[Toke]

[Barry Green] “(including revealing what some of the variable frame rates will be, etc)”

Can you tell us what the frame rates will be?

btw. Canon’s XL H1’s hd-sdi-output makes me wonder would it be possible for eg. Decklink to build hd-sdi-pc-card, which would have some nice realtime compression chip and therefore you could record to fw800-disk with laptop with even higher bitrates than 100Mbps?

[Toke]

$10k for the camera and 5x$4k for the set of 16MB cards, total $30k, right? 🙂

[Toke]

Yep, seems to be that tape is dead in acquisition, but very much alive and kicking in archiving.
I believe the latest news were that hd-dvd drives are going to be delayed.
Might be that panny gets pal-hvx out before we have any brd/hd-dvd to archive with.
So next year we might need a quite lot of raid5, but that will be useful also in the future.

[Toke]

[Graeme Nattress] “Sony deck that did that was not cheap either!”

Neither was a hdtv camera at that time.
This does not mean that we couldn’t buy one with 6k

[Toke]

[Graeme Nattress] “if they had a DVCProHD deck in there it would cost $20,000 more on the camera and you’d need a $20,000 deck in your edit suite – hardly a low cost option.”

This has been discussed many times before but one more time; sony build a deck almost a decade ago that could transfer data from/to miniDVCam tape at 100Mbps (quadruple speed).
So if these camera companies would have been willing to push development on that area, there could be a tape mechanism which wouldn’t be significantly more expensive or bigger than normal minidv mechanism, but it could deliver 100Mbps.
Time for that has gone and now we are in the beginning of era of disk and solid state recording.

[Toke]

I think that’s just a datarate issue.
When p2 came to market there wasn’t fast enough options.
Now there is.
You can’t “hurt” the memory by using it in its upper bitrate limit.
If it works, it just works. If it can’t sustain the datarate, the next model in half a year can.

And for the robustness, if I would go to shoot in Antarktis surely I’d just use p2.
If I’m going to shoot low budget music video in my home town and offload memorycards at coffee break, I’d use something cheaper.
And to which of these enviroments $6k cameras are usually targeted?

[Toke]

Most expensive and robust and errorless cf or sd is dirt cheap compared to p2.
And I don’t see any differences in saving videostream or still pictures to flash memory.
It does not choke or heat or anything. It just saves the data or there’s a corrupted bit, which memory should notice and save that bit to somewhere else.
If all back-up areas for “bad sectors” are used then drop-outs start appearing and then so big part of a memory is damaged that is should be replaced immediately.

Some flash memory propably works better in extreme weather and more years or 200 000 cycles compared to 100 000, but they all work fine until “bad sectors” start to show up. After that none of them works.

[Toke]

15 years ago everybody would have asked: “Who would put a hard disk on a shelf?”
Today many of us would do that, if they would just be reliable enough.

[Toke]

Depends on your master format. If you go bak to dvcprohd then it’s of course the same.
If your master format is something else, then editing with dvcprohd codec is just one more generation of compression in workflow that decreases the quality a little.

[Toke]

It’s amazing how pro still photographers have managed to shoot millions of pictures without any dropout problems.