[Helmut Kobler]

I checked with my dealer and my Panasonic rep in Los Angeles, and hear that the color viewfinder will arrive in late June, and possibly July. Which means possibly even August, but hopefully July.

[Helmut Kobler]

I seriously hope Panasonic takes care of this asap. P2 really needs to be rock-solid and bullet proof. People need absolute confidence that their video will transfer properly from the cards to a hard drive. There can’t be a sense of anxiety or any kind of question that the data may not be intact….

[Helmut Kobler]

Thanks for the info, Jan. That’s too bad that I can’t use a CalDigit card to connect both a raid and the PDC35.

I might have to consider getting a PDC20 and connecting it via FireWire 800 (saving a precious PCIe slot in my Mac), but I really liked the idea of a fast-as-possible transfer rate for five P2 cards. I could always get a PCIe expansion chassis from Dulce or Magma, but those are thousands of dollars…ie, not so attractive!

It’s too bad Apple couldn’t squeeze one more PCIe card slot into the Mac Pro. 3 open slots is really tough to work with these days!

One question, Jan: Would the PCD35, connected with a PCIe card, be significantly faster for transferring data than a PCD20 via FireWire 800? I would expect so, but you never know how things work out in the real world…

[Helmut Kobler]

Yea, I had already asked CalDigit, but they said that the 2-port PCIe card from the HDOne was simply providing two standard PCIe cable connectors. They thought the Panasonic PCD35 *might* work when connected to their card, *IF* the Panasonic’s own native PCIe card was similarly providing just a standard PCIe connector, and not adding additional circuitry that the PCD35 might require.

Maybe I can find a dealer who carries both products, and might be able to do a test. I could always consider the PCD20, but I think most of the card dumps I’ll be doing will be at my desk, and not in the field. So having a 1Gb PCIe connection (versus even FireWire 800…thanks for the reminder, Jeremy!), might be a nice thing…

I’ll let you guys know when/if I figure this out, thanks…

[Helmut Kobler]

AVC Intra is definitely in the Gold camp at Discovery. I’m working on a Discovery show now and just double-checked their Producer’s Portal web site–yep, there was AVC-I in the Gold column.

[Helmut Kobler]

Hi Kevin,

For your extreme “in the field” shoots, where you have no running water, and generator-supplied power, I bet you can still make P2 work. It doesn’t take much power to run a small 2.5″ raid 1 enclosure off a laptop or P2 Mobile.

Also, solid state backup drives will also come of age in the next year or two. Right now, you could assemble 500 GB of solid state, palm-sized backup storage for about $1000-$1100. Since the drives are solid state, they are very low power, very rugged, and very secure. That gives you another 10-20 hours of media backup that you can perform in the field. In a year, you’ll probably be able to buy a terabyte of solid state storage for the same price. So that’s 20-40 hours of solid state backup capacity in an enclosure slightly bigger than a 2.5″ drive, which doesn’t need its own power source. And if the cameraman is worth his salt and has prepped his scene files before the shoot, the footage already has reasonable clip names and basic metadata baked in, which will definitely come in handy for editing. And if a producer or assistant producer has some downtime during travel, he/she can use a 2.5 pound P2 Gear/Mobile to watch the media and further annotate it for editing later. Plus, the team doesn’t have to carry 20, 30, 40, 50 blasted tapes/xdcam disks around as well. And no poor SOB in the editing room has to log one tape after another once the footage is back to civilization.

Anyway, I think it’s also worth asking: out of all the videography that happens in the world, what percentage of it happens in extreme situations where you’re basically living in the wild, away for electrical power for days and days at a time? I have to think it’s a pretty small percentage of the whole, and it doesn’t seem fair to judge a camera format based on how it serves an extreme situation which many shooters rarely encounter…especially when that same format (p2) beats alternative formats (like tape) in many shooting scenarios that are more commonplace.

[Helmut Kobler]

Hi Tom,

As for the data wrangling, that’s exactly why I mentioned 64GB p2 cards in my example. With 5 of those cards, you can shoot for almost 12 hours at 720 (30p). At 1080, it’s a little less than 6 hours. That’s a lot of footage, and many productions would have a hard time filling it all up in a single day. Given this, the field producer wouldn’t have to worry about data wrangling. They simply bring the cards back to the office at the end of the day, and then do the transfer and erase the cards there (or the post guy does that).

I realize not *all* productions can work in 6 or 12 hour blocks at a time, but a lot can. For instance, at this company I work for, I recently tracked the typical number of tapes a field producer brings back from a shoot (these shoots take place all around the country). It’s very very rare that a producer brings back more than 5 hours of taped material at a time (10 DVCPRO tapes), so that would easily fit within P2’s 5 card capacity. I also think a decent P2 cameraman is going to be able to get his/her shots using less hours/minutes, thanks to P2’s ease of erasing bad clips, and the interval recording features which let you keep recording into a buffer constantly, but hit the record button only when you see a good shot taking place. If tape-based shooters had these features, I think they would come back with even less tape.

So what about the times when a producer is away from the office for more than 6 or 12 hours worth of footage. In that case, the cameraman can take along a Raid 1 drive (two mirrored disks in one enclosure), like this miniature one that uses 2.5″ drives:

https://www.cooldrives.com/2usb2alrahdd.html

Or this one that uses 3.5″ drives:
https://www.icydock.com/product/mb662us-2s.html

There are plenty of other options.

Anyway, just dump the cards off to the drive directly from the camera. Or you can take along a P2 Gear or a laptop and avoid using the camera as the drives. Any cameraman in the digital age should be able to handle this, and it woudn’t take long to train a field producer.

I guess I just don’t see the big deal with making this work. With 64GB cards, so many productions can get away without data wrangling during the day.

One more thing: I really have my doubts that a Panasonic tape/P2 hybrid would sell. It would require a tape drive like a Varicam, plus all the circuitry that supports the cards as well. That means it would be bigger and heavier than a normal camera, the ergonomics wouldn’t be great for one format or the other, and it would certainly cost more. You wouldn’t get a 5 year warranty either (God I love that…5 years!). I think when faced with those compromises, most shooters would simply choose a “pure” solution–either tape or P2.

But that, too, is just one guy’s opinion! 😉

[Helmut Kobler]

Tom, what happens if the producer brings his/her own P2 cards, and simply hands them to you when you’re ready to shoot? That way, the media resides on the producer’s property, and they take it with them at the end of the day. Problem solved. It requires a change in the way things currently work between *some* producers and freelancers, but that change brings many benefits.

I’m working for a production company that puts around 50 shows per year on networks like History and Discovery. They spend a lot of money on DVCPRO HD tape (which they buy and supply to their freelance cameramen across the country) and could save half of that cost in the first 1-2 years simply by buying a bunch of P2 cards (even at today’s prices, which are likely to drop by NAB). This company would also save a ton of money by seriously downscaling the tape dubbing room that runs 12 hours a day.

Yes, archival would be treated differently than simply putting a tape on a shelf. But even small companies are beginning to put SANs in place, and creating a long-term backup strategy using LTO-4 tapes would not be a big step beyond that.

Imagine: 5 64GB P2 cards hold 12 hours of 720P material. They come back from the field and are plugged into a 5 card P2 reader, which offloads the video in a single hour onto a blazing fast, ultra secure RAID 6 SAN, which every editing station can access. At the same time, the footage is automatically converted into small MPEG-4 proxy files, with timecode burn, which are instantly emailed to any producers attached to the project, along with a transcription company. These proxies also get quickly incorporated into a database of company-wide footage, so any employee can see any shot the company has ever recorded, right from their desk. At some interval, the project also gets backed up to an LTO-4 tape (800 TB per tape…ie, 12.5 hours of full 1080 footage). When the project is done, everything is again archived to a couple of tapes (as opposed to 40 or so tapes), and those sit safely on a shelf somewhere, up to 30 years.

This is all very possible now, at affordable cost, and more and more companies are going to go this way in the next couple of years. And P2 tech works FAR better in this sort of scheme than tape, or even XDCAM disk. It’s a different animal, and it doesn’t work if you try to force it into the same tape-based workflow that’s been used since….what, the 70s? It requires a different workflow, but if you’re willing to make the investment, it can definitely pay off.

[Helmut Kobler]

I’m in the market for a new camera and am leaning towards the HPX2700. The reasons are: 1) the Panasonic filmic look, 2) the variable frame rates, 3) P2 and AVC Intra and 4) price combined with Panasonic’s 24 month leasing terms (0%).

Personally, I can’t imagine ever needing/wanting to shoot SD, but I definitely wring my hands over the issue of a 1.1 vs 2.2 MP imager. I would LOVE to be able to have an HPX3000 imager combined with 60 fps, but no one seems to offer that in the form of a field-friendly ENG camera (Red does it but you get plenty of other hassles in exchange–ie, the weight, battery life, the difficulty in using it as a one man band, the more complicated post workflow, etc.).

Since no one else offers my dream camera, it tells me that there might be good technical/cost reasons for that state of being. At some point we’ll get there I’m sure, but it seems like we’re not there yet.

By the way, Erich, I caught some of your work last night on History Channel’s Air Force One documentary. Nice job! I really liked the show, and what a great experience that must have been to shoot the plane. Just curious: what camera did you use for that production? I think there might have been some film used on the plane itself, but most looked like Varicam, maybe HDX900. I wasn’t entirely sure, though.

[Helmut Kobler]

Jeez, I’m not sure what to think of this. I’m working for a major production company that has been producing about 50 shows a year for networks like Discovery and The History Channel. They still shoot tape off Varicams and HDX900s, and seem far away from making the leap to tapeless. I know of a bunch of other production companies that are the same way.

As much as I love P2 (other than the stubbornly high price…why no price cut on 32GB cards after 15 months?), I wonder how the format is doing outside of the news networks that have adopted it. Seems like a slow adoption rate, which makes killing off the traditional Varicam all the more interesting.

Maybe it wasn’t’ selling very well anyway, given the popularity of the HDX900…