Re: Could there be a Marketing/Sales Edge in Using the Panasonic DVX-100?

With lots of respect to Leo and a serious case o'lust for one of his cameras – I think that the 24 P advantage in DV is negligible unless you’re planning to go directly to film with your product. Shooting 24p and keeping the entire postproduction chain in video using gear that is running at 29.97 fps with 3:2 pulldown introduced compensate for the frame rate difference will not improve the look of your DV footage. In fact, many post production tricks will be completely out of reach and there will be frames that you just won’t be able to cut cleanly together. When I used to shoot TV commercials on 35mm film most of the time we ran the cameras at 29.97 fps. In fact every commercial that I ever shot for J Walter Thompson (very big Add agency) and McCann Erickson (one of, if not the biggest) was shot at 29.97 so that the folks in post wouldn’t have to deal with 3:2 pull down motion artifacts. I was on the set of a Chevy truck commercial last week and they were shooting in 35 with a crew of about 60, (wind machines, bluescreen covering an entire intersection, a 12 story crane flying a 100’ X 200’ butterfly to control the light --- in other words, not a small budget shoot) and they were shooting 29.97 FPS, which, in effect, produces 30P footage. With all of the special effects they were going to do on this project it would have been nuts to add the 3:2 pulldown nightmare to the project.

I think Leo’s marketing advantage is more HD and variable frame rates than 24P. If you really want to push 24P and higher quality then I’d shoot with a native 16X9 Pal camera, do all of your post in PAL and then convert to NTSC for final output. You’ll end up with footage that has the equivalent of 1024 X 576 square pixel frame compared with an 864 X 480 frame for NTSC 16X9. That’s much closer to Leo’s 1280 X 720 resolution than you’d get with NTSC DV, not native 16X9 from the little Panasonic DVX-100.

I will one thing in defense of the DVX-100 though. I saw a side by side comparison with Sony’s PD 150 and it was a much, not a little, better camera as far as apparent resolution and dynamic color range. I didn’t like the 24P look at all, but then I never liked that look. If you compared the DVX-100 to the Iki HL-DV7AW there it fell far short of producing AMAZING pictures. It should have – because you can not really compare a 2/3 inch camera to a 1/3 inch camera when there’s about a $18,000 dollar difference in price. You’d have a lot more competitive advantage with a 2/3 inch camera (even a betacam) than you would matching a DVX-100 with an XL1 or a PD . . .