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Well, you could ask Chris Hurd to let me in. He banned me last February…

[Toke]

Thanks for the invitation.
Where do you discuss about Red?

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Yep, and overall the problem is that the designers are not listening the users.
Designers have acted like they know better what the users needs are.
Same thing with sony and progressive picture.
When fx1 came out, everybody was screaming for 24p, but sony tried to explain how they don’t need it.
Now every hvx buyer in Europe is screaming for 24p and some Panny’s reps have tried to make excuses like “second oscillator would be too expensive”. That is really underestimaing our buyers intelligence. Some of us do know how cheap those oscillators are and how they are used in much cheaper cameras.

On the contrary, there’s lots of good design in the hvx: giving user options that user can choose by him/herself. Choosing from shutter speed/angle is good example of this.

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[Graeme Nattress] “I’m sure if they’d designed the camera from scratch to be both PAL and NTSC, it would do all these things easily, but they didn’t.”

And I think that that’s a really bad design mistake.
HD is a new thing to PAL countries and maybe designing hd-cameras for PAL countries is a bit too new thing for Panny also.
Eg. even the cheapest sony’s minidv cameras have been a long time pal/ntsc switchable considering their VTR part. You just need a service remote controller or proper cable and a little piece of software to make the change.
Camera heads of those cameras have had different resolutions etc., so cameras have not been identical as a whole.
But things have changed with HD. Now pal and ntsc countries have same resolution, so it’s just logical (and also more economical) to build just one model for the whole world.
And that’s exactly what sony has done with Z1 and hdcams.

And like Barry said, maybe we’ll get both same resolutions and framerates for the whole world with uhdtv or dci…

[Graeme Nattress] “I’m sure that camera would still be in the wooden block stage and not ready for release to the public.”

How does sony then succeed to manufacture global models within designed schedule?

I hope that we get hvx200a or hvx300 from Panny that can handle 24, 25, 50 & 60 fps within the same camera.

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Yep, just another unsolved apple mystery…
Somebody in apple’s forum suspected that the problem lies in the heart of quicktime format.
He had had problems with fcp and also Affinity and they both use qt.
Another opinion I heard was that apple has never cared about PAL sync as long as NTSC is working.
No-one of us have had problems with sync in avid or premiere and they both don’t use qt…

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Yep, only place where you can still buy new displays w/o multistandard is US. And maybe Japan also.
Here in Europe, if you buy a small flat tv with $500 it will propably handle 25,30,50,60Hz.
(But of course it’s too expensive for $6k camera…)
In fact lcd panels have fixed refresh rate, so they usually have to do framerate conversion anyway and this is where PQ differences petween models come up.

I meant that “regional” framerates are becoming global. Receivers and displays will be able to handle all used framerates.(24,25,30,50,60).
Traditional local broadcasters will of course stick with their equipment, but already people watch content from satellites and from internet. Might be that after one decade all wireless information communication is ip-based. Then all data is just ip-packets and nobody has to obey ATSC standards.

I asked a while a go from some EBU people that do we really need 25/50-hdtv here in Europe. Half of the programs aired are from US or global events like sports anyway. So the work is about same if you have to do frame conversion to those or to those programs that you have in your PAL archive.
Last framerate conversion will always be then in consumer’s cheap lcd display and if we want to think about PQ it will always be better to feed that display with its native framerate and do the framerate conversion with very expensive high end equipment by the broadcasters.

What we are looking now, if somebody wants to distribute a movie globally is:
23.976p for ATSC broadcast
24.000p for DCI
25.000p for Eu DVD
50.000i for PAL
50.000i for EBU 1080
50.000p for EBU 720
50.000p for EBU 1080/mp4
59.940i for NTSC
59.940i for ATSC 1080
59.940p for ATSC 720
+IP-VoD
+dvd/hd-dvd/blu-ray/etc.

So something like a dozen of different formats are needed for distributing same one content globally.
Smaller productions will have to use quite a big cut of their budgets for format conversions and that’s one thing that protects the few big players in the market.
Isn’t this digital technology easy, cheap and fast to make things simplier or what ?-)

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[Barry Green] “But I’d recommend you request it from http://www.panasonic-broadcast.com‘s forum right away”

That’s exactly what everybody’s requesting over there.

These 1000/1001-ntsc framerates clearly explains why there would have to be 2 oscillators for “global” model, but it does not explain why Panny is not offering 24.000fps for European model.

We should also remember that televisions are getting more and more like computers that can replay any framerates. At the same time internet is beginning to be a global distribution channel. So “regional” framerates are slowly fading away.

[Toke]

Jan,
I can imagine quite a lot.
Can you tell me any technical explanation or give me a link to one how can it be harder to build a camera to support 24&25p than 23&25&27 or 22&24&26.

I’d like to have a rational and logical explanation.
Thank you!

[Toke]

Sounds great.
This is really design for usability.
Now both people from video industry and from film industry can understand the camera better and work together better.

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My guess is that Panny has got into a deadlock with this ccd specs situation.
I believe that individual ccd’s in hvx have fewer pixels both horz & vert than 1920×1080 and this is technically the best way to achieve as good as possible PQ with this camera.

Nevertheless chips (or the whole block, but nobody cares) were advertised as “1080p” and now it’s just too hard to explain to everybody that this camera produces better 1080p picture with fewer pixels in individual ccd chip.
So they will never announce the specs of the chips.

And why fewer pixels are better?
Because camera is recording YCbCr (=component) picture that does not benefit from the full RGB resolution.

Heck, I would even prefer 4:2:0 over 4:2:2 to get lighter compression rate.
(4:2:2 was important thing with interlaced video, not with digital progressive picture; why would we need more chroma information in one dimension than with the other with progressive picture?)

So, it’s better to have larger pixels (smaller resolution) and use pixel shifting.
That way we get more sensitivity, which means wider usage for the camera and lesser noise to picture.