[Karl Holt]

Ron,

I’m paraphrasing, but Jan stated on another forum that she didnt really trust Iomega or their products. All her Jazz and Zip drives she had bought have now broken down and I heard a bad review of the stability of the Rev drive too from a user. She wouldnt touch the Rev technology. Of course with Grass Valley involved with Iomega they may have come up with a very robust system for the Rev Pro drive – but don’t expect Panasonic to be developing partners with Iomega anytime soon.

It’s a debatable point but the reason P2 costs so much is because they want it to be flawless and to operate at speeds which are futureproof. The Rev can only sustain a Data rate of 100Mbits/s or thereabouts – which is fast enough for HD recording but not so good for offload or any future developments/improvements.

I’m not saying that’s right or wrong, and Rev are so cheap you probably wouldn’t need to offload in a hurry – but 100mbps is a real-time offload – so no quicker than a tape capture…..I’m just giving you the Pansonic logic. They dont want to use a technology that even has a slight change of failing during a shoot and they want to make sure it can cope with higher data rates as that’s one of the main benefits of the time-saving solid state technology.

Also I think people forget that P2 isnt being designed for the HVX; it’s going to be Panasonics new format for capture across the board; I assume the new Varicam and their high end broadcast cameras will be using it; so it has to be designed to be able to cope with the most demanding proffessional applications and maybe for an even higher data rate on a future varicam?!?

Personally I think the infinity camrea sounds awesome, but the whole unit is just out of my price range. I will probably go the HVX/firestore route too, at least until the capacity of P2 can store about an hour of HD.

If anything Panasonic are just a few years too early…..Its actually nice for once for a company to be ahead of the game, rather than some other manufacturers who seem to be content with delivering minor improvements each year. The HVX really is revolutionary and whether P2 takes off or not it’s certainly going to change the way camcorders are made from now on; but there is a price or workaround to pay for pushing techniology to it’s limit.

[Karl Holt]

the announcement of GV using IOmega Rev does beg the queation why P2 needs to be such a high data rate. The Rev is just fast enogh to do 100mbps, which is all we need.

Why do Panasonic put so much empahasis on getting a data rate that is largely unused and then charging the consumer $2000 for around 8GB.

So I agree, while the HVX200 is a great camera, something which recorded to a more afforable and larger media at jpeg2000 would probably wipe the contender out.

[Karl Holt]

silly question but I guess $20,000 is for body-only? Or does that include the fujinon lens?

[Karl Holt]

I think that what most people forget on here is that tech specs aside, its all about fooling the eye.I have worked with digibeta,beta SP, DVCPRO50, mini DV and once a cinealta. Sure the larger cameras are better – they work better in all round conditions; they have better lenses, CCD’s, and technical gubbings.

However, under the right lighting conditions, can we get our mini-dv footage to look almost as good as the DVCPRO50 to the eye? Pretty much that’s a yes. Maybe it only gets 90% of the way there and technically is a vastly inferior signal – but would our clients notice? No. Absolutely not. Would your average TV viewer notice? again, no. So if you’re not getting into CC, or fine effects work, mini DV can cut it for broadcast – its already been proven as channels all over the world accept and shoot mini DV for many TV series.

This forum has a mixture of people who work at the ‘high end’ and those which are pretty much confined to the world of SD. So of course people are going to look at the introduction of this camera very differently and from very different points of view. Some see it as a revolution, others as a threat to the specialist world of HD they occupy. Its very much like the beta vs mini-DV argument of 10 years ago. The difference here is that the signal compression this time round is as high as the ‘high end’, so were down to CCD and lens differences.

So far the jury is out on the HVX CCD’s, so we can’t comment….People go on about the lens quality and price differnces, but look at it this way – why does my digital SLR with a $60 lens look far, far superior to any still image shot with a digibeta, or cinealta? Its down to the CCD res. Id rather have a digistill from my $600 canon 350D than a still image from a varicam or cinealta with a $20,000 lens. The lenses are much more expensive on these cameras but that really doesnt help when you’re shooting a much lower res signal.

My understanding is that the lens resolving power should match the CCD pick-up. Whats the point having a great lens on a camera that records a 320×240 pixel mpg? Thats extreme, but you see my point. The lens on the HVX is good enough Im sure to sharply reproduce a 1.2 – 2Mpixel image. Yes it will cost 1/40 of the price of a cinealta lens, but it sure wont look 40 times worse. You could argue that some of the resolving power of a cinealta lens maybe lost on only a 2Mpixel pickup….. There will be limitations to the HVX, such as depth of field/low light issues – but you work around them because you didn’t pay $60k for it.

The HVX200 will let us budding indie filmakers to shoot movies that could well be indistinguishable to those shot with a Varicam, and also some that will look massively different. And thats the whole point, technology in the right hands….

If you can afford it you would shoot film – this is all about bringing a very close approximation of a varicam to the masses at a decent price. Just like mini-dv gave the prosumer a step into the broadcast world; the HVX200 will do the same with HD. If it’s used correctly, my guess is most people won’t be able to tell if it was shot with the HVX or varicam.

Even if the trained eye can clearly see the diffrence, I watched ‘open water’ and ’28 days later’ at the cinema. At first I went URGH…. and after 5 mins even I forgot it was shot on mini-dv because I was drawn into the story.

The HVX200 will look a lot better than SD mini-dv footage for CC, keying, and projection. So I’ll be happy with that. Only one day to wait I guess. Do we will get tech specs of the CCD’s they are using today?

[Karl Holt]

1. the ability to nest clips into a single block, like FCP (dragging them into another sequence is not practical)

2. DVCPROHD/ P2 support.

oh sod it…. timewarp, multi camera editing, animated titling, fix the project trimming issues, ability to clear attributes on multiple selected clips.

I wish if you copy and paste a title in the timeline – change it and save it, then the timeline title would update…. Instead you have to import the new title, and drag it onto the timeline and then apply the effects/transitions – a huge waste of time.

I could go on, but i wont.

[Karl Holt]

Bill

the only way to get 4:3 to 16:9 is to crop the 4:3 footage or strech it to 16:9 – so the image is distorted and everyone has fat faces.

What you are asking is otherwise impossible. Something that no software can get round.

think about what you are asking for a second….if you don’t want to stretch it, and you do not want to crop it then what you are saying is…. “I want extra picture information to appear on either side of my 4:3 picture that I have not shot or have no record of.”

you’re asking for a circle to be transformed to a triangle, but you want it to still look like a circle.

Still….. not as adventurours as a woman who wanted me to remove a bin from a still photograph of her house – I said I could probably take the bin out and she said “thats good because when you remove the bin you’ll see the dog – who was behind it….”

[Karl Holt]

I think for most people getting into HD the Axio is a step too far.

The question remains if DVCPROHD can be supported by Matrox and Mainconcept on a PC, then surely Adobe can also announce support for this natively. I hope they are working on it.

The investment in the Panasonic camera will probably mean an upgrade to my PC too; including new monitors, bigger drives etc. If Adobe do not get it together then I’ll just buy a mac with FCP.

[Karl Holt]

I use a Matrox RTX100 for editing. I think the reason for the codecs is so that you can render to the digisuite card on a system which doesnt have the board installed.

However, does the Matrox DVCPRO50 all play back in realtime off the timeline? If you had a blackmagic card would the ouput be sent to this? probably not my guess. So it’s ok for editing on the computer but you wouldn’t be able to monitor it.

We really need someone like blackmagic to support DVCPRO50 and HD in Premiere Pro.

[Karl Holt]

I asked this queation a month or so ago. It seems that misrosoft does not support DVCPROHD yet, and until they do Adobe cannot implement it.

We may be looking at next year before Adobe announces support for the camera. It’s annoying because Im sure a lot of use here are PC based. IMO Panasonic would do well trying to push this one as a lot of current HDV users are also PC based, and surely this is a market Panasonic would like to tap into.

I have heared Avid can edit DVCPROHD, but Im not sure whether this is just Avid on a Mac. If it’s true that DVCPROHD is currently a MAC only codec then thats a very big blow

[Karl Holt]

thanks for all the responses everyone!

Good to know the blackmagic does indeed have dual outputs, but maybe there are other options to consider also.

My workspace wont really allow for the big HD CRT monitors; as Toki says the next year could be the most interesting so far in terms of LCD development.

Karl