Posted by Toby on 09/23/06 17:27

<mv@movingvision.co.uk> wrote in message
news:Ij0rjTKuEUFFFwEZ@movingvision.demon.co.uk...
> In message <45152f11$0$37667$bb4e3ad8@newscene.com>, Toby
> <kymarto123@ybb.ne.jpp> writes
>>
>>>>
>>>> Plus, strangely, they don't seem to be very Panasonic-friendly here.
>>>> You
>>>> find a lot, I mean a damn' lot stuff from Sony, you can find some Canon
>>>> cams too such as the XL2 (not the HD ones though). But Panasonic cams
>>>> are
>>>> difficult to find. Unless you want to buy entry-level cams like NV-GS
>>>> series, I just know one shop that sells the AG DVX100B...
>>>
>>> Simpletons who read Panasonic "influenced" websites are the only ones
>>> that
>>> buy that turkey.
>>>
>>> The Sony A1E shoots rings round the HVX200 for a 1/3 of the price.
>>>
>>> If you are renting then take a look at XDCAM HD from Sony.
>>
>>XDCam has major problems. CBS bought a whole bunch and have been tearing
>>their hair out over the miserable quality of the software, among many
>>other
>>issues. I would stay far away from XDCam for at least another year or two.
>>If you are renting think about the Panasonic Varicam. I've shot a bunch of
>>footage on it for some glossy docos and it looks excellent.
>>
>>Toby
>>
>>
>
> I think I'm getting the picture now. Toby, are you or are you not a person
> with some sort of vested Internet in Panasonic? I guess if you are a
> person who shoots Varicam for "glossy docos" it would suggest you have
> professional provenance, however your remarks about broadcasters being
> concerned with HDV drop out on another thread did raise an eyebrow. I
> won't argue as to whether or not CBS have had problems with XDCAM software
> because it's yet another non secitur. Other people including BBC and major
> independent producers are getting on very well with XDCAM. Like HDV and
> other 'new' formats, there are steep learning and appropriate equipment
> acquisition curves to be completed. Clearly CBS, like certain other over
> large organisations who mistakenly take the erroneous assertions of their
> in-hose techies to be gospel, should not take their own shortcomings for a
> generality.
> --
> John Lubran
>
> Bullshit baffles brains

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

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