Jan Crittenden livingston
Forum Replies Created
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[Brian SaenzDeViteri] ”
If that is really the case, then why can’t we take the firewire out from the HVX200 to any hard drive based recorder that can handle the Firewire date rate? Shouldn’t that function the same as an HD1200A deck without the tape? Or do we HAVE to use a Firestore device for this style of deck-based recording with the HVX200?”Well on the HD1200A you would have to push the record button. I don’t know of a Hard Drive that has a record button which is why you can do it on a 1200 and not to a HDD.
Hope that helps,
Jan
Jan Crittenden Livingston
Product Manager, DVCPRO, DVCPRO50, AG-DVX100
Panasonic Broadcast & TV Systems -
[ShawnMitchL] “I am wondering what anyone might think/know about Panasonic’s commitment to P2 will be and when is a realistic time frame for 64GB media?”
Hi,
First off we are totally committed to P2, I mean we are introducing something, putting all of our efforts into a product line that will decimate our most profitable business if we are successful. That is we make VTRs and we make more VTRs than any other manufacturer in the video business and if we are successful with P2 and memory based recording, then the VTR business goes away. Think about it. Gutsy move.
The Memory based P2 is based on the SD memory card which is based on memory chips. San Disk is now delivering 4 gig SD, they tend to lead on SD memory introductions, which will get us 16 GB P2s. We do make our own SDs as we can skim the cream of the crop and other manufacturers wouldn’t put up with such nonsense. By this I mean only the Defect Free cards which is 1% or less are defect free and those with transfer rates of 20MBps are the ones we put into the P2s. So with the rate of introduction we are looking at 16 GB next year, 32 the year after and the 64 would be the year after. So under normal timetable the 64GB is about 3 years out.
However, I saw an article the other day where Samsung was working on a 32GB memory chip, the article did not say whether it was small enough for the SD, but if it were, that would leap-frog and all would have to follow to remain competitive.
And yes, the cameras are being designed to either be firmware upgradeable, that is, once it passes a certain number of GB on the P2, it can be upgraded to accept the larger ones or they are are open to accept any size of P2. Our map on the SD has the memory doubling every year, so yes these are exciting times.
Hope this helps,
Jan
Jan Crittenden Livingston
Product Manager, DVCPRO, DVCPRO50, AG-DVX100
Panasonic Broadcast & TV Systems -
[Randall3] “P2 is cool. Not quite for HD yet, but very cool. I hope Panasonic provides HD-SDI out on their new camera. That would solve a great deal of problems in the interim. It would also sell a LOT of 1200a decks. Panny, are you listening?”
Hi Randall,
To get the footage into a HD1200A, use the 1394, no need for HD-SDI. There is no difference between the compression at the HVX200 or in the HD1200A, none whatsoever. HD-SDI would only be useful if you had a RAID that would handle 1.2GBps of data.
Best regards,
Jan
Jan Crittenden Livingston
Product Manager, DVCPRO, DVCPRO50, AG-DVX100
Panasonic Broadcast & TV Systems -
[Steve Connor] “Incorporate DLT into your workflow, do you know what DLT records to -TAPE. So much for P2 bringing you a tapeless workflow!
Of course we know it records to tape, but it records as data. Current devices are much faster and the Dell can do HD at about 1 1/2 times faster than real time.
It is one idea, but not every idea.
Best,
Jan
Jan Crittenden Livingston
Product Manager, DVCPRO, DVCPRO50, AG-DVX100
Panasonic Broadcast & TV Systems -
jiri vrozina wrote:I think the most effective archiving could be DVD blue and HD DVD.
Hi Jiri, This would work for what I consider short form, but actually for larger projects, I think I would rather look at something that I could put the entire project onto, if possible. I think in terms of HD because of my closeness to the HVX200, so if you are working in DV50 or 25 divide by 2 or 4 respectively. DVCPRO HD in full frame rate 60i or 60Pis roughly 1 gB per minute. I have been looking at DLT or LTO drives, there is a wide variety and in general you can get a 200GB tape pack for one of these as cheaply as $50. Certainly Hard drives for near-time storage and editing functionality, and backup even while on set to the DLT.
Dell has a very nice and fast little DLT drive that the machine cost is about $2250 or so, and the Drives are cheap, geing the cost per Gig of storage down to 25 cents per gig. Compare this to 30 minutes or 30 gigs of DVCPRO tape storage which is $25 -$30 per half hour of tape(street price for the smart shopper) which of course is .83 to $1.00 per gig. Of course in tape there is the additional cost of digitizing, but I am going to assume we all know that.
>I guess this could be cost effective as well.
The Blue-ray or the HD-DVDas well as the DVD-R might be fine for short form and news or standard def storage, but as I said I like to think big in the storage arena.
There also are some rather cutting edge things coming, I think are notable and worth watching like the Holographic Blue Laser Technology, 300 GBs on a DVD sized disk. Or the Quantum Metadata aware DLT. The more we think of the video as data the more the IT industry can proffer a solution.
Hopes this adds to the conversation,
Jan
Jan Crittenden Livingston
Product Manager, DVCPRO, DVCPRO50, AG-DVX100
Panasonic Broadcast & TV Systems -
Simon Wyndham: Hey Jan, it wasn’t me who introduced XDCAM into this discussion. As you will see from the very top of this thread it was the mention of HD XDCAM that brought me into it. You might like to look on things as being XDCAM chest beating. Hey, its the system I use a lot. I looked into P2. If you can tell me where all the clip organisation abilities are in camera, or even with the P2 free downloadable software it would be nice if you pointed it out.
It is in the P2 Viewer software. You can name or rename, add many other essential details, whatever your pleasure, short of acting like an archiving data-base, it allows for more information than most customers care to add.
>Because a) the manuals for P2 hardware certainly make no mention of such abilities,
Not sure why this is, it should be and I will agree with you there, but the camera comes with the software. I am not the product manager for this camera, so I am not in control of these ideas but will bring it to his attention. I know the very early manuals may not be as complete as the current one as the camera was released without full feature set and has been upgraded over the last year about 2-3 times. So perhaps when the final manual is finished it will be in there.
>and b) you aren’t exactly endearing me to the HVX by practically making out I’m some kind of Sony henchman.
If it felt so, I apologize, but it seemed as though there was a tone in your responses that was negatively aimed at the P2 system, so if I interpreted that incorrectly, sorry about that as well.
> This kind of hardware is not cheap, and if someone is asking about the various capabilities I will point them out as I see them.
I agree with you that equipment is not cheap and it takes a certain amount of faith to purchase. And it takes a good foundation of understanding to make decisions.
>Being one of the product managers for a new piece of P2 hardware if I am wrong then please correct me. I don’t want to know about your sales to another company. Sony could probably tell you of a few that were looking into P2 but bought XD instead.
Exactly but I guess the way I saw it, was that you made statements presented as facts that the system was flawed and frankly I felt my saying “it isn’t” could be construed as the little kids in the back room saying “yes it is, no it’s not” or to be accused of just more marketing hype. So I chose to point to a customer that made a decision, an expensive one and that sounds as though it isn’t just me with marketing hype, it is another rational entity that made the decision. I hope you can appreciate why I chose a customer story.
>No, what I’m interested in is the facts. You have accused me of having limited experience. From what do you base these comments on? I certainly didn’t plonk down nearly 25k UKP on hardware without looking into all the options!
Well since you didn’t know about the downloadable P2 viewer in which all of the metadata can be customized, I guess that is what lead me to that assumption. I am sure that you chose what is best for you and your workflow requirement. However, that is isn’t close to the P2 workflow.
>1) Does P2 have on camera clip organisation and naming?
Yes, totally possible, although I can’t rename in the camera, I can in the P2viewer, however I can choose clips for playout, do a standup edit on the fly, delete, reclaim time, edit from, with more than one stream of video(Avid has done as many as 5 streams) and back to the card, and if desired transfer the footage at faster than real time onto the hard drive, from either the camera, or the P2 Drive. The card can also at this time be inserted into a PC via a PCMCIA card and the files can be transferred off. If I want proxy, and this is in the big camera, I can have proxy and I can edit with proxy, but it is not a requirement. It can go from reviewing footage anywhere on the memory card to record in less than a 1/2 second, and never have to wait for the spin-up. In reality to produce something all I would need is the camera and a PC with a firewire port and a story can be made.
>2) With regards to different types of projects what is your honest appraisal of both systems for different tasks?
I am not in a position to nor would I consider addressing the XDCAM system, since my experience is rather short, only anecdotal and it is not my product line, as far as HVX P2 however, I think it has a tremendous potential in digital film production, B & I video production as well as news, and many points in-between.
>3) Has Panasonic done any software upgrades to current P2 cameras that increase or add to their feature set?
Absolutely. There have been three software upgrades up till April of this year that either fine-tuned or added features.
>I did try to tackle the points Ron made in a constructive way. However I cannot help but get my back up at comments such as your Jan. Especially when you are supposed to be selling me on your system, not putting me off it!
I apologize if you took what I was saying in a critical way; maybe I was coming from having my hackles up in the way that you itemized the “problems” in P2. My interpretation, up and until you responded to Ron was that you were not interested in the P2 system nor this camera based on comments that you were making, so the problem is that when we read our way through the internet without the opportunity to understand or gain the full expression of our communication which may be expressed more easily by being face to face, we only have the words to help us decide the full meaning our communication and perhaps the full communication does not happen as is the case here.
So I apologize if you took offense to my words. I guess I didn’t understand from where you were coming. Hope these answers give you a little more information, and please if you have more questions, ask away.
Best regards,
Jan
Jan Crittenden Livingston
Product Manager, DVCPRO, DVCPRO50, AG-DVX100
Panasonic Broadcast & TV Systems -
Hi Simon,
I do read these forums a lot and frankly I have been sitting on the fence as to whether to say something in this thread as frankly your posting about P2 and its flexibility comes from a very limited space, someone else’s newly tried out system where they were just getting a feel for what to do and how to manage the data. You took that information and decided that that was fact and that it is a major drawback to the P2 system. No, it really is a bit of growing pains.
Your posts seem to be very much along the lines of XDCAM is better than P2 and yet your hands on experience is very limited indeed. However if I point out that one of our larger and most recent sales at Griffen Communications who was about to place an order for XDCAM and basically gave us a polite 1/2 hour hearing, emerged indo a full blown look under the hood, see how it works and then make that decision; they bought P2. So if it has so many problems how is it that we are able to make this kind of a sale? Point is many people post their frustrations, it doens’t necessarily mean that the system is flawed, it only means that the person has not figured out how to deal with it.
To underscore that point, let’s look at all of the posts on how to do 24P capture off of the DVX100. If we take the first posts and the agonizing that goes on until they finally work it out, we would say that the system is flawed and doesn’t work too well. We know this isn’t true, but that would be the assumption, especially when the 2:3:3:2 was first introduced some 2 1/2 years ago. A forum is not a fact sheet, it is a place for an exchange of ideas, and looking for help. In the case of P2, many of the broadcasters that have happily adopted and are working with it, do not hang out here. Too bad, they may have helped.
Hey, I don’t even respond to every post and frankly there are many days where there are just too many and I am not able to read them all. I get about 250 panasonic relevant emails a day, about 50 from the Cow. There is not enough time to deal with it all.
So I am glad to hear that you may entertain the purchase of the HVX, but frankly from the tone of your posts up to that, it definitely sounded the way that Ron and I have interpreted it. Like why are you here? This is not the forum for chest-beating the XDCAM format and workflow.
Anyhow, perhaps that sheds some light on the reaction that you are receiving.
Best,
Jan
Jan Crittenden Livingston
Product Manager, DVCPRO, DVCPRO50, AG-DVX100
Panasonic Broadcast & TV Systems -
Your problem is that the AJ-D455 will not play DVCPRO50 footage and so that is the first place to pay attention It needs to be either an AJ-SD93 or and AJ-SD930 with firewire cards. Start there and it should work.
Hope that helps,
Jan
Jan Crittenden Livingston
Product Manager, DVCPRO, DVCPRO50, AG-DVX100
Panasonic Broadcast & TV Systems -
Ron Shook:I just don’t see how the P2 technology fits into this now, or in any foreseeable near term unless you Pana folk have something coming that we don’t know about.
Hi Ron,
First, you are right, I am busy, very busy, I am in the middle of a bunch of shows. Just check the time of this post to get an idea of when I found the time to respond. Second, Panasonic is not in the Data Storage business, other than a SAIT drive set that is aimed more for the small broadcaster and not every day Jane or Joe producer. But there are plenty of manufacturers that will stand in line for the business.>80% of the production work that I do is for outside producers coming in, overseeing the shoot, grabbing the cheap tapes of whatever format and running for the airport or post house or Sattelite uplink, while we are packing up to leave.
If you want to adopt this camera, you must first learn how to embrace IT and the cost savings that it offers over tape, and here we are not talking little DV tapes, we are talking DVCPRO HD tapes, as that is what this camera records. You put it up against DV tapes and it doesn’t make sense. We are talking VariCam DVCPRO HD here, designed from the ground up to be a high end HD solution.
>I can’t give them $2k memory cards or hard drive units, or even $200 memory cards which despite the best of intentions I’ll never get back.
And I would not expect you to. You need to think of other alternatives.
>I suspect that it’s going to be a very long, long time before memory card technology will allow for that, so we need some quick, easy, transportable, cheap way to get from P2 cards or hard drive recorders to media that’s disposable and overnite shipable. Have you-all got anything like a P2 and/or hard-drive to Optical portable, DC unit in the pipeline that would meet such a need?
Frankly a quick look around the industry shows that there are plenty of Hard drives available for storage. It isn’t like we don’t know how much storage is required. In HD it is about 1 minute a gig. Hard drives have become down right cheap. Now I am not saying that this works in all cases but frankly some derivation might work in many. Most of the shoots that I have been on have some form of electricity, and therefore a transfer station can be set up. What is handed to the client at the end of the day is the data in a drive, and a back up drive. The back up drive could be a DLT which is cheaper yet, but there is security in having back ups. So unlike many productions that then make copies of the tapes before they start their post work, the clone is made before it even leaves the set.
So is that different from a tape based reality. Yep. Will it take a bit of selling to make it go, probably, but is the benefit there? Yes, and most producers that I talk to see this benefit as they have all have stupid things done to their tapes in the dub process, or have had problems in the digitizing stages of the post process. With this workflow, they move from the production arena to the post in one fell swoop and start making creative decisions.
>Like a lot of folks posting here, I’d very much like to consider this camera over the comparable HDV offerings from others, but without a way to move the files quickly to cheap media of whatever sort, it doesn’t make sense.
Drives are cheap and the data does move quickly, in most cases 4X real time, and the capability for faster is bred into the P2 card, we are waiting for the rest of the channel to open up to 640Mbps.
>This is a problem not only for production that demands fast, inexpensive transportability but for longer term archiving as well.
On a Dell DLT, cost of the machine is $2250 or so, the 200GB tape is about $50. This will hold 200 minutes. Compare that with a 30 minute DVCPRO tape at $30 each, obviously this is just the begininngs of savings for an archive. A hard drive to do the initial transfer to is more expensive but if you average the cost of the 250 gig drive with the cost of the DLT it actually will come out about the same as DVCPRO tape. The producer is now able to save a day because they do not have to dub tapes and save the money they would have spent there, and they are able to just attach the HDD to the computer system and start the post process, be that on an Apple, Avid, or Canopus, and soon Matrox. They can start making creative decisions. Yes, review the footage but that is what I mean by making creative decisions, they don’t have to think of the batch capturing process as this arduous process that can become tedious at best, especially if there are problems in the time code. They can select the takes they like, immediately and move them to the time line.
Keep in mind that the producer doesn’t get paid till he invoices his client and the sooner they can do that the better. IT moves the process though much faster and it is even more significant on long form than it is on short form.
>At this price point it must be designed to be, to suck up market share, promote a better technology, and justify that better technology at higher price points. If part of the workflow makes that technology worthless to too many folks, then the HVX200 isn’t doing its job, no matter how good it is.
The whole deal is that if people approach the HVX and want to maintain a Tape like workflow, it isn’t going to work. New workflow needs to be embraced if this is going to work, if trying an IT based workflow does not appeal to you then you probably won’t be able to benefit from the feature set this camera has to offer. But if you do then the benefits of the camera are many.
>I realize as a company rep you can’t divulge proprietary information, but if you-all have something on the drawing boards, for at least previewing at NAB that speaks to the concerns expressed here, a “maybe” and a wink might be in order. (g)
For Hard drives take a look at the Western Digital, the Lacie, and frankly many others out there. For Archival and back up, check out DELL, Quantum, Exabyte, In-Phase Technologies. Of course there is the Blue-ray product coming that will handle short form work.
>BTW, I have been experiencing your participation on various newsgroups and forums for years and you do your company a great service. I doubt whether a little course language is about to put you off too long from the rough and tumble and enervation of these forums, so please keep comin’ ’round.
No, coarse language won’t keep me away, but it does give me a picture of the sender and in general I won’t respond to another post written by that person as I don’t care for that sort of discourse. The whole problem with the internet is that many folks feel that rudeness and crudeness is an acceptable form of communication when no one knows who you are. It does take more effort to say something civilly than crudely, and the folks that aren’t willing to make that effort, well, I don’t have time for.
Anyhow off to the IFP Market.
Best regards,
Jan
Jan Crittenden Livingston
Product Manager, DVCPRO, DVCPRO50, AG-DVX100
Panasonic Broadcast & TV Systems -
[Graeme Nattress] “Jan, if the HVX200 had SDI I/O then you could shoot on the Canon, and record over SDI to the DVCproHD codec on the HVX, and onto P2, and not have to lug around a $20k+ DVCproHD deck around with you 🙂 🙂 :-)”
True but then you would have to record on P2, and then you would wonder okay why am I hooking up a 1/3″ camera to this other 1/3″ camera? Ha, Ha, Ha.