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Sadly there’s no 1080p24 in PAL version.
But maybe we can live with 720p24. Is that included in PAL version?
What are the “varicam” framerates tha will be in the camera?

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[donatello] “i don’t think the camera is for a person that only shoots DV25”

It’s still the cheapest native 16:9 progressive camera that has at least 1/3″ ccd’s.

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[Video Opp] “I think that the price of the cards will have a direct effect on how many of these cameras are sold.”

Absolutely right. When sony brings similar camera than hvx200 with recording to 50GB optical disk, which are sold about $50 each and are used both acquisition and archiving simultaneosly and are used in editing practically as easy as p2, then panny really has to decide whether to consentrate to niche market or to go to mainstream.

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But new CF-cards will have 100Mb write speed, so what I’m really waiting for is the first P2 adapter for cf-card.
Cf maybe not so robust than genuine p2, but surely robust enough for me.

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[Jan Crittenden Livingston] “DVCPRO tapes, Metal Particle, completely different than Metal Evaporated which is what the HDV, and DV are based on.”

Jan, is this bad durability proven fact or just marketing hype?
Any links for any tests?
I have copied miniDV to 50-100 vhs-tapes several times and have not seen any drop-outs in miniDV-tape after that.
If you can playback the tape 100 times without drop-outs, I’d suspect that recording for 10 times is no problem. (Although I’ve used some tapes only 2-3 times…)

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[Brian SaenzDeViteri] “The LTO option right now seems like the cheapest alternative to purchasing a lot of hard drives, but the cheapest drive is over $5000.”

It just doesn’t sound for a nice idea that after this “getting rid of the tape” phenomena you’ll have to archive to tape. Maybe Blu Ray will come soon enough… And there is PD from sony already.

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[Jan Crittenden Livingston] “The problem is that you are looking the P2 cards as storage. They are not. Those same two P2 cards will record as much video over time as you can record with 100,000 passes whis is vastly more than 400 tapes.”

P2 _is_ a storage, especially during the shooting and more so if you don’t have money to hire assistant to switch and purge p2’s.
What if you use tapes just like p2, just as a temporary storage?
You could use those 400 tapes 4000 times, how cheap is that?

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“…before we will get cameras that _record_ sq px”, I was trying to say.

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I haven’t noticed been haunted when cc’ing progressive 4:2:0.
I’d say that 4:2:2 is only needed with interlaced material of FX pictures.

Problems with cc’ing interlaced 4:2:0 are because there’s one color at lines 1 & 3 and other color at lines 2 & 4.
So there’s no really continuation in colors and this problem is tried to solve by very agressive low pass filtering, which reduces the real chroma resolution greatly.

There’s no such problems with progressive scanning. 4:2:0 just has a little bit less resolution in chroma channels which isn’t usually even noticable in natural pictures. 2 x 2 chroma blocks begin to show up only when you don’t have enough tones and that’s why we need more than 8bit colors. And usually the DCT blocks begin to show way more before than chroma sub sampling blocks. So there’s a need for more advanced compression that uses adaptive dct block sizes than over a decade old dv compression that even dvcprohd uses.

So, in order to make (progressive) picture quality better, right temporal order would be:
1) more tones
2) better compression
3) 4:2:0 -> 4:2:2 -> 4:4:4
Bitrates can be increased all the way as the storages gets faster and bigger. Jump from (h)dv’s 25Mbps to dvcprohd’s 100Mbps is a great advancement in that field. I hope there’s already a new compression in development that might have mAx 200Mbps, 1920×1080 sq px, adaptive dct blocks and user selectable color depth (8-12b), chroma resolution and compression ratio. So the user could choose eg. 200Mbps 12bits 4:2:2 for rich colored natural picture, or 200Mps 10bits 4:4:4 for fx backslates that has little movement and need less cc, or 100Mbps 8bits 4:2:0 for cheap long event documenting.

But why prefer 4:1:1 with progressive picture?
Even that it seems that it will take another decade before we van get cameras that uses only square pixels, human eye’s perception isn’t so different horizontally than vertically, so square pixels should give better real resolution.
And then again, there will be no 4:1:1 delivery formats. After the death of analog and interlaced video, 4:1:1 is as good as 4:1:0…

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And even better would have been 1440x1080p24 with lesser compression…