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

	Re: Freelancer work flow as an owner/operator of a HVX. by Noah Kadner on Dec 23, 2005 at 6:39:51 pm I'd say throw in an inexpensive FW drive as part of the service quote- treat it like media. Definitely do not want to give over your P2 cards to the client as they are too valuable for that. Naoh Respond to this post   •   Return to posts index

	Re: Freelancer work flow as an owner/operator of a HVX. by David Battistella on Dec 23, 2005 at 6:46:06 pm 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 Respond to this post   •   Return to posts index

	Re: Freelancer work flow as an owner/operator of a HVX. by David Battistella on Dec 24, 2005 at 4:11:50 am Jiri and Donatello, I know that the Varicam is about 10 times the cost of the HVX. The glass is better. The chips are bigger. I agree totally. The varicam does not record a better codec than the HVX. Sure the from end is better, but it does not record a better codec? ON shooting variable speed. Think like a producer for a minute. "hey I can get beautiful slomo images in HD out of that little camera, Great! I'm only going to have two or three shots like that....Blah, blah, blah." You see where I am going. This camera release is going to bring all of the best features the Varicam has to offer to the masses. Will producers shell out the Varicam rates when the HVX will "do, roughly but not exactly the same thing" This is the slippery slope that Panasonic has gone on with this release. I can only hope that the HVX draws more attention to the Varicam (which I happen to think is a great camera) but I would hate to see it go the other way. Also, If P2 is so fantastic why did they not implement it into the "H" release of the Varicam. This is false market segmentation. Does Panasonic think that people will believe that the Varicam Respond to this post   •   Return to posts index

	Re: Freelancer work flow as an owner/operator of a HVX. by David Battistella on Dec 24, 2005 at 3:09:37 pm Donatello "the codec may be the same BUT 1/3" CCD's just don't give you teh same image as 2/3 " CCD's ... they are paying for quality... " But the HVX can offer them 1080 images albeit from a 1/3" chip? So would you want Varicam slomo at 1080 instea of 720. It's all realative. An example. If you read the American cinematographer article about collateral you will see that they started out using the Viper system to record, but as they got into production they started to put more and more shots on tape. Now I am sure there was alot of technical debate with Viper over HDCAM,, yada yada yada. But in the end the production shot very littel viper and much much much more tape. So those producers and film makers that wanted viper, sacrificed the quality for speed and ease of use ehich ultimately were the important factors to telling their story. Here is a real world Hollywood motion Picture Scenario: Pay close attention tot he progression in these paragraphs as it goes from pre-production nervousness to what actually happened the first day of the shoot. Quoted from the August 2004 issue: Respond to this post   •   Return to posts index

	Re: Freelancer work flow as an owner/operator of a HVX. by David Battistella on Dec 24, 2005 at 3:10:22 pm Here is the link if you want to read the whole article, It's a good one. http://www.theasc.com/magazine/aug04/collateral/index.html David Merry Christmas Respond to this post   •   Return to posts index

	Re: Freelancer work flow as an owner/operator of a HVX. by David Battistella on Dec 26, 2005 at 5:18:12 pm Thanks Toki, Could you see the F900 stuff vs the viper stuff in the final film? It seems like they still managed a very decent look to the whole film and a seemless one at that. I guess I was trying to say that if you mix the HVX and the Varicam for a film the big difference will be if you use the Ziess Primes and that will be the way to make the Varicam look far superior to the HVX. David Merry Christmas Respond to this post   •   Return to posts index

	Re: Freelancer work flow as an owner/operator of a HVX. by David Battistella on Dec 28, 2005 at 2:53:49 pm Toki, No arguement from me on D0F. there is no way that you'll get similar DoF with the HVX, but with carefull planning and lighting I think it will be possible to get very acceptable results with the HVX. It seems that if they went to this extent to match the 900 that it must be a pretty important component to their workflow. And it was so important that it was nessesary to degrade the quality of the image from the better camera's so that they would have the freedom to use the tools they wanted to use. That is smart film making. They took all of the tools they wanted to use and made them work together to make the film. It's great that they had so many options and so many choices to make. Going back to my orginal point. It will be interesting to see if people go with a Varicam and an HVX or maybe just two HVX's or Two Varicams. All of this depends, to a certain degree on budget of course, but I might go for the camera that records 1080 and then work take a lot of care with making that 1080 image look as good as it can with the tools and budget I have to work with. David Merry Christmas Respond to this post   •   Return to posts index