[Uli Plank]

Hi Tim,

while I have exactly the same complaints regarding Apple, I can only second the answers you’ve got here. It doesn’t work like this. Let all of us PAL folks ( and there are billions in China 😉 ) bomb Apple with our requests, but not this forum.

We have told them that we are about to switch a whole facility in TV education to PC, since even Premiere Pro with Raylight can already process 720p50 from the HVX 200 while FCP can’t. And we were the first arts school in Germany to switch to Apple about 20 years ago!

Regards,

Uli

Author of “DVDs gestalten und produzieren”, a book on professional DVD-authoring in German.

[Uli Plank]

Thank you, Gary,

I’ll test it right away and get in touch with you again.

Best regards,

Uli

Author of “DVDs gestalten und produzieren”, a book on professional DVD-authoring in German.

[Uli Plank]

I know what you are talking about! I tried to get a camera for our tests at the institute (to be published in a very respected magazine!) and no reply at all.

I finally got it from a very helpful dealer, who even travelled up from Southern Germany to support our tests.

Best regards,

Uli

Author of “DVDs gestalten und produzieren”, a book on professional DVD-authoring in German.

[Uli Plank]

Actually, the viewer funktionality is there, I can open and see my P2 stuff (in 25p!). But I can’t spot the export to QuickTime, under File -> Export there is no option for this.

Regards,

Uli

Author of “DVDs gestalten und produzieren”, a book on professional DVD-authoring in German.

[Uli Plank]

Dear Jan,

since we’d be using the HVX 200s for cinematic shooting anyway, the US model might be a solution to our disappointment with Apple. But our dealer couldn’t help us, so I’d like to know if there’s a possibility to officially buy a US model through Panasonics channels in Europe. Even if it might be cheaper, I don’t want to travel to the US and drag a few boxes home, since we want professional support and service later on as well.

TIA,

Uli Plank

P.S. Unfortunately Panasonic doesn’t have a person as knowledgeable and helpful as you here in Europe…

Author of “DVDs gestalten und produzieren”, a book on professional DVD-authoring in German.

[Uli Plank]

Yes, I’m afraid it’s the USB implementation on the Mac, not your machines. We get about the same rates for PCMCIA transfer on a G4 PB 1,67 GHz. Swapping cards is possible there, but via USB it is not.

What’s even more annoying is the lack of support from Apple for us here in ‘old Europe’. We were looking into buying a few HVX 200s, since the excelled in our large test against HDV, but NAB was a complete disappointment. No support from Apple for 25p or 50p, not even a defined schedule. We may have to drop Panasonic, since our time for this investment is running out.

I looked at HD Log, but apart from the pretty high price I couldn’t even find the option in the demo of converting a file from P2 to QuickTime as claimed in the manual. Since I haven’t got a response to my mail from their support yet, I’d like to ask here: Is anybody using it with success? Is it a viable option?

Best regards,

Uli

Author of “DVDs gestalten und produzieren”, a book on professional DVD-authoring in German.

[Uli Plank]

As Jeremy said, it’s a delivery codec. But we shouldn’t be too fast in saying it’ll never be used for acquisition as well

[Uli Plank]

If your station is broadcasting in SD, why waste bandwidth and space on those expensive cards with 720p?
Are you planning to keep it for later use as HD?

If so, you could work in 720p

[Uli Plank]

Well, if I understand Jan Crittenden right, the HVX 200 is delivering an analog signal to the component outputs that is coming from pre-compression stages in the camera electronics.

Even if the DVCPro codec is a very good one, it is compressing quite a bit. 100 mbps is not much for HD, and it’s only 100 mbps at 60 fps. You can expect better quality when recording without compression in the studio (not from tape, of course). BTW, this is not more bandwidth in the anlog sense. But it won’t come cheap: Apart from the card you’ll need a pretty fast RAID to keep up with the data rate.

Best regards,

Uli

[Uli Plank]

I was not talking about the big zoom lens from the XL-1 (the mechanical version), which is bad even on SD