Ethan Sigman
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Hello,
I have the 2700 and the canon IASE. the difference is the remote focus servo control that the iase has and the irse does not. the purpose of this control is to allow the lens to be mounted on a jibbed camera, to give the operator control of the focus when the cam is not on his/her shoulder. the irse has remote zoom control only to be used on shoulder/tripod. the cac function wants to know the focus position to make its adjustments to the image and therefore i believe the iase takes this info from the servo position.
Ethan
https://www.EZSProductions.com
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https://www.VaricamUser.comhttp://www.EZSproductions.com
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i have two century optics lenses for sale for that camera. they are perfect condition and do not require a dof adapter. the adapters are a sloppy business overall, the letus ultimate is the only system that allows proper back focus adjustment and it starts at $4600 without any lenses. they also require power, and maintenance for achromats, ground glass, dust, etc.
my lenses are 82mm thread, lightly used, fit directly onto your camera.
Wide Angle:
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if you do some searching on “the glitch” you might find some examples of this. it exists, despite being very rare. i experienced it a couple times with my first hvx200. i posted pics on my free production page at productionmeeting.com…… you can see the picture of the example here:
https://www.productionmeeting.com/photo/2039668:Photo:1701?context=user
most people have not seen it nor will they know what you are talking about. the only way around it that i know of it is to minimize your use of those frames in the project then go through frame by frame and sample the area to knock out the digital spec pixels…
ethan
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ok, my last one on this one. i think we agree much more than we diagree. opposite sides, but close to the middle-in fact, we can team up and be “ideal”- let me know if your in the big apple;)
i would summarize my argument by saying that while p2 is expensive, it is empowering in new and exciting ways and creates many subtle time and cost savings that make it actually cheaper than it appears when applied to a volume of work. I think panasonic attempted to address both your combo cam complaint and the field offload complaint when they gave you the “gear” and the “110”. the gear will attach to your camera (albeit, perhaps awkwardly) make it a combo cam that records intra, and simultaneously lets you use your deck to play your archive through the gear to get meta on your legacy footage. it also does byte for byte offload verification. the 110 has 6 p2 slots that do byte for byte verified, automated, field offloads, will edit and hook up to a satellite or drives. don’t forget the p2 store, the belt worn verified 60gig drive- though i don’t own any…
I don’t think Panasonic believes tape is “going away”…. they will sell parts for their decks so they can run as long as there is call for them to justify repair and it seems they believe it will live on in the rental market for a long time. i just don’t expect them sell the two cams side by side with great success and the reality is that it is cheaper to make the solid state cam. car manufacturers don’t sell the old model anymore either, it just sort of seems reasonable, though perhaps not required. tape transports are high precision tolerances, they cost a lot to manufacture and are prone to break. not to mention to cost of tape stock. i would point out that the original varicam sold for 70 grand, plus the cost of the deck which i might be overestimating somewhat but, regardless, it pushed the price of the camera toward 100k, and it had a 1 year warranty. a new 2700 lists for 40k and comes with a 5 year warranty because solid state is seriously reliable. consider the cost of ownership with no repair costs ammortized over 5 years. to me it is like when i got a digital still camera, even the first one that shot to the 1.44 mb floppy disks. it only fit a couple pics, disks weren’t that cheap, had to be backed up etc, etc, but you could delete your bad ones, offload the good ones, and re-use the disks and i shot my face off with what felt like no marginal operating costs compared film. it didn’t look like film but shooting more pictures for less money was the way to shoot more overall.
I agree tape is great for some things and p2 is a compromise in some ways also, i just argue that it saves you time and money too and the features in the “pros” category of p2 are the features that have more “mojo” with me, making the “cons” a worthy price. cheers, catch you on the next one.
Ethan
http://www.EZSproductions.com
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I don’t wand to be combative or beat a dead horse, i confess, i love the sport of this debate… I don’t disagree that tape was a mature technology that had evolved to manage many of its own shortcomings, though i would debate some of your points.
i think tape shooters, (who basically have a deck in their cam) forget the cost, space, and weight of that deck. if you want to watch your footage, you pop it the cam…. but producers gotta find that deck to see what they have….I find it kind of hard to complain about cost, when a shooter/editor no longer has to think about purchasing a piece of deck gear that cost as much as the camera and only functioned to move your footage to a computer. the cost of that function in $50k decks is astronomical compared to my $110 duel adapter that puts my footage at my fingertips for editing in a shorter process than digitizing and saves me log and capture labeling….. last week i used a 1 terabyte raided bus powered drive to allow me go directly to the train station from my shoot and offload, view, and edit my footage on a train between boston and new york…. you just plain can’t do that tape…. so while you say it wasn’t “broken”…. i would just argue it wasn’t capable or affordable for the type of doc work i have been doing lately.like every piece of gear in production, p2 products need to fit your workflow but i can tell you as a p2 shooter for years now, don’t underestimate some of the subtle dynamics of Intra. amongst my bigger issues with P2 is an archive strategy, intra gives me better performance images, and an advantage in the archive space because amazingly the 4x more efficient codec actually means you save drive space compared to dvcpro100 also. so intra is more for less in more dimensions than many realize…… i am not going to tell you that P2 won’t make shooters learn more and work a little harder, and i see that shooters who are only shooters don’t care about most of the advantages of P2. But if you own the process beyond shooting, p2 pays you back elsewhere. the reality that the post production has heaped more burden onto production, but the whole process is cheaper, faster, and better so if you need to manage media creation from start to finish you appreciate it. Tape shooters don’t have to like solid state because, in reality, aside from footage lost in a tape jam, it doesn’t help to much- you could get a pretty image captured before and this has not changed. but shooters are going to have to realize that they are part of a much larger process that sees far more benefits to the workflow efficiency- and the world is correctly beginning to recognize and value TIME as the only truly scare resource in the universe.
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you have made two different points. they are related but not as intertwined as you would suggest. There is the conversion to tapless, and the number of cameras.
Tape won’t go away for a while, so if you really love your million dollar deck and your tape transports, you can use and repair them for years to come- they become perversely more expensive to repair but cheaper to replace as people trade out and more used gear is available.
The simple answer to all the complaints is that Panny has given everyone more options. When it comes to options (and all other “normal” economic goods)- more is always better. While i agree that your rental customers are probably a bit confused, part of the new burden of technology operators is to educate. It seems a simple sale to say “sony gives you small medium and large, while panny gives you every option under the sun for technology, features, and budget.” The 300 is a CMOS chip. CMOS is lower power and lower heat technology and therefore can be cycled faster without requiring the same cooling (fan noise, more power). this is how red accomplishes its feature set so while you say you look to red for what is possible, panasonic has done that already, and probably before red- except they invested far more in R&D before releasing the product- we all know the first reds were all but unusable…..
CMOS is an overall more efficient chip but it comes with a rolling shutter, IR sensitivity, color reproduction, and a higher propensity to smear downside.
1/3″ and shoulder mount are to fill the void that Zacuto has been feeding on. I am one of the suckers with the $4000 shoulder mount studio rig added to $5000 “handheld” camera . Only 3 servo speeds on an HVX/hpx leave plenty of desire for real lenses- its pretty easy to see how this camera makes sense. While i also own a 2700 and find this disconcerting on some level, i think the camera represents a general swelling of the video industry, which always requires more and more specific tools, and volume always puts pressure on pricing.
Incidentally, i will be playing with a 300 today, and will post some pics and thoughts here and over at http://www.VaricamUser.com and at http://www.ProductionMeeting.com
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I think Jan, despite her infinite wisdom, has under emphasized the power of the meta data. I also think tape to clients completely depends on your clients. If you have broadcast clients, then they may have a deck and some future use for that tape. The rest of the world goes back to an office full of computers and no decks.
I pre-fab all my meta data into the sd card with titles that are instantly loaded to my clips when i hit record. they then show up in my edit bin with the names thanks to raylight. new fcp studio 2 plugin will take mxf also, so if you hand a client pre-tagged meta files on a drive and put all p2 viewer software and p2cms on there, i think they are better off, and more capable. Web based companies take to this quickly. everyone sees the time savings immediately, and while my clients seemingly understand little most of the time, they understand less time, which makes it easy to sell.
another power of the gear is to create a “DIT Station” at a multicam shoot where you can now use five kinds of cameras and run them back to a desk where one guy can swap and offload footage for all the cams whithout ever a pause in recording and no stock cost.
the last under emphasized part of the p2 gear is as an archive tool. you can play old footage back through the gear to convert an old tape library from any format to mxf, which carries its meta via extensible markup language, xml- univerally availablet to other IT equipment, and therefore, searchable.
oh, and it verifies your offloads to the byte, tape what? tape who? tape why?
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I heard today that panny wants small p2 off the market and is taking a couple hundred trade in on 4’s and 8’s toward 32’s…..
i was also told by a rental tech recently that when they send out hvx’s with 4 16’s instead of 2 32’s, their customers are annoyed. color me an early p2 adopter but i guess i don’t really see the big deal anymore when 750gig drives are $100, it is $200 redundant. I know drives are less than ideal, but tape cost, camera repair, and decks are much further from ideal. I think a 32g gives me like 84 minutes per card in the 2700 in intra, i would prefer to offload to my sonnet f2 drives a couple times (bus powered field raid) than carry enough tape to shoot 420 minutes. I leave my drives in the hotel room, and travel lighter. tapes cost money and take up space, decks cost money, tape carriages break. i would rather take on the democratization of video into the IT world than pay for another proprietary deck that will be outdated in a few years exactly like the long line of predecessors- fool me a thousand times…shame on me…..
incidentally, i bought an 8 gig flash stick at the “rat shack” the other day for 12.99. that’s half the cost of a blu-ray disc, and you don’t need a burner. if you could buy a few hundred of 32’s at the same price in bulk, you could back up to flash sticks soon almost as cheap as blu ray, slow transfer but no spinning disc……..
neither tape nor sxs cards are raided inside, so your data is safer and more portable on p2. if you ammortized the deck cost into p2 cards, you come out ahead, and someday, the cards will be both better and cheaper than tape.
lastly: one word: INTRA
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Hi Ernie,
can you explain the last part of your post…. what part of that workflow is not possible on a varicam?
ethanhttp://www.EZSproductions.com
http://www.productionmeeting.com/profile/EthanSigman