I dropped by at Panasonic booth today and spent a couple of hours there.

My employee shot some video footage so I will post or stream it later tonight.

The camera looks chubby, but not that heavy and felt like I can hold it longer than FX1. The motorized zoom worked beautifully like how it was working or maybe better than DVC30. The fat viewer section didn't look that bad in person. It is dazzling to see all of the format it supports in the format parameter like 1080/60i/30p/24p, 720/60p, 480p and so on. Vast choice. And I realized that on the way to there in the car that since all of these formats are recording on the P2 card, I would not run into some difficulties on bringing all sorts of different formats to NLE, you don't even have to change the mode on NLE to capture the footage because there's no need to capture (it was annoying to deal with a tape with more than one format recorded, not a bug or anything, but cumbersome to switch). After looking at how P2 works on the Power Book G4 and the FCP5, my thinking was confirmed it was right.

Panasonic is having a multiple displays using HVX200s with different NLE workstations like Avid, Canopus and Apple. On MacOS, they are demonstrating with PowerBook G4 and had a beta version of FCP5 to implement the support for P2 card (DVCPRO HD format itself is already supported). Panasonic said they already approved the portion of FCP5 with Apple, so it is up to Apple to release the supported version of P2. The demonstration of the support of P2 on FCP5 is on my video, so you will be able to watch it later.

They said the HVX200s at the booth is on the final stage of fine tunning the picture adjustments and the cam I was trying seemed to have all of the parameters working. They said the taste of the picture might vary upon its release. The cams will be available in this December, but no absolute date is set yet.

Also, my company is demonstrating AJA Kona 2 and Kona LH system at the Japanese distributor of AJA, Ask Corporation. Today, as the first day, we demonstrated with Dual 2.7GHz Power Mac G5, but we had the Power Mac G5 Quad come in at the office, so we swapped the machine after the first day. We are provided with Kona LHe which is supporting the new PCI Express bus (and the ATTO card), so took out the boot hard drive from the dual 2.7G and put it in to G5 Quad, install the Kona LHe and ATTO card and there you go, a lot faster Final Cut Pro 5 machine with HD-SDI support.
We were amazed with the speed of the machine. I do feel some lag when I'm working on my dual 2.5Ghz, but working with the same project file, G5 Quad was working a lot faster, no lag when you blazing the timeline wiper right and left through the transitions and realtime overlays.

Many of you must have felt not comfortable with the size and the cost of P2 card. But unless you have to be shooting HD for documentary or long hour video shooting that can't give you enough time to unload the files from P2 cards to hard disk drives, I feel it is going to be workable with many ways that files on P2 card being inside of HVX200 and P2 card alone. HVX200 can work as a host device so that you can connect firewire drive directly (without any PC) to unload the files from its P2 card. You can probalby have you Power Book on the firewire target mode, so that you can unload the files directly, too. Also, they were showing Focus drive attatched that was recording directly from HVX200 (CORRECTION:maybe it was connected via firewire and only for file unload capability, not direct recording at this point). P2 card can be inserted directly to the PCMCIA slot of Power Book. Many ways to work with besides Panasonic's own portable P2/hard disk unit.

What a world we live in!!

Also I met a man, he wanted to talk to me deadly and figured out later that he is also a reader of dvinfo.net and he has his own user website on DVX cams. He seems to be a good source for getting Panasonic information.

Chris, once again, the matrix you have created spreads connections and provides ease of making new relationship.

I'm selling my FX1 and HC1 and some other stuff to migrate to HVX200 environment.

Wow, what a great report. Thanks as always, Kaku!

Kaku,

Considering all the footage you supplied for the Canon H1, what factors made you decide on the HVX200 over the H1? You spoke very highly of the P2 and made some great points on not having to worry about the capture settings in FCP5 in your post above. Was that one of the deciding factors?

Thanks Kaku Ito, I saw you Canon Xlh1 footage and I was very happy that people as you are showing precious preview footage of this new camera. I was waiting for footage about Panasonic Hvx200 too, I believe only you can give us this opportunity to view video clips from Panasonic camera today, so i'm stick to the computer waiting for your precious footage.

Thanks, very thanks!
I live in Italy, here Hvx200 will be avaible in jan 2006...so thanks, i'm dying here in Italy waiting for this camera!

Cheers:) !

Chris, I was there today to shoot some publicity photo and video of my company demonstrating new Power Mac G5 Quad/Kona LHe combination, so spent extra time to dig into HVX200 and people at Panasonic were VERY helpful, unlike Sony.

Here (http://www.xtream.ne.jp/content/view/253/33/) is the link to my QuickTime H.264 video report on how P2 card is integrated with Final Cut Pro 5 and Power Book G4. I'm sorry my appearance and English speaking is horrible, but that was the best I can do, hahaha. You may have to register at my site to downloand and leave comments.

Danilo, I placed the order at my trusty dealer, Pro Video Station Shinjuku, so I will receive one from the first bunch some time in December, unless Panasonic wants to make some kind of special arrangement. If everyone help me convince Panasonic then it might happen. Other than that, I will work of the real production model when it comes out.

Derek, I had some time working on the footage I shot with XLH1 and FX1 the other day, found that video on XLH1 had a lot higher resolution and I like how it looks very much. But, one, XLH1 is too large to carry around in the mountain (I shoot downhill mountainbiking in the mountain and trails), two, so far, any HDV cams besides JVC is failing my needs in following bikers going fast in front of me when the background is complicated looking woods and natural environment. 25MBps is not enough for action shooting. We discussed this before, but after trying FX1, HC1, A1 and XLH1, this is my conclusion. I did what I could with Glidecam V8 (it gets a lot better with this), but it is too much husstle to wear that all the time and I could not do that in the mountain for sure. I decided to shoot the moments with HVX200 for the next year projects, capture details of what happens in mountainbike riding with 60p instead of kicking my butt and shooting the whole events (who knows, the other lower res formats might be good enough on P2 that I can shoot longer). Primarily, for the next year project, I want to shoot in 60p. And HVX200 is the only affordable choice to be able to do that. So, my decision is based on very narrow useage. Everyone should consider other facts to agree with me. The capturing setting thing was a new finding on top of these facts first.

thanks Kaku!

Kaku,
Thanks for your excellent coverage. The P2 Cards are quite an issue and you demistify them.
Seeing this all work on a powerbook is what I really needed to convince my self of this purchase.
There was a cut in the footage where he downloaded the P2 Card to the G4 - I wonder how long it took (how large was the card)???

Thank you ~

Kaku,
Thanks for your excellent coverage. The P2 Cards are quite an issue and you demistify them.
Seeing this all work on a powerbook is what I really needed to convince my self of this purchase.
There was a cut in the footage where he downloaded the P2 Card to the G4 - I wonder how long it took (how large was the card)???

Thank you ~

I cut it because we were speaking too much in Japanese. The alert says it is done less than a minute. :) No intension in cutting in short. The card was 4GB I think.

Regardless of my company is buying HVX200 or not, I sent a proposal to Panasonic people I met today if I can barrow HVX200 before its release to provide footage to you here. I hope they understand the positive ways of how things work here.

I heard that Citidisk is going to support HVX200 with thier shoe mountable harddisk drive, today.

I heard that Citidisk is going to support HVX200 with thier shoe mountable harddisk drive, today.

got any photos of the screen layout when recording, i have to see that...

got any photos of the screen layout when recording, i have to see that...

Sorry, I meant in the future. I heard from the Japanese distributor of citidisk that they descided to do so.

Now, I'm gonna call it for today. Good night.

i meant the hvx lcd screen when recording, all the screen shot i have seen have been of the clip review screen, i was wondering what the layout looks like...

anywas goodnight and thanks for the feedback...

Hi Kaku,

Great job posting that P2 clip! It was great. Thanks.

One thing I noticed was that when the gentleman was importing the clips from the P2 card into the Powerbook's hard drive, it was bringing them in as .mov files. Is it converting on the fly? I thought the P2 card recorded in a different format. Then again, I'm not sure if I'm seeing this correctly.

Can anyone shed some light on this?

Thanks.

The camera records .mxf files to the P2 card. As far as I know, FCP has to convert them to quicktime files when importing them.

Yeah, that's what I figured.

It sure does seem to be a fast conversion process on that P2 video. That is good news.

Thanks again Barry.

As Barry says, it was "import" command to bring in the files.

i meant the hvx lcd screen when recording, all the screen shot i have seen have been of the clip review screen, i was wondering what the layout looks like...

anywas goodnight and thanks for the feedback...

I see. I do have footage me playing around the camera and my staff shot video of that. I was debating to broadcast that because my english is so horrible. But I guess I will make a clip swallowing the embarrasment.
It does have a lot of information on the screen, I liked it.

My encoding had to hold off because my staff had to give demos.

I'm going to InterBEE for the last minutes to take some still shots of other products.

I will post the video and stills later tonight.

Thank you for the updates Kaku-san!
You're information is very helpful

あなたに感謝しなさい

Steve

As always Kaku if you need extra hosting space for video clips just call on me. Much appreciated,

Here's the link (http://www.xtream.ne.jp/content/blogcategory/48/62/) to my blog and I uploaded the clip of taking a closer look at AG-HVX200. Please excuse my horrible English on the clip.

I checked with Panaosnic person today that 4GB on P2 card can be transfered entirely around 2 minutes and 30 seconds. He said it depends on what kind of video is on the data. More movement intensive footage might take little longer (I guess this is because it has to convert to bring them on Mac).

And they are aiming the shipping date in Japan around December 20th.

i tried to download the video but your registration process is impossible for me to accomplish, for whatever reason these pop up boxes pop up and are unreadble by me so i'mnot even sure what i'm doing wrong, any way you can send it to Chris for an upload on his site...

thanks...

Having trouble getting these files also. I only got to see your first file because someone else shared it on a different server. Let us know how to get these.

Thanks!

Nevermind...finally got the confirmatiion email!!!!

Robert,

It is because you are providing invalid email address? It requires validating process with a valid email address.

Kaku,
Thanks for the video. It showed us some nice stuff. The LCD looked very cluttered and I was wondering 2 things.

1)was that the 4x3 guide that looked liked 2 vertical lines on the left and right side of the image? IF so it seemed very prominent.

2)that you could find, was there an option of turning off all of the overlays for a clean LCD?

One of the big selling points of PANA staying with the 4x3 LCD was that all the information was above and below the 16x9 area thus leaving the image uncluttered. I came away from your video thinking "damn that looked cluttered"!!

Any thoughts on this? thanks again
Marty

1)was that the 4x3 guide that looked liked 2 vertical lines on the left and right side of the image? IF so it seemed very prominent.

2)that you could find, was there an option of turning off all of the overlays for a clean LCD?



One thing I noticed that the LCD looks smaller than what I used to, FX1.

The two lines seems to be guide for 4x3 frame guide.

When you say cluttered, yeah, it's cluttered. I just thought, yeah, lot of information, but I was more hyped than being calm.

I will send email to Panasonic person in the development team asking about the switch for the overlays. I'm pretty sure they do.

Also, some information from Sumi's DVXFan page that Panasonic could not make the zoom act the same as DVC30 at the slow speed. From the users used to DVC30 felt that HVX200 did not provide super slow zoom ring behavior.

i tried to download the video but your registration process is impossible for me to accomplish, for whatever reason these pop up boxes pop up and are unreadble by me so i'mnot even sure what i'm doing wrong, any way you can send it to Chris for an upload on his site...

thanks...

Robert,

I added a photo to the article so you can see the LCD screen. Click it to enlarge.

Now, 2:15am and I have to do interview shooting of Japanese 2005 downhill champion from Honda Racing Team, so I'm going to sleep. Good night.

What about workflows for other non NLE products such as After Effects, Combustion and Shake? As far as I know no current graphics, animation or compositing program can load MXF files. Does this mean for us VFX people that all footage shot on the HVX200 will have to be converted to DVCPRO HD quicktime or uncompressed HD in order for us to do our FX work? Hopefully Apple will add native MXF support built inside of Quicktime so then it will become universal for every program based on quicktime.

I believe Avid supports MXF, but I'm only starting to look into it now as it's looking like I'll have to move away from Vegas.

For my animation & effects work, I already work uncompressed, so that's still the avenue I will travel anyway for that type of work and for video to be combined into those productions. For straight video work and projects using very limited CG, it would be nice to have native MXF / DVCPro support.

You're right, Jeff, Avid does support MXF natively. They also allow you to mix DVCProHD footage in the same timeline as HDV footage, without rendering. Do we know if FCP does this as well?

Peter

If you add a Kona or Decklink card Final Cut Pro can mix formats.

I believe Avid supports MXF...


avid supports mxf files as does fcp but neither app has full XML metadata support

Avid files can import the metadata but once on the timeline it gets stripped, and fcp strips the metadata on the import process

the only nle that gives you full XML Metadata support is edius, which means you drop it on the timeline, render the file back to p2 and the data will still be there...

i can only assume for the vast majority this is a non issue

Mr. Nakagaki from Panasonic (the person helped me to shoot the P2 intergration clip) said Aivd and Canopus can play back P2 footage without converting drectly from P2 card. I envy that.
My wish is too, for Apple to support the format natively within QuickTime, so the clips can be used with QT based application software.

Additional information from Panasonic.

Mr. Kurama/Panasonic emailed me even before I email him and answered our questions about the overlay display thing, this is even the next day of tiring InterBEE attendance AND his day off (Saturday)!! I don't think he can do that so often, so I should warn you that he won't be able to answer all of the questions we have, but I will try to moderately ask important questions to him in the future. I tell you I NEVER had recieved this kind of attention from Sony. They ignored. I have to mention Canon had always been very helpful, too.

Anyway, Mr. Kurama had informed me that from the menu, you can turn the "safety zone display" off, 90% and to display 4:3. Also, switching the overlay on and off by the dedicated "DISP/MODE" button located the side of the cam.

Panasonic's determination for selling this product is super!!

If you add a Kona or Decklink card Final Cut Pro can mix formats.

But most likely you have to render when you mix different format.

I heard that Canopus let you play all of the HVX200 supported format on the timeline in realtime.

Did you get the chance to see the Canopus Edius in use with HVX/P2 files? Their stand was next to Panasonic`s (ie Matsushita`s) I believe.

Did you get the chance to see the Canopus Edius in use with HVX/P2 files? Their stand was next to Panasonic`s (ie Matsushita`s) I believe.

They were few booth away. But right before the show was ending, I found someone I knew and now he is working at Canopus. He is the source that explained about realtime multi-format support on thier system. But I did not see it well because it was actually after the closing time.

little disappointed.. color dosen't look like 4:2:2 it looks very videoish to me.
anyway thank you for detail demonstration.

!!? Jung, my clips are shot with HVR-A1, not with HVX200. I actually tried to negotiate with Panasonic to let me copy thier clips to the G5 Quad that we were demonstrating at AJA booth but they did not respond probably because the HVX200 they had were not the final, they said it has to go through the final adjustment of how picture looks. They said the picture will be adjusted to look to have more dynamic range to take advantage of the higher resolution.

...any HDV cams besides JVC is failing my needs in following bikers going fast in front of me when the background is complicated looking woods and natural environment. 25MBps is not enough for action shooting. We discussed this before, but after trying FX1, HC1, A1 and XLH1, this is my conclusion.

Hi Kaku...

I gather from this that the HDV format had difficulty recording fast action with a lot of detail? Was the picture falling apart, or perhaps did it suffer some other form of compression artifacts?

By the way, was wondering if you might have been the guy I met through Audy in Hawaii back in the 1980's. Your name sounds familiar.

Hi Kaku...

I gather from this that the HDV format had difficulty recording fast action with a lot of detail? Was the picture falling apart, or perhaps did it suffer some other form of compression artifacts?

By the way, was wondering if you might have been the guy I met through Audy in Hawaii back in the 1980's. Your name sounds familiar.

Dean, howzit.

I once found your email from an article and sent an email to you but I guess it was old or something and came back failed. Yeah, back in 80's, long time ago.

Probalby HDV would be more useful when each companies give us more format choices to shoot (which means smaller format like JVC GY-HD100). By shooting at 1080/60i, it's beautiful when you are shooting scenaries, close up of the casts, however, trying to shoot like fast or not even that fast mountainbiker passing by and either holding the camera still or following the biker with steadiest panning would introduce mpeg artifacts (like half diameter of the wheels would look like they have really big blocks around them) and lower resolution (I guess by the result of blocky compression). I have many many clips that I experienced this and I did everything I could to avoid this issue including shooting with Glidecam V8, using tripod and so on, but I can't adjust myself and change the shooting style FOR WHAT SONY WANTS TO SELL or HOW THEY WANT TO MANIPULATE THE ENTERTAINMENT CLUTURE (I personally think Sony really abuses the quality of entertainment media like video and music for the products they want to sell, I have many evidences) when honest company like JVC made desicion to go with lower resolution format in HDV to avoid the terrible looking portion of footage (usually only less than a second, but you can see as you get used to it, just like stereophile people can hear the slightest distortion in the recording) and like Panasonic decided to go with P2 that able to shoot higher resolution and frames but currently suffers with price/capacity issues. Sony Japan even advertises HC1 saying it is HD quality, but it is most of the time and it is not fully, that is an exaggerate advertisement. They advertised before that CD sounds better than analog records. Some ways they are, but not every way. They later said that was mistake (after over 20 years) and came back and said we are trying to get the audio fidelity of vinyl records on SACD to satisfy the real audio mania.... and so on.

Talking about HDV format issue, In case of Ken's problem (http://www.dvinfo.net/conf/showthread.php?t=49804), it is the characteristic of HDV format that it is not suitable for what he wanted to do, but DV format performed better for his needs (that simply HDV is not a better format than DV under that situation nor other situation like mine). I have done many onboard shooting with my mountain bike now and came to the conclusion for HDV that this format is not suitable for sever situations like onboard with small vibration and low frequency vibration (to back this up, I think I should shoot both DV and HDV with the same cam, say HVR-A1 because it is the latest...unless the problem is originated from the optical section, not HDV format). I haven't tried JVC GY-HD100, so please disregard it from this conclusion.

Mr. Kurama/Panasonic was a videographer before he was hired by Panasonic and he said he shot with HVX200 under sever vibrated condition and he reported that DVCPRO HD format does not suffer the same problem.

I guess Canon must have had studied the panning compression issue and vibration issue, but they probably came to the conclusion that XLH1 is going to be used more like film camera instead of video camera, so people wouldn't swing around or mount it on mountainbikes and ATB. XLH1 can capture scenaries beautifully, taking advantage on the 1080i format the best they can.

Please don't forget that my application is very niche, probably does not apply to many situation, but even in regular situation, you might run into the similar problem because it does in its extreme situations like mine and Ken's. Also, Sony did make many good products, but they are too confident about what they do and in the respect of media culture, their advertisement and sales copies are oftenly way too much wrapped around to make it sound good. I'm not enermy of Sony, I would give my points to them if they come to talk to me. I even talk about these kind of things on my column in VideoAlfa magazine which I really respect because editors let me express my points as long as I have evidences.

Kaku,

Now that you've seen the HVX200 up close, were you able to actually play back the P2 files? It appears from your video that you were only monitoring.

If you were able to see footage played from the camera, how did it look?

Thank you,
Steve

Kaku,

Now that you've seen the HVX200 up close, were you able to actually play back the P2 files? It appears from your video that you were only monitoring.

If you were able to see footage played from the camera, how did it look?

Thank you,
Steve

Steven,

On the P2 integration video, the girl was shot by Mr. Nakagaki at the spot (her little stage was located right next to the P2/Power Book stand), took the P2 card out, inserted it to Power Book's PCMCIA, imported to FCP. Maybe I can look for portion of my video (probably in Japanese tho) that shows what he did. There was no trick. Only thing is that Panasonic haven't finalize fine tunning the characteristics on color and picture, so they did not want to give me the files. At 720/60p, it looked lower resolution than 1080i (ofcourse) but when you freeze it, it was taking advantage of progressive format, there was no interlace artifacts (now we can say truely interlace artifacts is bad in this situation because this camera can shoot in 60p :) ). For 1080i, my impression was not that excellent, but I'm used to monitoring 1080i in the true 1080i resolution with my digitally connected AJA HDP/Eizo S2410W combination, and what they had at the P2 integration stand was probalby lower resolution Plazma connected with component, so my normal monitoring enviroment for regular footage like girl's talking would be a lot higher resolution than that. I really have to have the cam in my hand, shoot my regular footage and bring it in to my editing environment.

By the way, Panasonic's new full resolition 65inch plasma display looked awesome.

deleted because I double clicked the post button.

Kaku...

Great to hear from you again.

Thanks for all the detailed practical info on the HVX-200 and the video format it's using.

It's as I suspected when I first heard about HDV. I didn't think the GOP concept would hold up with rapid changes in scenery. It might work well with multi-pass variable rate encoding but with live material and the impossible task of predicting changes in every frame, it's highly likely there would be artifacts.

And sure enough, there is.

For our own work, the Panasonic system would probably be a better choice. I left the newspaper business at the beginning of the year to do video production full time. The fishing show I'm working on often has thrashing fish at the back of some large fishing boat. With the rapidly changing pattern in the wake at the boat's stern, the splashing, and changing colors it's a sure bet HDV would fall apart at the worst possible moment.

We're not going to jump into HD just yet as we're still watching the technology. Also, our cablecast host, Time/Warner, isn't requiring HD programming yet. But we'd like to be ready when it does require the jump.

One of the things I like about Panasonic's camera is the ability to create a record-ahead buffer. We've burned hours of tape on a lot of trips just waiting for that moment. And I've missed a lot of candid comments as well. A lot of our time is spent waiting for a hook-up or other real-life action. Now we can have the camera ready and waiting with a 10-second buffer and just hit "record" when a reel starts to scream or when someone says something meaningful. Just gotta make sure someone's awake to grab the camera when it does!

Aloha,

Hi Dean,

I think I did find your name under the fishing thing.
Fishing in Hawaii must be spectacular that can be appreciated all over the world. If I get asked about any fishing deal by my clients (boradcasters and productions) and I will recommend you to them.

Just imagine what HVX200 can do for the slow motion footage on fishing! Shooting in 720/60P, you can benefit right away even for your SD projects.

were you able to eject the tape when you were holding hvx200.
if so you could brought spare dv tape and record it. i know it's not HD footage but we can basically see what it's like. such as color tone and others.

were you able to eject the tape when you were holding hvx200.
if so you could brought spare dv tape and record it. i know it's not HD footage but we can basically see what it's like. such as color tone and others.

Jung,

I was told that the unit was not the finalized version, so I wouldn't have done that. I asked Panasonic if we could copy the files shot at the show but they did not want to provide them, so they don't want to have the files go out. I won't take chances to shoot something wihtout asking even if I were appearing here with psudoname. My name is know enough around the industry in Japan because I've been writing articles for a decade on Video Alfa magazine.

Hi Dean,

I think I did find your name under the fishing thing.
Fishing in Hawaii must be spectacular that can be appreciated all over the world. If I get asked about any fishing deal by my clients (boradcasters and productions) and I will recommend you to them.

Just imagine what HVX200 can do for the slow motion footage on fishing! Shooting in 720/60P, you can benefit right away even for your SD projects.

Kaku...

Thanks for the offer of recommendations! We're looking right now at having the show marketed outside of Hawaii. One third of our website's visitors come from California and another third comes from everywhere else.

I thought about the slow-mo feature. True half-speed video. Certain FCP plug-ins should provide even better options, too. And what's also nice about the HVX200 is that it'll shoot DVCPro50 as its SD format, tho not to tape. And that has 4:2:2 color space, which is really helpful in post.

So I'm keeping a close eye on what develops with that camera.

And here's a bit of fishing trivia: The Pacific Blue marlins caught and tagged in Kona, Hawaii often travel as far as the South China Sea and other parts of the Pacific. This was discovered with the aid of electronic "pop up" tags. These large pelagic fish cruise entire oceans!