Freelancer work flow as an owner/operator of a HVX.
by PEYIII
on
Apr 6, 2006 at 6:45:48 pm
This topic came up in late Dec. 2005 and unfortunately the discussion got a little off the topic and after reading the threads it really didn't help. I'm looking into buying a camera and thinking about the HVX. However, I don't know if the idea of shooting to a P2 card and transferring the media to the card reader or a hard drive will "fly" or be easily accepted with clients. How are other freelancers working this out? What's your work flow as far as delivery of raw footage to your clients?
Re: Freelancer work flow as an owner/operator of a HVX. by Noah Kadner on Apr 6, 2006 at 8:30:14 pm
Providing the footage to the client on a portable hard drive is pretty much the best way to go if you want to work as a freelancer at this point. Giving them the "raw" P2 cards is not realistic financially. You could always run out a tape using a 1200A deck but that doesn't make much sense either as they would then need to recapture that back to hard drive anyway in order to edit. It's a new workflow sure but I think most clients see the huge benefits of great looking footage and material that's ready to edit right away.
Re: Freelancer work flow as an owner/operator of a HVX. by Chris Baldwin on Apr 6, 2006 at 10:19:31 pm
granted there are only certain clients that will bite on this, but I have had luck convincing a few clients who do their own post production, to purchase the P2 and/or external P2 Hard Drive. Just like them bringing their own tape stock and not paying for a marked up tape. Now again granted this agreement was also reached as a forward looking investment on their part and based on using the HPC2000 not the HVX200. If they are going to spend between $2000 to $7500 on P2 then they probably have the budget to just but the HVX200 themselves. Nevertheless I think for local clients with their own post production facilities, I think its not unreasonable to have the conversation with them to investigate their willingness to purchase their own aquizition media. For out of towners, I'm back to the drawing board of creating Hard Drive Dups but more than likely this means giving them the media after an overnight transfer. It'd be wonderful for my clients across the country if there was a super fast way of transferring them the 100 or so gigs for a full day's shoot. I think this might be a bit off topic though as it is to my knowledge not fiscally reasonable and probably not fast enough to be logistically reasonable.
Chris Baldwin
Shoulder High Productions
Media of the World; For the World!
http://www.shoulderhigh.com
newsletters@shoulderhigh.com
Re: Freelancer work flow as an owner/operator of a HVX. by Steve Freebairn on Apr 7, 2006 at 2:26:35 pm
in response to sending the 100gb to a client across the country, I remembered seeing a device a while back that they are marketing toward Digital theatres, that uses a device on one end of the connection (either the sending or the receiving end, but I think it is mainly for the sending end) and it uses a high speed connection to transfer terrabytes of information overnight to clients around the world. It verifies data after it is transferred and used some special techonologies to use as much bandwidth on the net as it could find. It was very impressive, but I haven't been able to find out where I saw it. You might look into file transfers on google and then look for hardware options. The box also let your client log on from anywhere in the world and start downloading. Although, it seems like if they only had DSL, that they'd be downloading for days.
Re: Freelancer work flow as an owner/operator of a HVX. by Leonard Levy on Apr 7, 2006 at 3:34:13 am
So far at this point I find it a very hard sell. But time will tell.
People need to fget used to the workflow.
I haven't shot a single job in HD yet - all miniDV.
Re: Freelancer work flow as an owner/operator of a HVX. by Mike Schrengohst on Apr 7, 2006 at 1:28:55 pm
Are you just shooting and handing over the tapes??
All of my shoots have been HD. Of course I am finishing
and delivering DVD's as the final product. Plus I have
clients who want to run HD files from a Buffalo player.
The difference in quality from DV to HD is night & day.
Re: Freelancer work flow as an owner/operator of a HVX. by PEYIII on Apr 7, 2006 at 3:27:54 pm
So it sounds like the best options are to:
1: discuss and try to sell the P2 technology and workflow to clients and try to get them to purchase a card reader or store drive to keep at their facility
2: I would purchase a couple of hard drives that I could transfer media to and rent / loan to the client
3: purchase more than one store drive for clients to rent
Another question, how many people (agencies and such) are aware of this "new" technology. Most of us who are shooters/editors/producers and general techies are aware of this technology and are welcoming it with open arms. How hard of a sell has it been for those of you who are using it?
Re: Freelancer work flow as an owner/operator of a HVX. by Mike Schrengohst on Apr 7, 2006 at 5:32:25 pm
Yesterday I shot a greenscreen insert for a clients website.
They know After Effects and Flash.
The fact that I could immediately render them
a QuickTime file they could use was like magic.
No tape to digitize and I did it right after the
shoot will I was striking. Right before I left
they were keying it in and then said "Mike do you
have some cool video backgrounds??" It never ends......
Re: Freelancer work flow as an owner/operator of a HVX. by todd mcmullen on Apr 8, 2006 at 12:50:21 am
I am currently shooting a lifetime television movie in Shreveport, LA. We are using the HVX as a 4th camera along side sony cinealta's from panavision.
The post house is in Burbank. Here is our workflow.
Shoot 1080i 24p onto 2-8gig and 1 4gig card.
Transfer footage to lacie fw 800 hd.
Copy days footage to g-tech 100 gig mini HD, or, a 20 gig firewire ipod, or dvd's. ( it all depends on amount of days footage)
Send days footage with hd cam tapes and sound to editorial in Burbank.(overnight)
Editorial sends back HD for another days footage.
Works just like sending film to the lab.
Todd McMullen
Flip Flop Films
Austin
Cinematography Forum Leader
Re: Freelancer work flow as an owner/operator of a HVX. by PEYIII on Apr 8, 2006 at 3:08:36 am
Todd,
This workflow makes sense to me and the extra drives or DVD's would not be that expensive of a investment. Did the producers ask for the HVX or did you have to sell it to them.
Re: Freelancer work flow as an owner/operator of a HVX. by todd mcmullen on Apr 8, 2006 at 6:37:51 pm
The producers wanted a mini dv camera for surveilance video shots. They were going to make them Black and white. But when the director found out the hvx does 1080 as well, he wanted it for shooting unscripted, edgy, scenes. so we have been shooting whole scenes with camera and the stuff looks great. almost too good. I setup a wide shot with the sony f900 and one with the hvx and it was hard to tell the difference.
Todd McMullen
Flip Flop Films
Austin
Cinematography Forum Leader
Re: Freelancer work flow as an owner/operator of a HVX. by Drew Harty on Apr 8, 2006 at 6:22:01 pm
Anybody working with Iomega Rev for archiving or getting footage to clients? The Rev has 35 gig removable media that Iomega says is archival, and, if my math was right, takes about 25 minutes to write a full disc.
Re: Freelancer work flow as an owner/operator of a HVX. by JeremyG on Apr 9, 2006 at 4:29:11 am
I was just talking about this with a D.P. friend of mine. he is obsessed with digitizing straight into FCP and I'm not. I told him that it might be sensible for some clients and shooting conditions, but certainly far from all. We hashed out a workflow that involves p2 cards, a p2 store, a cheap SATA enclosure, cheap SATA drives, and a cheap SATA cardbus controller. The workflow goes like this, shoot on P2, transfer to P2 store. At lunch or at the end of the day or whenever is most convenient, transfer the contents of the P2 store to the cheap SATA 2 disk RAID that is striped RAID 1. This will essentially write two copies of the p2 files to two drives at the same time. Your client on the other end has to have a cheap enclosure and SATA card or cardbus adaptor. You can then give them either both of the drives, or you give them one drive and you keep one. The drive then becomes the master and you keep the backup. If you try and insert just one drive, your computer will say that an incomplete RAID is present, but all of the data will still be there. At that point your client could choose to rebuild the array (making a new copy) or they can start to enter the footage into their NLE which then copies the material again. It is then their job to backup from their. If the poop hits the fan, then you have a backup from the original two drives. This is untested, unproven, but it's what we are working on. So far so good and further testing is happening everyday.
Re: Freelancer work flow as an owner/operator of a HVX. by Ron Shook on Apr 9, 2006 at 6:01:14 pm
Jeremy,
[JeremyG]"At lunch or at the end of the day or whenever is most convenient, transfer the contents of the P2 store to the cheap SATA 2 disk RAID that is striped RAID 1. This will essentially write two copies of the p2 files to two drives at the same time."
This is something I've been thinking of myself. I'm pretty sure it would work. A friend of mine had an XP computer go down with a raid 1 Sata in it. He pulled one of the drives out and put it in another computer and found that he could access the drive just fine. This is the only kind of redundant hard drive backup that some clients are gonna accept, where you give them one and hold on to the other until the client has done whatever backup they will do. It's a little more expensive than tape initially but can be used over and over once the workflow is established to everyone's satisfaction.
Re: Freelancer work flow as an owner/operator of a HVX. by JeremyG on Apr 9, 2006 at 11:35:27 pm
Yeah, i know it works as I tried it with two dissimilar firewire drives just to test the theory. I have a powerbook SATA rig coming soon as soon as supplies arrive to the dealer. And as far as it costing more than tape, you can get 300 Gig SATA drives for just over $100 at places like NewEgg. 300 gigs will get ya roughly 12.5 hours of 720p24 Native material (if my math is correct). So for just over $200 you can have 12.5 hours of material to your client and a back up sitting on your shelf. That can't be much more than tape. Hell, a box of tape for our SDX900 (dv50) camera runs about 100-120 bucks or so and that's only 5.5 hours maximum record time. If you apply these prices to DVCPRO HD tape, it's gotta be cheaper. Clients will most definitely be attracted to that. The biggest part of this whole situation is convincing them that this is an okay way to do it. Also, what happens if your client is editing on a PC and your drives are formatted for a mac? Lots of wrinkles to be ironed out.
Re: Freelancer work flow as an owner/operator of a HVX. by Mike Schrengohst on Apr 10, 2006 at 4:12:27 am
If they are PC and you are MAC...
Most production people I know are
MAC & PC. I FAT format drives for
PC people. I copy from my G-raid
to the FAT formatted drive. I also
make a DVD-R back-up from each
P2 card. A lot faster than making
a bunch of BetaSP dubs....
Re: Freelancer work flow as an owner/operator of a HVX. by Mike Schrengohst on Apr 10, 2006 at 4:14:07 am
Forgot to add,
that way the PC folks can copy the info they
need to there system. I would not edit from
the FAT formatted drives. These are for
transfer and back-up only.
