Myself and a work some work mates were lucky enough to have a Panasonic NZ rep come out and see how our SPX800 cameras were going last week and we got talking about the 500.. to cut the story short he ended up having the first HPX502 (auz/nz version) in the country sitting in the back of his car, it'd just arrived in nz.

He ended up leaving it with us for the weekend to have a play.

Heres the footage.

http://www.sendspace.com/file/rf06oc - 1080 50i 42mb - H264 at HQ 1440 x 1080


http://www.sendspace.com/file/0hrba5 - 1080 50i - testing the gain - 0, 3 and 12 db. - 103mb

http://www.sendspace.com/file/zcs9lp - 720 25pn at 12fps - traffic. - 40mb

http://www.sendspace.com/file/dxo8fr - the 1080i two minute sequence we cut down converted to 720p - 234mb.


Joe

Really enjoyed the sequence. Nice night shots of Auckland? at night. Great music selection. The only problem... I now have an insatiable hunger for 500 footage.

Hey Kiwis,

Nice looking pictures.

Being expat NZ myself, i'm curious if there are any HPX500 Shooters in NZ? What HD cameras are people using down there? Also, how has the P2 workflow caught on?

Best,

Simon Sommerfeld
San Francisco CA

No idea on shooter numbers with 500s sorry, and i know panasonic are having a hard time to get them into rental shops last i heard because as soon as you add an hd lens on, the price jumps and you might as well rent a Varicam. There'll be a couple out there though, however a good 90% of the shooters buying new gear here have adopted xdcam 530's..

Theres a lot of HVX's in use, and then for big budget hd its all varicam or 900s.

Lots of XDCAM IMX in use by TVNZ (hence the shooters buying them) but there are only a couple of XDHD cams floating around, noones using them really.

P2 is slowly being adopted, TV3 are using it inhouse with spx800's and 900s and its their sister channel C4 that is using hvx's as well.

Thanks for all the info Joe.

The HPX500 is very appealing "lower-budget" proposition for production companies and there is a lot of interest in it here in the US. I'm looking at it especially because of it's 50 and 60 Hz recording capability, and the variable frame rates. It's horses for courses, but the 500 is a very versatile camera.

What sort of projects do you work on? Do you keep busy?

I work in outside broadcast with Panasonic SPX800 dvcpro50 cameras, all running triax to a small OB van. However we use P2 and FCP as our main production/post workflow when not doing OB.

Dead links, can you please update :)

No longer work for that company and do not have a copy of the footage sorry. Theres gotta be lots of low light footage around for the hpx, its been out awhile.