the short term at least it seem s very cumbersome to be hauling everything around with you. I stillthink it would be cheaper to iunvest in a Varicam for HD aquisition and work in the same manner.

P2 cards are a very very smart idea, but as I said in a previous post I think you will see the HD part of the camera used in very controlled situations.

What do you hand the client at the end of a shoot if you have been hired to shoot for a day? Does this speed things up?

David

[David Battistella]

I think this thread covers it.

https://forums.creativecow.net/cgi-bin/new_read_post.cgi?forumid=98&postid=848157

David

[David Battistella]

Jan,

Thanks for answering allo f these questions, it is great that you do. How is Panasonic marketing this camera? To me it seems that it is a DV camera all the time first with HD capabilities. I would say that this would be a greeat companion camera to a varicam, but there are limitations to it’s use. I’m not sure you would tell Varicam owners to carry a laptop with them on field shoots to record on to, nor would they expect that with a camera that costs 10x as much.

I think that this is the steroids version of the 100A. If I bought it, it easily replaces my DVX100A and gives me very limited SD and HD recording capability, but I can certainly see it as a perfect camera for indy filmmaking for sure and I am sure we will see films shot in this format.

Here is a question. Let’s say I am shooting DV and I want some varicam style sloomo to blend into my production. Can I record those shots on the P2 cards with variable frame rates or can I just record those shots to tape?

David

[David Battistella]

Yes,

I would definitely run tests, for sure to see if you can recapture frame accurately. Do a test from different sources integrated with different media, knock it all offline and try a recapture. This is a worst case scenario test but if you go with this format maybe you back all of the material captured DVCPROHD from HDV source or somethiing. That is one alternative,, then you can relink to a differnet drive if things go wrong.

With YOUR DVC source you would have tape as a back up and the HDV source you could copy t o external firewires and restore or relink in the event of media loss. This is what makes HDV a bit of a drag. It is a great Prosumer idea but hard to work into some post workflows where there is more involved than just cpture>edit>print to tape.

Thanks,

Daivd

[David Battistella]

Jan,

I realize that in my post I was looking completely at a storage times as the question was in regard to how much media the cards can hold and I think I gave a pretty accurate assessment of what they can hold (I am sure panasonic has better, more accurate nnumbers than this). I was looking at the P2 cards as storage because that is exactly what they are, reusable memory cards that “store” media.

I am always thinking of production workflows and I am fully aware of the cost of capturing footage and the benefits of not having to digitize.

I have been trying to figure out how I would integrate this camera in to a typical workflow I may face when I am shooting. I am sure that there are solutions to all of my workflow questions but here is an example of what I saw tonight while at a booklaunch here in Toronto.

I was at a live event and there was a single speaker on a podium giving a speech that would last anywhere from one to two hours. I watched the cameraman cover the entire speech, and then he had to get some B-roll of the crowds going in and out, maybe some exteriors of the venue and some interviews of people exiting the room. Then there is a formal sitdown interview 20 to 30 minutes with the author after the event, etc, you get my drift. That is a real typical night of production filming.

Now, I was watching this go down and I say to myself, OK, what if he was doing all of this with that new P2 Camera. Mt guess is he would shoot the whole thing DV with a tape. But let’s say on the outside chance that it had to be captured HD720 or 1080i. What would have happened? I figure you would have to have at least four to six 4mb cards, to cover the speech ( ihope that they are widely available for rent). I agree that it is doable, he can slip the cards out of the camera (we have yet to see how easy this is to do) and he can copy them to the 60 gig drive and replace the cards back in the camera once they have been downloaded and the speech is being recorded on the other card. Great!

So Scenario A with that camera costs you 9 dollars worth of tape and you might have one tape change.

But Scenario B, which I agree is a very cool and excellent scenario and will work really well, might require 2 to 4 additional P2 cards at 1750 each and and 1800.00 hard drive unit. What if it’s a 2 camera shoot!

I love the Panasonic DVX 100A that I own. I love the idea of the P2 camera and I think it is an enormously bold move for Panasonic to move this direction. I also love that the media is so reusable, and most of all I love tha there will be real TC attached to the media that is recorded. I agree that it is a LONG term investment that could pay for itself over time, but it is not a simple shift in thinking to go away from tape.

Tape is beautiful in the sense that you have an ultimate backup and archive. Like having the negative in film. This backup will inevitably be created, even in a tapeless world because the media will have to be copied and stored somewhere (a DVD is about 4GIG) . There has to be an archive. What do I reach for one year from now when I want to wacth the rushes of that speech? I will have o reach for that DVD that I created as a media archive. So there still will be time and cost in post of copying this full reez media to a third media storage solution. The tapeless world is not completely seemless because, there will always be a need for some form of media to revert to.

I am a fan of this format, I am looking forward to it. I just still trying to visualize it in more realworld scenarios and really breaking down all of the costs and time associated with it.

Thanks,

David 🙂

[David Battistella]

Your biggest problem will end up being if you have to recapture the HDV from an HDV source.

David

[David Battistella]

Assuming you have 8MB of media cards or two 4MB Cards

Using AJA storage rate calculator and assuming two tracks of 48k audio
ALL NTSC

DV 25 @24fps 43 minutes APROX
DV 25 @30fps 35 minutesAPROX
DVC Pro 50@30fps 18 minutes APROX
DVC Pro 50@24ps 22 minutes APROX
DVC Pro 720P@60fps 9 minutes APROX
DVC Pro 720P@30fps 18 minutes APROX
DVC Pro 720P@24fps 22 minutes APROX
DVC Pro 1080i@30fps 9 minutes APROX
DVC Pro 1080i@24fps 11 minutes APROX

The cost of the storage is about 3600.00 us. Which gives you less storage than an 9 dollar master series tape in DV.
To put this in hours of storage perspective. I could purchase about 400 hours of high quality DV tape for the price of 2 P2 cards.
The relatively puny 60gig companion field hard drive is priced at about 1800.00. This would hold about 165 minutes of hd 1080i@24fps, that is the equivalent of about 400.00 worth of HDCAM tape.

Until we see radical price drops and much larger and very releiable field storage, with some kind of redundancy because there is no tape back up, I think that it will be limited to close to home type shooting scenarios.

David

[David Battistella]

A google search and the aja site turned up this:

The D10A provides excellent quality component analog to 10-bit serial digital
conversion in a small, low cost package. The D10A works with RGB or YPbPr
component analog inputs (including Betacam and MII) in 525 or 625 line formats.
The D10A has one component analog input (3x BNC), one external sync input, and
three SDI outputs. Input format can be chosen by internal jumpers and level/gain
controls.

So maybe you have to open it up to convert the compnanet signal, right now it must be set to Betacam.

David