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Friday, September 16, 2005

Tapeless: Are We There Yet? A Look At The HVX-200

 

I just grabbed this image from the RESFEST demo of the new Panasonic HVX-200 camcorder I just attended. This next generation memory-card based camera does look pretty impressive but like every new camera that gets thrown to the lions at these events there will always be the trial period of who's going to drop a few paychecks on it and use it first. My guess, not filmmakers. Not yet at least.

I'm not going to go through the laundry list of features, you can see them from the Panasonic site or just drop by HD For Indies for up to the second news on, well, everything. Let me just say this, from an editors point-of-view, this is great! No more tape! Just lock and load. Footage on the drive. No more tedious log and capture. Just capture. A couple of immediate observations to make note of.

Pro:

When shooting in extreme conditions like high heat you will not have to worry about mechanism lock up. There is none where a tape is involved if you go the P2 route.

You can preview and mark footage in the LCD monitor. Great for quick notes of good and bad takes.

Mic that is mounted can be functional because there is no tape noise to pick up. Is it a decent mic? That's questionable, camera mics are notoriously bad.

Con:

The cost of the HVX-200 is $6,000. Fine. The cost of the HVX-200 with 2 X 8GB P2 cards, $10,000. Now the kicker. From what I gathered, at this time getting your footage into a Mac might by problematic. According to the Panasonic rep who kind of glossed over this, it's a Tiger issue. The Panasonic card reader runs for about $2,500. Firestore available for hard drive storage via Firewire.

As of now, I'm not finding a lot of HVX-200<-->FCP workflow information, Apple, what's up?

An 8 GB card will hold only 8 minutes of DVCPRO HD material. Why else would you be using this camera but to shoot HD? The 8 GB cards go for about $1,800 now and will drop. Great for ENG but filmmaking?

Overall, a solid looking camera but we'll see after the fourth quarter if the R&D will kick in to make this a viable option. There is no doubt that we are going tapeless in the future. These are the growing pains and as usual the pain starts in the wallet.

posted by William at 3:10 PM | permalink

2 Comments:

Anonymous Anonymous said...

I dunno. If it comes out soon enough (late Nov) then we might be using it for B and C cameras on the documentary we are shooting on Varicam. With an assistant on set to constantly download the footage from the cards so that we don't have to get more than the two provided.

2:37 AM  
Blogger William said...

Shane,

Approach with caution. The rep was saying that as of yesterday the camera was "85% baked". There will always be workarounds like what your are doing with an assistant. I do believe it will sell and if it does sell prices will drop. Don't expect larger cards to come out quickly unless it does. If Panasonic doesn't move enough HVX-200 units in the upcoming quarter into 2006 the manufacturing of higher capacity cards will be slow. In the end I do think it will be a very solid piece of equipment. It's a natural evolution in the video industry.

6:14 AM  

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