I am seriously thinking of buying either the pani hvx200 or the sony HVR-V1U. I am leaning towards the pani because of the better color rendition of the pani HD vs. HDV (and I believe 4 audio tracks). However, the pani uses an attached disk drive instead of cheap mini dv to record, so my questions are:

1. What are my options for disk recording (other than dvrack hd) for using the pani, and

2. Given my options for recording, what is the best price quality combo to choose from for (what seems to be the standard sizes of) 80gb and 120gb models, and

3. At full hd resolution, how much time can I record with one 120gb recorder using the pani, and

4. Do I need any special hardware (cards and the like) or software to edit the footage from the pani, or is it simply a firewire to off-the-shelf NLE issue.

Thanks again

Dwight

Dwight...

Detailed answers to your questions are peppered throughout this forum. But here's some quick responses:

1. What are my options for disk recording (other than dvrack hd) for using the pani. -- P2 card, Citi Disk, Firestore.

2. Given my options for recording, what is the best price quality combo to choose from for (what seems to be the standard sizes of) 80gb and 120gb models. -- Something with a hard drive. P2 cards are costly, along with the P2 Store. But each have benefits and disadvantages you'll need to weigh.

3. At full hd resolution, how much time can I record with one 120gb recorder using the pani. -- Roughly 1 gigabyte per minute.

4. Do I need any special hardware (cards and the like) or software to edit the footage from the pani, or is it simply a firewire to off-the-shelf NLE issue. -- If you're using a P2 card you'll need a reader or a P2 Store or read it from the camera via a Firewire cable.

Final Cut Pro v5.1.2 easily reads MXF files from P2 media and translates them into a Quicktime file.

Thanks,

I have seen some HD enclosure options online that I am looking into as possible options (ie. the catapult http://www.bella-usa.com/Catapult.htm). Frankly a recorder to me is just that. I want the stream that I captured at its full capacity, nothing more or less.

Hi.

The catapult won't work with the HVX. Only "smart" firewire devices. That is devices with a bukt in "computer/software".

There are at the moment only one working option, the Firestore-100, but it is very good.

Citidisk also have an offer, but noone seems to have any success.

Later this year hopefully Speciall Communications come out with a solution that plugs into a P2 slot and acts as a gigantic P2 card. Conceptwise the best solution, it only isn't here yet.

The fourth option is to recor directly to an NLE, as mentioned or go the P2 route, which is really nice, but has a higher ingress cost and demands more on set work for longer continuus shots.

(I'd do at least 3 8GB cards + a P2 store)

All these solutions give you the same quality of the video

Gunleik

the price difference between 1 HVX200, a firestore, and 3 8GB cards is significant when compared to just one V1U purchase.

i'd get the HVX though personally :)

I am still leaning towards the pani. Here's a tekie question that I do not know the answer too. Is there some technical reason why an hd signal can't be captured on a mini dv tape the same way that hdv is? I have only used dv and hdv cams, so I am not sure if any of the hd cams use mini dv tapes.

Consider the mini-DV tape a "Harddisk" with a constant throughput of 3,6 Megabytes pr second.



This is the throughput of both DV and HDV (which are both codecs for compression of video)

DVCPRO HD (another codec for compression of video) has a throughput of approximately 4 times this - 14 Megabytes pr second.

Theoretically you could achieve this throughput on a DV tape by accelrating the tape machanism fourfold, and thus getting 15 minutes of recording time on a 60 minutes tape, but I can see a lot of good reasons not to (mostly mechanical wear and tear on the tape)

When you consider that an uncompredssed 1080 stream runs at about 320 Megabytes pr second, you see why compression is a good and a bad issues for most cameras and formats. To accomodate these speeds you'll at least need a 5 disk SATA raid.

We're pretty happy with the firestore or 8 gb cards, though -;)


Gunleik