will 24p Panasonic HVX200 kill Sony Z1U?

[Barry Green]

Originally Posted by Thomas Smet

When the HDX-200 comes out I plan on getting

the camera ($6000)
1 small 2GB P2 card (around $900 I think)
cheap laptop.($600)

If you don't mind being chained to the laptop via firewire (perhaps with a 70' Laird firewire cable), you could use that laptop to capture the HD stream, and then you actually could record four hours at a time (or more). You don't need a P2 card in order to capture HD through the firewire, so running a program like HD Rack (a presumed name for DV Rack) to a 300gb external hard disk would give you five hours of continuous record time, if that's what you really wanted. Not highly portable, but it would be a way, if you wanted to, to get longform cheap recording. A 300gb hard disk should be under $150 by the time the camera comes out, so you'd be talking about $30/hr, which is about half the cost of recording to HD tape.

Obviously not a practical solution for *all* shooting situations, but for studio work (where you're usually cabled to a monitor, and frequently to the audio recorder as well) having one more cable shouldn't be any big deal, and makes the HD recording incredibly cheap!

[Radek Svoboda]

Would hard drive be able handle 100 Mbps? Is there firewire output of DVCPROHD signal?

Has the camera have uncompressed 1080p output like new HDV cameras have? Is there way to record uncompressed output to some RAID hard drive array, without laptop, or with laptop? Output converted to HDSDI will probably close to 1 Gbps.

[Kevin Shaw]

Well, this just goes to show what the most realistic uses of the HVX200 will be at first. Looking at how Thomas described what he wants to do, I wonder if there won't soon be a digital still camera which can do that equally well for a fraction of the price, using media which costs under $50/GB instead of over $200/GB. I saw a description recently of a new consumer-oriented digital camera which can record 640x480 video continuously until it fills up the memory card, so if someone would just put that feature in a pro camera and bump up the resolution, then you wouldn't need an HD video camera at all for short takes.

[Giroud Francois]

i read somewhere on this forum , that the output of the camera, out of P2 card, allows only DV recording. So the argument of attaching a disk to the camera is valid only if you want to get the video in DV format.

[Thomas Smet]

Good luck getting audio on that digital still camera.

There is a huge difference between 640 x 480 and HD video. It isn't just bumping up the resolution. Besides that video is usually either mpeg2 or mpeg4 video at very high compression levels. For that you might as well use HDV then.

What you are talking about could be 5 to 10 years down the road yet. If you want you can go ahead and wait 10 years to have a HD camera for $300.00 but most of us want to have one now to make money. In 10 years you will have a fun time trying to make any decent money with a $300.00 HD camera since everybody and his brother will also have one.

Will shooting P2 for a wedding be as easy as with HDV? no. That is part of the tradeoff for quality. Take photographers for example at a wedding. Many now use digital which means they use media cards. They either have to buy a lot of cards or have a person come along to transfer to a laptop at the event. Shooting on P2 could use the same method. I know P2 costs a lot more than still photo media but once you buy them you have them forever. Think of it as buying 5 DV tapes that you could use as many times as you wanted to without dropouts or hurting the tape. Maybe in your first year with the camera the costs will be higher but each year the costs go down. After 5 years how much will you have spent on high quality HDV tapes?

$13.00/tape (in bulk) * 4-6 per event * events a year.

Lets say you use 5 tapes per event and have 20 events a year. Thats $1,300 each year on HDV tapes. After 5 years you will have spent $6,500.00 on HDV tapes. For P2 if we buy 2 cards that will only be $3,400.00 but we get to use them as much as we want to. So for 1,5 or 10 years down the road our media will still only have cost us $3400.00.

I actually predict a great P2 trade community forming at some point in the future. At some point bigger P2 media will come out. Leading edge pros will want the bigger cards so they can now sell the smaller cards. The cards are just as good as they were before so there will be a market for smaller end users to buy those cards used. This also means for me if I only get one card now I am sure in the near future I could get more P2 cards at a much lower used price

[Steven Gotz]

Your math is off, if just a bit. The advantage to tape is that it archives itself. You will not use P2 to archive so you need to buy something to archive it on. And hard drives are about all that will do that for you at this point. So count the cost of the hard drives into the equation.

[Kevin Dooley]

Hard drives, DVD-R, Blu-Ray and HD-DVD (due out about the same time as the camera) and in a couple of years HVD's with 200 GB plus storage capacity per disc....

Sure P2 may be costly now and for the HVX200, it may be prohibitive to some people. But it is a new workflow and a new way of looking at things. The days of tape acquisition are numbered--sure it will be around for a while still, but nonetheless, their days are numbered.

Just think... eventually computers will use entirely solid state memory, and the whole hard drive argument will be a thing of the past as well...

[Barry Green]

Originally Posted by Radek Svoboda

Would hard drive be able handle 100 Mbps?

Easily.

Is there firewire output of DVCPROHD signal?

Yes.

Has the camera have uncompressed 1080p output like new HDV cameras have?

Yes.

Is there way to record uncompressed output to some RAID hard drive array, without laptop, or with laptop? Output converted to HDSDI will probably close to 1 Gbps.

Capturing uncompressed would be a tall task with any of these cameras.

[Barry Green]

Originally Posted by Giroud Francois

i read somewhere on this forum , that the output of the camera, out of P2 card, allows only DV recording. So the argument of attaching a disk to the camera is valid only if you want to get the video in DV format.

Not true. It streams all the signals out the firewire port live: you can capture DVCPRO-HD straight to a computer, or to a DVCPRO-HD tape deck, or to a compatible FireStore. You could capture DVCPRO-50 straight to a computer, to a DVCPRO-50 tape deck, or to a compatible FireStore. And the same with DV25.

[Barry Green]

Originally Posted by Steven Gotz

Your math is off, if just a bit. The advantage to tape is that it archives itself. You will not use P2 to archive so you need to buy something to archive it on. And hard drives are about all that will do that for you at this point. So count the cost of the hard drives into the equation.

Yes, but hard drives cost a lot less than tape! (at least HD tape.) DVCPRO-HD tape costs $68 for 46 minutes (or, extrapolating forward, about $90 per hour). Hard disk storage costs under $1 per gig now, so a 300-gig external drive is readily available at Best Buy for under $300, and provides five hours of storage, so that's $60 per hour, cheaper than tape. And that's at today's prices. By the time the camera is actually on the market, hard drive storage will probably be down around $40 per hour.

Archiving on tape will cost a lot more than archiving on hard disk (or blu-ray DVD or HD-DVD or dual-layer DVD-R or many other options).

[Kevin Shaw]

Barry: the problem is that Thomas didn't account for any cost associated with archiving video from a P2 camera, so his calculations are way off unless he plans to erase all his footage when he's done editing. Like I showed in my earlier figures, if you back up from your HVX200 to today's typical hard drives, it's going to cost you roughly $3000 (give or take a little) to store every 100 hours of footage. So let's say you shoot 30 weddings per year with a modest 4 hours of source footage per event: that's an ongoing cost of $3600 per year to archive footage from the HVX200, versus as little as $360 per year to record the same footage in HDV. And since there seems to be some agreement that hard drives can't be trusted as much as tape, you should double the HVX200 archiving cost to $7200 per year so you can duplicate everything to two separate drives. Okay, so you can massage all these figures somewhat depending on your circumstances, but the bottom line is that archiving HVX200 footage is going to be a non-trivial expense. For the right customers that will be worth it, but it's definitely not going to "kill" HDV.

[Barry Green]

I don't think it will kill HDV. I think there's a definite advantage to having two different types of cameras out there. Obviously the tape-based solution is clearly preferable for certain types of shooting --the oft-quoted example of doing a documentary while backpacking through the Himalayas, for example, would probably be easier/more practical on HDV than on DVCPRO-HD. And if you find the HDV quality good enough, then that's a great example of when you should choose the HDV solution.

I also think that if consumers ever do make a mass adoption of high-definition, and they want high-def in their consumer camcorders, HDV will be the obvious choice. I think there's a very good reason Sharp was one of the initial signatories to the HDV coalition. I don't think we'll ever see, ever, a $299 DVCPRO-HD handycam at Best Buy. It's a totally different market. But I fully expect that five years from now, we likely will be seeing $299 Sharp HDViewCams at Best Buy. It's a market that makes sense, provides high-def cameras for the consumer in a familiar form factor, and is not employed in mission-critical image gathering. I mean, let's not forget, JVC started this whole thing with their first consumer HD camera, and their stated goal wasn't to go after professionals or pro productions, they said they wanted to provide a camera for consumers who have a high-def TV set at home.

That doesn't mean pro's wont adopt and push HDV into the professional workplace -- Sony's Z1 is by no means a consumer camera! But I think in the professional world, where image quality is the paramount goal, people will look to the various formats and see that there's a clear distinction between them, and make their choices based on that. For some, the ability to record on $3 tapes, regardless of the compromises necessary to get footage on to that tape, will be the paramount concern. And for them, we have HDV, and some pretty darn nice HDV cameras at that. For others, image quality and color resolution and freedom from MPEG motion artifacts will be more important -- and for them, the DVCPRO-HD solution is available.

I don't think one will "kill" the other. But I do think there's a substantial quality gap between HDV and DVCPRO-HD. I do think each format is more suited to certain types of jobs than the other, and and I for one am glad that they're both out there.

[Jack Zhang]

Originally Posted by Barry Green

I don't think one will "kill" the other.

HDV is more suited for beginners. HDVPRO (what I think is a future format) or DVCPRO-HD will be something for every budget-minded Pro, but I think Barry's right.

Originally Posted by Barry Green

the oft-quoted example of doing a documentary while backpacking through the Himalayas, for example, would probably be easier/more practical on HDV than on DVCPRO-HD.

Right again! HDV is way more compact and the only format that can stream back to broadcaster HQ. Recently, the Discovery Channel Canada used 720p24 DVCPRO-HD footage to the near-top of Everest (all-real) but none of it could be edited until they went back to their Avid studio back at HQ, with HDV, they could've edited streaming HDV from Everest with the editor at HQ and releasing the show within weeks of the climb, not months. (It took 3-4 months to edit DVCPRO-HD after they came back.)

[Thomas Smet]

If you would read my earlier post you would see that I do not plan on backing up to hard drive. I plan on using optical RW media right now. Yes that also costs money but much less than tape or hard drives. At some point in the near future we will be getting an even better form of optical media which will be cheap, fast and can hold a lot of video.

My whole point that mnay people seem to forget is that those stupid tapes also cost you money. You may not be buying 1000 tapes right away with your camera but after a few years you will. The same P2 cards can be used for many years into the future. It is easy to say a decent P2 card costs $1700 and a HDV tape only costs $15 but unless you plan on only ever buying one tape and using it over many times this isn't a fair way to compare the formats.

Yes in the end maybe HDV tapes might be a little cheaper after 5 years instead of the optical or hard drive method but it isn't the same $6000.00 to $20,000.00 price gap some people are trying to say.

I actually do not think HDV will be the main comsumer format years into the future. Just like with every other technology video will become easier to use. The fact is that solid state recording does open up a whole new world of consumer editing. It will be like digital still cameras and how people can now shoot, transfer and edit photos with ease. At some point an optical or solid state consumer format will hit main stream. Consumers love things to be easier and cheaper. Tell them they can now shoot video onto an optical disk and instantly edit their footage from the disk and make endless copies onto Blue-ray disks and they will never look at tapes ever again.

I know there are cameras out now that record to DVD disks but they haven't hit very hard yet and almost seem like a neat toy at this point.

With us living in the day of E-mail and I-pods who wants to stick with a tape?

I do however think HDV will be around for at least a few years. Optical media just isn't big enough, cheap enough, and fast enough for SD or HD video.

I'm in no way knocking either format. They both have their advantages and disadvantages. I'm just trying to point out that you have to look at both formats from many different angles and not just from head on. For my short projects P2 actually will be cheaper than HDV in the long run although many people have a hard time seeing that. Remember we all heard this same stupid argument between DV and dvcpro-50 for years. People who love DV say DVCpro-50 and other 4:2:2 formats are stupid and a waste of money because nobody can tell between the two. While the high end market tries to say DV just isn't as good. Editing uncompressed video from a dvcpro-50 camera 3 years ago was a bear but people did it. They cost was much higher than if they would just stick with DV and it's cheap storage needs. Now I sit here and watch the fighting start up all over again between the "pro" and "consumer" formats that actually only have a slight increase in quality change.

While 3 years ago I doubt anybody shooting weddings would use dvcpro-50 and uncompressed editing I also feel perhaps shooting weddings with the HDX-200 might be equally silly. It can be done just not as easily. At least now the gap is slightly smaller than before. In terms of gear the cost difference is much smaller. Now instead of a $20,000 camera compared to a $4,000 camera we get cameras around the same price. Instead of massive storage needs the storage is only 2 or 4 times larger. Finally today almost any computer for $1,000.00 can edit either format with no special hardware card needs.

[Max Allen]

Originally Posted by Thomas Smet

Good luck getting audio on that digital still camera.

What you are talking about could be 5 to 10 years down the road yet.

Nope. It's here now. Google Kinetta.

Take photographers for example at a wedding. Many now use digital which means they use media cards. They either have to buy a lot of cards or have a person come along to transfer to a laptop at the event. Shooting on P2 could use the same method.

Almost never have seen them go past 4 cards. I don't call that a lot.

Maybe in your first year with the camera the costs will be higher but each year the costs go down. After 5 years how much will you have spent on high quality HDV tapes?

$13.00/tape (in bulk) * 4-6 per event * events a year.

Lets say you use 5 tapes per event and have 20 events a year. Thats $1,300 each year on HDV tapes. After 5 years you will have spent $6,500.00 on HDV tapes.

Not even a factor when I'm making 15,000% profit on the cost of tape.

Cheers

Max Allen