Graeme Nattress
Forum Replies Created
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Varicam is $65l, Deck about $22k with options, and then you need a lens. I think you’ll be spending more than $87k before you shoot a single frame! But boy do those pictures look nice 🙂
Graeme
– http://www.nattress.com – Film Effects for FCP
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Steve, that’s a very wise response! Let’s hope some of the as yet unnanounced things that Panasonic will announce at NAB will help all our P2 workflow dilemmas.
Graeme
– http://www.nattress.com – Film Effects for FCP
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I think a 1280×1080 CCD would be funky. If it has pixelshift as well, it’s not going to do it any harm, but you’d need really nice glass to make it all worthwile. The proof will be in the pudding, so to say.
Graeme
– http://www.nattress.com – Film Effects for FCP
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I don’t think a 15 frame GOP MPEG2 is 4 times as efficient as, say, DV, never mind a 6 frame GOP. It might just reach sort of DV quality on images with less movement. If they really wanted to use an efficient codec, why did they not use MPEG4?? Because they want to keep the cheap cameras lower quality?? As for chroma sampling, 4:2:0 is just about acceptable on progressive video, but quite ghastly on interlaced.
Graeme
– http://www.nattress.com – Film Effects for FCP
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Maybe Serge is still editing tape to tape in a linear suite 🙂 That would certainly explain why he likes tape.
Hey, I like tape, I have shelves full of the stuff. But just as I remember adopting NLE early on, and just as I made the mistake of not getting into digital video earlier, I’m ready to embrace solid state recording ahead of time!
Graeme
– http://www.nattress.com – Film Effects for FCP
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1TB = 217 DVDs, not 1 million, or about 83 miniDV tapes.
The hard drive stuff is all about getting the video into your NLE as fast and as easily as possible. It’s not about long term storage.
If tape is so smart, cheap and simple, why do the BBC, of all people, have bother playing back D1 dubs of old quad recordings as the D1 decks are giving up the ghost. Come on – tape always has been iffy, and sure, an 80s Umatic might play back today, but the tape was so big, and the quality of the video on it so low, the tape would have to practically deteriorate to dust before you’d notice anyway.
Graeme
– http://www.nattress.com – Film Effects for FCP
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I still don’t get you Peter. News crews regularly wipe over old tapes. You can see this in the increase in dropouts in news programmes.
Now, you say about backing up the video twice. This doesn’t get done today as standard practise. The cameraguy tapes the event and at the end, might wind the tape back a bit to see if it’s worked. Then you have a mastertape, that gets digitised to edit from, and the master either gets stuck on a shelf or wiped and re-used. Similarly, if you’re an indie movie maker, documentarian, whatever, you shoot the master tape, wind it back to check a bit, and get it into your edit suite and stuff it on the shelf. At no point do you check the whole tape until it’s too late to go back and shoot the once in a lifetime event again.
No what’s different with P2? Well, shooting direct to memory has got to be more reliable than shooting direct to tape. Then you shove the P2 into your NLE, and then take that P2 and dump it’s contents to tape, to disc, to hard drive, whatever. Yes, when you wipe that P2, the video is gone, but if you’ve made an unattended backup to tape, both that and your NLE would have to fail for you to loose anything, whereas in shooting direct to tape, which is not always reliable, you’ve lost your footage before you’ve even began!
With digital video, it’s either 100% perfect or 0%. I don’t see why dumping a P2 to tape is going to be any less reliable than the current standard, which is just shooting direct to tape. By keeping your deck in a nice, controlled, office environment, where you can lavish it with the care it needs, rather being bumped up and down on your shoulder in all environments, I can only think that shooting P2 and dumping to tape would be MORE reliable than the old way of doing things, rather than less. And yes, accidents will happen, but they happen now. I can only see this reducing accidents.
As for destroying the original – remember, when you’re out videoing stuff, the “original” is the unique event you’re video taping, and that can never be repeated, and in that sense, under no video capture mechanism do we get to keep the original event, only a copy of it on some ephemeral media, be it tape, disk, P2 or whatever. And if you count the “orginal” as the master recorded copy, with digital video, every dub is a clone dub and is as an equally valid master as the original.
Remember, when video tape first came out, it was re-used as it was so darn expensive. If they wanted to keep something, they did a tele-recording onto film. That didn’t stop video tape taking off to become the norm, and the high price, initially of P2 won’t stop that taking off either.
I guess what I’m looking forwards to is not having to wait for tape to get up to speed after hitting the record button!!
Graeme
– http://www.nattress.com – Film Effects for FCP
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As a stills photographer gone digital – does the memory “go wrong” and loose your pictures? It’s certainly not happened here. As for XDCAM – it’s neither tape nor solid state. It’s an optical disc that would be quite fragile out of it’s little carrier. It’s nearly as mechanical as tape, and to me, looks reasonably suited for standard definition archiving, as it doesn’t have the data rate for HD archiving. But why put one in a camera over tape?? It’s advantages are slim at best. It’s just a new way for Sony to sell a new “tape”. It’s not a format designed for aquisition, but a distribution format (blu ray) turned into something else by putting it in a caddy.
Carrying 30 or 40 of this XDCAM disks with you is hardly trivial. They only store, what is it, how many gigabytes? Hard drives are more compact, tape is more compact. Hard drives are faster, tape slower. XDCAM is not one thing or another, but a small stepping stone to “tapeless” acquisition. Why not go the whole way instead of putting your toe in the water??
Graeme
– http://www.nattress.com – Film Effects for FCP
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Say you backup the P2 media to tape. Why would you subject the process to much more stringent control and over-sight than what a cameraman would do shooting direct to tape?? If it were unreliable to dump a P2 to tape, surely it would be unreliable to shoot tape in the first place??
This all reminds me very much of the introlduction of the NLE, where nobody could afford the many gigabytes of hard disk space needed, and, of course, the NLE never took off as tape to tape is just so much cheaper, quicker, easier etc.
Also, what about CRT monitors? Sony, of all people, no longer manufacture CRTs. Think about it. What they’ve got left is stockpile only. Once they’re gone, they’re gone.
In the audio industry, Quantegy, the last tape manufacturer of analogue professional audio tape shut down. This gave the industry quite a fright until they managed to find someone new, but in the meantime they were worried. That’s because the mainstream audio industry records direct to hard disk now.
And yes, stills photographers! They’ve moved to digital, recording on memory cards, no doubt backing up in the field to the hard drive of their laptop, burning a CD, wiping the memory card then starting again. I see that they’ve got their workflow sorted, and it won’t be long before video people get their workflow sorted too.
Graeme
– http://www.nattress.com – Film Effects for FCP
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As indeed it will.
WHo would have thought, after seeing the first Avid, that we’d all today be editing non-linearly, with all that expensive hard drives we’d need and super fast processors.
Graeme
– http://www.nattress.com – Film Effects for FCP