I went to see AG-HVX200 in person today at InterBEE

[Kaku Ito]

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.

[Chris Hurd]

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?

[Danilo Del Tufo]

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:) !

[Kaku Ito]

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 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!

[John Benton]

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 Ito]

Originally Posted by John Benton

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.

[Kaku Ito]

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.

[Kaku Ito]

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

[Robert Mann Z.]

Originally Posted by Kaku Ito

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...

[Kaku Ito]

Originally Posted by Robert Mann Z.

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.

[Robert Mann Z.]

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...

[Walter S. Chelliah]

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.

[Barry Green]

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.