[Serge Rodnunsky]

Just email me how many in your party. It’s free.

[Serge Rodnunsky]

Thanks soooo much for the info.

[Serge Rodnunsky]

I’m curious if you can send your timeline out to the Z1 and recapture the same timeline back to FCP5 using the Z1’s DV converters.

For features delivering HD masters has become a big deal.

I haven’t gotten FCP5 Sony Z1 yet but currently use DVCPRO HD on FCP4.5.

[Serge Rodnunsky]

I shot a couple of films on Varicam Panasonic HD that are going to be at upcoming festivals.

Indigo Hearts – Beverly Hills Film Festival.
http://www.beverlyhillsfilmfestival.com April 16th, 10pm. Clarity Theater.

Shattered Day – Dances with Films Festival.
http://www.danceswithfilms.com in early May.

Check them out at my site http://www.rojakfilms.com. Just to show that I do all kinds of productions. Zero and up, mostly zero.

I really enjoy the Varicam, there is already low end competition in tape HDV it may not be there yet, but its dangerously close to the untrained eye. The argument that I have unrealistic expectations about tape in Panasonic may be valid, but HDV is doing it, maybe not as high end, but its HD. A lot of people I know are shooting DVX100a and are very happy and its not HD.

[Serge Rodnunsky]

I left for 10 minutes and all hell broke lose, its like we’re talking about religion here.

I work on a healthy mix of peanut productions and cumcumber sandwich productions.

I don’t buy any gear generally. I rent the Varicam for a week and I rent the deck for a couple days to digitize the tapes.

If there’s some great long form Hard Drive docking system going to be apart of this camera, well then I guess I’ll wait and see.

Cutting film out of the movie and still industry makes sense, Film beautiful but very expensive and scary stuff. Its prone to scratches and dirt and damage and weave and flicker and bad processing or handling etc. etc. etc.
I think HD tape has shown to be cheap and less dangerous. Flash Cards work for still guys because they’re doing very little data acquition in comparison.
I don’t do it anymore but for awhile people were using tape backups of their harddrives, is that “tape” bad too?

I don’t have a “data management” staff, although I could go on and on about nimrods erasing drives and data or crashing systems that lose hundreds of hours of work. Or people BLOWING over files because they “Thought” or “they were told” the stuff was backed up already. We’ve all been there. Productions are always sleepless environments.

Paranoia Squared = P2

There’s a lot of toys you can have on a show, cool lenses, cool cranes, cool locations, but you’ve got to have your basics covered first.

I’m sure in time I’ll relook at the issue, but I hope these type of threads help get us better workable gear, cheaper.

[Serge Rodnunsky]

I want my Panasonic 24p HD camcorder under $10k hopefully under $5k and I want it to record on TAPE…. If its on 4gig P2 cards its just a toy to me, not a functioning real world device – too bad.

Let the ishuffle, and digital camera guys drive the price of SD flashcards down and then come out with 128gig P2’s for under $2k. I’d still be terrified about zapping the card to put new data on it.

All this confidence in Hard Drives as an archive format is nutty too. Has anyone had a hard drive sitting on their shelf for ten years and then tried to boot it up again. I mean what was I using ten years ago SCSI, I don’t even have SCSI cards and connections anymore. I have a 3/4 inch tape from 1980 that I just put in a deck and it was fine. That tape is 25 years old. Getting over to optical makes sense but so little data on a DVD. At the end of a show I easily have a terabyte or more of material, that’s what a million DVD’s. Currently I have tape source, my final output is to tape, I archive the drives hoping that maybe I’ll be able to access them again in the future, but not with a lot of confidence. There’s so many moving parts in a drive. Tape is so smart,cheap and simple.

If I have to take all the P2’s and put them on tape… well that’s just dumb, you’re making 10 times more work.

I wish panasonic would make a workable camcorder and not a toy… I think its a big error…. unfortunate.

[Serge Rodnunsky]

I read it its cool, but not yet there as far as long form for me.

SD Memory is about $100/gig. I’m not sure why p2 is $1700 for 4gigs.
And this is really far away from 128gigs. We’re talking huge drop in price of flash memory to make 128gig cards logical.
To me that size card is the only logical competitor to tape at the moment, performance cost etc. 4 and 8gig are way too small.

Even at $100/gig that’s $13k for a 128gig 90min hd card. It would have to drop into the $2k range to be competitive. Are SD memory prices going to drop from 13k to 2k in the next year or so? We’ll see. I can’t see buying a camera for $5k and paying $13k for a card to make it workable. When I can buy an HDV system with tape at $20/hr.
They write some sillyness on there about having a crew sit around while we download P2 cards, its like reloading film. Come on.
Film comes in 400ft 16mm or 1000ft 35mm loads 10min loads. And those of us who have been shooting HD for years now, don’t expect or need to wait for load changes. You want my crew to wait around for a new P2 system, you know how much they eat.
I don’t know about you but on a low end camcorder you’re likely to do a lot of family/vacation stuff with it p2 doesn’t work at all there. I have a book of SD cards for my digital camera and I’m always running out of space on holidays. Bye Grandma you’re a little too out of focus in that shot. Bye cousins in law don’t remember your names anyhow.

[Serge Rodnunsky]

I’m now curious about this so I’ve been reading that they’re planning to come out with a 128gig card that will record 90min in hd and 50hours or something in Dv. That makes more sense than 4gig /5min at $1700. But archiving issues still make me nervous.

I’ll wait and see…. meanwhile I’ll still shoot the Varicam with Tape.

[Serge Rodnunsky]

“Solid state is OK for short pieces, but what happens when it’s full and something big happens. It’s expensive, so you don’t carry lots of spares. And what about a documentary producer going abroad, and shooting 30 or 40 hours for an hour programme. What do they do with that material?,” asks Olivier Bovis, XDCAM product marketing manager, Sony Business Europe. Also, if something goes wrong, how do you recover the information from solid state. “With tape or disc you can usually recover something,” he maintains. “If you look at them from a business perspective, the difference is clear.” Until memory reaches the same price as tape, he believes it will be too expensive.

I’m not alone…. Panasonic should have made this system tape.

[Serge Rodnunsky]

I’m sure they’ll be plenty of tape around in 10years as I’m sure they’ll be cars and film.

I’ve never had a problem with a tape in almost 50 films.
None of the things you mentioned. That’s 100’s of hours of recording.
I usually rent new cameras so I’ve never seen one eat a tape.
I’ve had a few tapes eaten by decks. But thats usually way downstream in post and rarely at the source tape level and even and eaten tape is usually 99% salvagable.

Not answering the basic question.

How do I conveniently, safely, and cost effectively record four hours a day of material on a P2 system.

I’m all for getting rid of the need for expensive decks, but $1700 4gig flashcards that record only 5min. aren’t going to cut it. That’s 20 per hour, if I’m out remote I would need 80 cards to be safe that’s what $130k in p2 flashcards. Then I’ve got to get them back to the editor at the end of the day to be dumped over and then erase them all for the next days shoot?
This seems a very bizarre workflow to me.