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Posted by mv on 09/25/06 18:00
>
>No John, I don't have any vested interest in Panasonic. MII was a disaster;
>I supported Sony all the way in those days. I was not a great fan of SX, but
>it did have its nice points. When my company went DVCPro 8 years ago I
>cringed, but I've been reasonably happy with the format. I reason I've shot
>about 2000 hours with very few problems--and very few dropouts--although I
>was seeing quite a number on some tapes we shot in Kinshasa recently (a very
>inhospitable environment). I also think Digibeta is great, although the
>tapes are too big...
>
>As I said, CBS Tokyo is finding their XDCams a disaster. There are nice
>tings about them for sure, but they are huge power hogs and getting data off
>the disk with their inadequate software I am told is maddening. Going to
>non-linear is a big pain as well, as importing the files is only marginally
>faster than 1:1, so you have to use proxies. If you're interested I'll talk
>to them and get a list of bitches. There are definite teething problems.
>BTW, do you have a vested interest in Sony?
>
>I think that Panasonic's decision to go flash memory with P2 was much
>smarter for the long-run, although they have also dropped the ball with
>their method of dumping the files to disk. But you can plugs those cards
>into a reader, or hotplug the disks with dumped data and you are ready to
>edit at full resolution immediately; and they are truly random read and
>write, as opposed to Sony's discs which are sequential write and thus files
>can't be erased. And the P2 cams are usable in rough locations where head
>bounce kills the Sonys, even with their 16 second buffers. When the card
>prices come down a little bit more and they get up to their projected 64 and
>128 gig cards--5 slots hot-swappable--it's going to be hard to beat that.
>
>I think that Sony Professional has dropped the ball--my NBC colleague thinks
>the same. Their consumer stuff is great, though, I find the little Sony Z1 a
>great camera, except for a few points--much better than the Panasonic
>offerings unless you need real 3223 24p for film transfers, but XD? No,
>sorry, not my cup of tea.
>
>I did like the Varicam, we got beautiful footage from it, and it has some
>useful features--including the ability to shoot 25fps for PAL conversions
>and other nice motion effects--not like Sony pandering to the amateur market
>with assignable buttons on the handle and intervalometers...
>
>Sony may get their software act together, although s/w seems to be one of
>their major weaknesses, and perhaps they'll pull XD out of the fire, but
>with HDDs going for $1 a gig there is no advantage to storing data on
>writeable plastic disks, especially since they can't be selectively erased.
>So I think that XD will ultimately prove to have been a mistake, and I wager
>we'll soon be seeing Sony recording to silicon or directly to HDDs.
>
>You missed the earlier thread, apparently, with PTravel, in which we were
>discussing the rate of visible dropouts on DV. Everyone agrees that life is
>orders of magnitude better now than in analog days, but the discussion
>centered around whether DV copying could truly be considered lossless, as is
>generally claimed. A number of us argued that while near perfect, DV copying
>was still going to be subject to data corruption from mechanical exigencies
>(tape and/or transport problems) that even the sophisticated error
>correction algorithms in use would not be able to compensate for, and so the
>marketing claims of "perfect copies" had to be taken with a grain of salt.
>In fact a number of manufacturers now claim "near lossless", which is more
>honest.
>
>I thought it was interesting that IBE (International Broadcast Engineer),
>"The Industry Standard" they claim, writes about industry concern with
>dropouts from digital tape (although as others pointed out, they refer
>specifically to Mpeg2-encoded material, in which dropouts can be much more
>egregious because of the interframe compression). My point is that while
>extremely rare, dropouts do occur with DV, and apparently often enough that
>they are a topic of concern among broadcast engineers. Sorry if you didn't
>understand the context of the post.
>
>I'm not a Luddite, I love digital. But I'm interested; why would my post
>about dropouts in DV make you think I have a vested interest in Panasonic?
>DVCPro is as digital as XD, except that it uses tape instead of discs. If
>you want to claim that XD is superior because of random-read, then P2 must
>be a step better because it is random-read and random-write.
>
>Me, I'm waiting for the HDD cameras to go pro, although flash is probably
>better for rough rides.
>
>Toby
>
>
Thanks for providing a very substantial missive Toby. Clearly you are
very much a professional operator. I'm also a working multitasking
producer and don't have the time to follow on with a depth and breadth
of discussion that your post deserves. however I would say that much of
the drop out and glitch presented on DV and HDV material is down to poor
equipment management, or cack handedness, as I've said before. I'm able
to relate entirely objectively to these issues because in all honesty I
have about as much hands on experience with these formats as anyone. HDV
glitches, where they occur are magnified due to the long GOP Frame. A
lot of folks are unaware of the HDV monitoring drop outs that are indeed
only monitoring issues and not recorded to tape. Compared with Beta SP
for example these format can almost be regarded as drop out free !
My company has used Z1's in some pretty harsh environments without
reliability problems. One of our intrepid cameraman down in the South
Atlantic and Antarctica brought back some eighty hours of HDV shot on an
early FX1. That camera did finally succumb after a soaking in salt water
but still managed to record well enough afterwards. (Monitors packed in
but not quite to the extent that they were totally useless). From my so
far more limited experience with the JVC 101 with standard issue Fujinon
lens, I have found it to have no better pictures than the Z1. The Z1 is
better at motion handling too despite the many astonishing assertions to
the contrary. Adding 35mm lenses to the JVC via the adapter option
starts to make comparisons somewhat moot since the cost differentials
are increased exponentially. Perhaps the HD hardened Carl Ziess lens
fixed to the front of the Z1 is not as good as other lenses that cost
more, and often many times more, than the whole Z1 itself, but really
it's not so poor that anyone but squinty eyed camera nerds notice. The
other consideration is 1080i versus 720p. Once one is able to
differentiate the arguments expressed and published by the supporters of
either camp that are not tainted by self interest and misleading
engineering assertions, especially the ones that bring the progressive
scan monitoring issue into the equation, or merely consider the current
limitations of transmission bandwidths (720p uses less of it) one might
consider that 1080i can be de-interlaced very successfully whereas 720p
can not be converted to match 1080i.
One thing I'm not arguing with though is that these compact HDV's, even
the Canon HDV with it's arguably higher performance, can not match
HDCAM, Varicam or DVC PRO HD, even though they are being seamlessly cut
with these formats everyday. It will be interesting to see how the HDV
version of the DSR 450 performs. We've yet to see HDV behind a 2/3rd"
chip set and proper lens.
--
john
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