Re: 4 (6) cam comparison

David,

My, my, looks like someone is looking to purchase a new Sony HD XDCAM camcorder. Good for you, but don't make the mistake of assuming that this will be the next BetaSP. If there's one thing that I'm pretty positive about, it's that we don't know what will come out in the wash over the next few years, and that I'm gonna still get a lot of use out of my BetaSP kit. (g)

[David Battistella] "How do you handle out of town clients who might be getting on an aircraft at the end of a shooting day?"

Not easily, that's for sure. It can be done, but getting that sort of client to accept a commodity hard drive, rather than a tape would be a steep uphill battle, that might not be winnable.

[David Battistella] "What will you do with your P2 cards when removable media disk based cameras (ieHD XDCAM) become the widespread standard?"

What standard and for how long? Anyone in their right mind knows that solid state memory with no moving parts is the future of on-location media production. It may not, probably won't be, P2, as the solid state memory capability grows in capacity and shrinks in price, but any way you look at it, it's simply a matter of when and how much the technology advances, and we're talkin' a few years, not decades.

[David Battistella] "It's [P2] on it's last legs so they pushed it out to their consumer customers to squeeze the last bit of money out of it. P2 is the new M2 NOT the new Betacam."

P2 as a proprietary technology is probably a new M2, but HD XDCAM is even more so. The IT commodity technology cat is out of the bag and spitting on all proprietary technology that attempts to replace VTRs with further proprietary devices with hundreds of percent markups, whether its P2 or HD XDCAM quasi VTRs or other I/O devices.

My guess is that we have yet to see the "new Betacam," if we ever do, and that if and when we do, It'll evolve into something that we can purchase at the local drug store like a phone card, along with our drugs. (g)

Ron Shook

PS. Had enough of dueling codecs? See if we don't hear plenty of talk about the open source MJPEG2000 codec at NAB this year, along with full MXF implementation by both our production and post-production tools.