Re: Freelancer work flow as an owner/operator of a HVX.

Chris,

This is a great question and a frequent one. I think that P2 has been designed as a complete workflow for news organizations. This is a fantastic place for P2 because it is fast. It significantly lowers tape costs because these organisations can save and back up files to a server or tape on a daily basis.

When a station is set up with P2 it is a fantastic. Fast, relieable and the one time high costs of the cards will pay for themselves many times over. It's great for these integrated systems because you can give the P2 cards to the reporters and then they can go from shoot to shoot with different camera operators and then just bring the cards back to the edit station, load and GO! Very well thought out.

In EFP production the workflow is going to have to be a bit different. The big benefit to the HVX is that it records HD formats to the P2 and it does the same variable frame rates the Varicam does. IMHO I think that people will lean to this camera over the Varicam now because up to this point those are the two huge beniftis to shooting varicam.Pundits will say that the Varicam chips are bigger etc, but hey, the Varicam compresses everything down to the same codec. That is a killer. You might say garbage in Garbage out, but at the end of the day you are dealing with the same compression rates with the HVX and the Varicam. If I was a recent Varicam owner, this would upset me because I think that the best picture you could now get out of a Varicam is in direct to disk mode, which move it out of the field and into the studio.

Sorry to get sidetracked.

The workflow for an HVX owner operator is different now. Anyone who has outof town clients know that they want to leave town with some physical media in their hands. Try telling ABC news to buy a firestore or that you will send them the tapes tomorrow. It does not really wash. The other thing is this. You ca't just buy one firestore because what if you ship it and you have a shoot the next day?

This is where the "you borrow from Peter to pay Paul arguement comes in." Sure. If most places migrated to P2 then it would be a no brainer, production companies, news organizations, agencies would all send their people out with P2 cards, but that is not the case. There is still a ton of Betacam floating around. What is great about P2 is that every one of these organizations have a PC or mac around.

This problem is easily solved with "PRICEPOINT". If Panasonic were to prictice the good solid Japanese marketing tactic of "price dumping" then they could actually make a move in this market. This was done very successfully with LCD flat panels and Nintendo games. Introduce them at a huge loss, but corner the market and fix prices in the subsequent years. (Ron Lindeboom could further explain this I am sure :) ) If they were to introduce P2 at a price point of 150.00 per 4gig card, I do not think people would bat an eylash at HDV