How can SONY overtake the Panasonic HVX200

[Hans ter Lingen]

I said "Moreover if P2 card will become cheaper in the very near future I can easily make the change over. The demand for HD is still very limited in the market anyway" Mark replied "ignoring the fact that you'll have to pay about the same amount again to buy enough P2 cards to be useful" So he did not understand what I wrote. I am not ignoring the high price of the P2 cards at the moment. James I understood what he ment by underrate the disadvantages but I think that people worry to much about the disadvantages of P2 cards besides price.

[John M Burkhart]

In my humble opinion, Sony is not going to crush Panasonic with HDV, which is their consumer format. DVCPRO50, HD and P2 are not aimed at consumers, so the cameras are really in two different markets.

Nor will Sony's HDCAM(SR) crush Panasonic, again there are two different markets involved.

The pro camera that Sony will crush Panasonic in the "mid-range" with is the upcoming HD version of their XDCAM (HDXDCAM?). Which I am drooling for more than anything at the moment.

Instead of p2 cards, you write to small affordable "Blu-ray" type dvds. The reasons they stompify p2 based solutions are the following:

1. Capacity (currently 23gigs). There is enough storage space on the DVD for at least a 30 min worth of HD, at a very good compression ratio, equivilant to or better than DVCPROHD. (check out their current XDCAM IMX offerings).

2. They are cheap enough to archive your footage to (about $30/unit). Not too many people are going to have a tape shelf full of P2 cards, but a shelf full of dvd's? No problem.

3. The DVD's are re-writable, and so are re-useable like tape.

4. No digitizing required. Pop in the DVD and copy direct to your computer, just like like p2. Current XDCAM cameras have firewire, as well as an optional ethernet card for footage transfer.

5. No dropouts. Just like p2.

6. No mechanical tape transport issues, clogged heads, worn pinch rollers etc. Just lasers. (And really, how cool is that? My camera has lasers!)

So it looks like these upcoming HD XDCAMs will have all the benefits of tape, like re-usability, and relatively low cost per storage unit, as well as all the benefits of p2 cards, WITHOUT ANY OF THE DOWNSIDES OF EITHER TAPE OR P2.

A nice little trick that, in my opinion will, as mentioned above, stompify p2 and bring us all into a shiny, happy HD future.

[Mark Grant]

Mark replied "ignoring the fact that you'll have to pay about the same amount again to buy enough P2 cards to be useful" So he did not understand what I wrote.

No, I did understand what you wrote. You said "moreover if P2 card will become cheaper in the very near future I can easily make the change over."

Why do you think that P2 cards are going to drop massively in price in the very near future? I doubt that anyone who'd consider buying a camera as cheap as the Z1 will be able to afford enough P2 cards for a day of HD shooting without having to offload footage to a laptop in the lifetime of the two cameras... and anyone who can afford the cards can probably afford to rent a real HD camera instead.

A nice little trick that, in my opinion will, as mentioned above, stompify p2 and bring us all into a shiny, happy HD future.

Agreed: I suspect that DVD recording will be the post-tape future.

[Hans ter Lingen]

DVD recording still uses mechanical moving parts which can brake down or is this already solved?

[John M Burkhart]

True, there are some moving parts. However Sony's current XDCAM cameras have a seven year "power train" warranty. Covering all the moving parts on the camera, so they must think it's pretty stable at least.

Recordable DVD just makes sense to me.

[Fredrik-Larsson]

Recordable discs isn't that stable. I know a lot whom are having problems with CDs now. But it might be an intermediate format that you can have until you moved the data to more stable formats.

[Douglas Spotted Eagle]

BD is a VERY stable recording format, buffered and error checked.

[Fredrik-Larsson]

Well, I can imagine that it's stable in the short run but I highly doubt that it will be stable in the long run. CD-Rs that are a couple of years old can't be read anymore. What shipping CDs and DVDs have is a protective layer above the data which writable CD/DVDs don't have. Otherwise they couldn't write to it. I hope to be proven wrong but my experience tells me that the new formats aren't any exceptions.

[Douglas Spotted Eagle]

Originally Posted by Fredrik-Larsson

Well, I can imagine that it's stable in the short run but I highly doubt that it will be stable in the long run. CD-Rs that are a couple of years old can't be read anymore. What shipping CDs and DVDs have is a protective layer above the data which writable CD/DVDs don't have. Otherwise they couldn't write to it. I hope to be proven wrong but my experience tells me that the new formats aren't any exceptions.

Huh?
I don't know what the oceansides of Malmo might be doing to your CD's, but we're regularly using disks that are 10 years old. Duplicated, not replicated disks. BD has been in use for nearly 2 years, and thus far, no problems. It's a high end, professional format, and while there is no empirical evidence that BD will last longer than two years because it's only been around for two years, there is also zero evidence that they'll only last a few years.
I'd urge you to learn what BD is, prior to suggesting that it will only last two years.
I'm well aware, as most people here are, of the differences between replicated and duplicated disks. Maybe there is some chemical in the air in Southern Sweden that affects disks, but I've yet to see a CD or DVD burned on our systems last only two years. Maybe it's the media you're buying? The half-life of any quality brand of CDR media is 70 years. No one has had one that long, but they have been doing accelerated aging tests on CDs for many years now.
Check out: T. Aol and K. Namba: "Recording Materials and Characteristics of the Recordable Compact Disc," IEEE Tokyo Section, Donshi Tokyo No. 31 (1992).

[Fredrik-Larsson]

What I am talking is the first generation of a disc i e I do my recording on a BD today and what are the chances that disc will be readable in 10 or 20 years time? Scientists today agree that a lot of all of the digital information we are retrieving will be lost in the future. A normal CD is 1/5 (or was it 1/3) actual data and the rest is errorcodes to handle the loss of data. A scratch across a CD will be fine but along the tracks will destroy a great length of it. Our national archive lab constantly re-copies data just to maintain it intact. Analog media is of course a lot better.

I totally agree that high quality media and high quality devices are a lot better at preserving data than the average consumer product. But I also believe that there will be many more buying consumer editions of discs that the high quality ones. And depending on where you are you might not be able to get that high quality media when you need it.

We get a lot of salt from the sea but this is just about anywhere else. Yes, you should have good archiving environment with right temperature but not everyone has that. And let's say that you accidentally forget that BD in a car for some days/nights. I can almost bet that you lost some of that data if not all.

I have (had... thrown them out) a lot of CDRs that aren't readable anymore and they are a myriads of brands like Maxell, BASF, Fuji et c. And lot's of friends experienced it to.

I am only laying out my experiences with CDRs which of course reflects my opinion of BD/similar disc media. Since BD has a thinner laser it would probably be even more sensitive to damages but probably also depends more on errorcorrection.

/Fredrik.

[Mark Grant]

Personally, at the weekend I was recovering some old emails from no-name CD-Rs I burnt in 1994, 1995 and 1996... no problem reading any of them.

Certainly I doubt that they're any less robust than tapes or P2 cards over long timescales. Heck, they'll probably be obsolete before they're unreadable in most cases.

[Kevin Shaw]

As a happy Sony FX1 owner I don't see the HVX200 being a competing product for general-purpose videography. Since the P2 memory is hopelessly expensive and will likely continue to be so for several years, the only realistic way to record more than a few minutes of HD video on the HVX200 will be to Firestore-like hard drives. And even then you're looking at a cost of roughly $20 per minute (!) of HD recording, compared to a few dollars per hour to record HDV. So with the HVX200 you have to make arrangements to copy your original data somewhere else to free up your expensive recording media, which requires both time and money. For some purposes this won't be a significant problem, but for others it will be a major deterrent. The HVX200 will not be a suitable choice for many videographers.

Then there's the question of what to do with your P2 footage once you've captured and edited it. The most promising distribution option for HD video starting next year will be blue-laser DVDs using either MPEG2 or MPEG4 compression. Depending on how this is implemented, the highest quality option on these discs could be MPEG2 at a bit rate of around 25-30 Mbps...wait a minute, that's basically HDV! Of course it's possible that the HVX200 will yield noticeably better results when transcoded to HDV than HDV source material itself, but the difference is likely to be mitigated somewhat by this conversion.

The obvious way for Sony to give the HVX200 a run for its money would be to release an HDV camera with a 1/2" or 2/3" sensor. Once they do that, spending $10K+ for an HVX200 setup (including memory) may seem like a poor choice for people used to working with big-chip cameras. The thing to understand here is that Sony's HDV solution works surprisingly well, and yields video which looks great to most viewers. For some people the HVX200 may be a better choice, but it's not going to have much impact on the spread of the HDV format.

[Eric James]

Fredrik,
I've got to just say, you really need to go do some more research. You are writing off of misinformation from articles you've read I take it. Sure crappy CD-R's don't last very long, Sure if you leave the discs in the sun (just as with ANY media format) they will be ruined......

I just disagree with some of the things your saying. Here's an example of what I mean:

"Scientists today agree that a lot of all of the digital information we are retrieving will be lost in the future."

Yes they agree that in the "future" it will be lost. Now for some reason you seem to want to think future is within 2 years? Why is that? IS that what 'they' agreed upon?

"Since BD has a thinner laser it would probably be even more sensitive to damages but probably also depends more on errorcorrection."

This is just completely wrong, and shows you do not have an understanding of the technology. BD has a higher wavelength UV laser. This has NOTHING to do with it's ability to withstand damages to the disk. In Fact BD has a thicker protection layer above the data so it will actually be much tougher than CD's or DVD's.

What I'm trying to say is.... If you do not take care of any media in any format it will be gone in 2-5 years. If you take care of CD's, DVD's, and BD's they will last 70 - 100 years OR MORE.

My 2 c,
Eric James

[John M Burkhart]

According to Sony's site, the "Professional Disc" media has an estimated shelf life of 50 years. Even if you take this as manufacturer's specs and 1/2 it, even 25 years is a pretty good shelf life. (I mean, 25 years ago 3/4" tape ruled).

And since it's just data recorded not a signal per se, it seems to me it would be incredibly easy to back up to the next big media format, rather than to dub it (from someone who had to supervise dubbing a library of 100,000 BetaSp tapes).

Also, living in the tropics as I do, you can actually watch the mold growing on your tapes. Not to mention that damn "dew" sensor going off on the camera constantly. I can't wait to get rid of tape, and for me the "Pro-disc" format is the only one that seems to replace tape fully.

Ok, one other cool thing about "Pro Disc", There's a 500MB sector on the disc reserved just for data. You can write, word and excel files, Avid or FCP project files, After Effects projects, whatever. Being able to archive or send all your media, project files, graphics, and audio all on the same disc would be really useful.

You can check out the brochure here:

http://bssc.sel.sony.com/Broadcastan...ures/v2223.pdf

[Douglas Spotted Eagle]

Originally Posted by John M Burkhart

Also, living in the tropics as I do, you can actually watch the mold growing on your tapes. Not to mention that damn "dew" sensor going off on the camera constantly. I can't wait to get rid of tape, and for me the "Pro-disc" format is the only one that seems to replace tape fully.

It's for this reason alone, some of the Combat Camera Groups in the marines are using XDCAM. Heck, if those guys can manage PD 170's, Z1's, and XDCAMs, that says a lot for the toughness of the cams, and in the case of the XDCAM, says a lot for the BD format.