In a very large North American launch, Panasonic premiered the AG-HVX200 to the public via full page ads in newspapers including the Los Angeles Times, New York Times, and the Wall Street Journal. At the DV Expo in Los Angeles, Panasonic contracted with filmmakers to take the VariCam sibling HVX200 through it’s paces, with footage of a college basketball game, Hollywood street scene, a frame rate exploration of a backlit martial artist, and a green screen music video.
Barry Green’s footage looked fantastic. He shot multiple frame rates at 720p and also some 1080p capture. The Panasonic booth had a 17 inch LCD display as the presentation monitor, and the footage was 80% of the VariCam. Michael Caporale showed an experimental music video shot on a green screen. The original pre-composited material looked sharp, excellent contrast, and ready for green screen removal. Caporale also shot run and gun footage of a Hollywood movie premiere, which looked bright, color accurate, and competent.
Panasonic promised sometime in the future these shots should be available on a DVD. I hope that similar to the VCR-FireWire-NLE launch some two years ago, an editing software vendor release raw DVCPRO HD from the camera, so anyone can test their NLE of choice with actual image captures.
Panasonic also announced the availability of the AG-HVX200 targeted for 29 December 2005. DV Expo featured a near 2 hour walkthrough by Jan Crittenden Livingston, the product manager for the AG-HVX200, on the design and features of this revolutionary camcorder. Included here are keypoint slides from the presentation.
In the history of computation, electrical power consumption has been on the bottom of the stack in the marketing campaign of Intel, AMD, IBM, and other semiconductor chip fabricators. We’ve all heard about the MHz and GHz wars between Pentium, Athlon, PowerPC, Itanium, and Opteron computer processors. Over the last decade the performance of microprocessors has gone up many fold, usually exceeding Moore’s Law, and likewise following Rock’s Law.
The marketplace of ideas contracted as processor companies folded, or merged. Today we have three major high performance high volume microprocessor manufacturers, and a new era of computing at each. IBM uses the Power Architecture, Intel has the Xeon line, and AMD has the Opteron line of 64-bit (sometimes called x64) dual-core chips. Several factors facilitated the move to multi-core, but the greatest achievement was the move from 130 nm production to the 90 nm process.
Working in such a small production environment allows multiple processors on a single die, which essentially permits nearly double the performance on a dual processor configuration. In the future expect more than two cores on a die, but at the electrical power expense of a single core. In 2006, chip vendors hope to move to 65 nm processes, that will allow even more cores onto the same space as the older 130 and 90 nm designs.
This describes the break from the GHz run-up, instead of a single 10 GHz chip, produce quad-core 2.5 GHz chips with equal or better performance, and at at least a quarter of the electrical requirements. Today, Xeon processors take 110 W per core, Opteron 90 W per core, and PowerPC 55 W per core. A new metric is being developed called performance per watt, and multiple system integrators are working on the problem with next generation chips.
Sun Microsystems is first out with a low power dual-core dual-processor system, the 1U Sun Fire X4100 Server, which also reduces power consumption by using SAS 2.5 inch hard drives. Anticipate other vendors like Dell, IBM, and even Apple Computer to explore energy efficient designs to reduce electrical consumption from carbon combustion fuel generating stations.
In the coming months Apple will most likely release a dual-core Xserve G5, along with a future Intel based Xserve. Apple currenty ships a dual-core Power Mac G5 Dual workstation and soon to release the quad-core Power Mac G5 Quad.
At the Egyptian Theatre on Friday September 30 2005, Jan Crittenden Livingston, Product Line Business Manager for the Panasonic AG-HVX200 camcorder thrilled a crowd of over 100 Los Angeles producers, directors, and high definition (HD) enthusiasts with the latest information on the upcoming DVCPRO HD product. Every aspect of the history and design methodology of this next revolution in affordable HD image acquisition became clear in the 1.5 hour lecture and hands on walkthrough of the HVX200 device.
This camcorder has extensive coverage from around the blogosphere, including HVX User, P2 Info Net, and Creative Cow P2 forum. The most interesting tidbits from the discussion and presentation in no particular order:
Panasonic showed coyness in revealing the HXV200 imaging block specifications, but rather had actual test footage from a prototype camcorder, and asked the audience to judge the final results, and not compare pixel count or CCD size. In the test footage at the booth, and some projected engineering style capture of a luscious tabletop scene of spinning desk accessories, textures, and reflective materials the image held it own. One audience member quipped that we did not actually see raw capture off the P2 card, but due to logistical reasons, the source material was transferred via analog component to an AJ-HD1200A VCR and played back on a DVCPRO HD tape, preserving the DVCPRO HD codec output.
For four days the prototype HVX200 played back a scene on P2 from the IBC 2005 Amsterdam show, with street cars during a night and daylight shot, and on the playback display, the images looked stunning with absolute clarity and image fidelity, even into the shadows. This also demonstrated the robustness of the P2 media, as hundreds, if not thousands of eager camera operators touched, prodded and cajoled the camcorder all weekend long. I left on the final day and the media and camera continued to play back the Amsterdam scene without tape wear or hesitation. The DVCPRO HD codec, based on the compression technology of DV, but at a color sampling of 4:2:2 instead of DV 4:1:1 is one step closer to the highest quality HD-D5, but at a more affordable price point. Panasonic has already announced in some future camcorder a full D5 unit, most like two years away. Currently, a HD-D5 VCR lists at $99,000 as compared to the $5995 list price for the AG-HVX200 camcorder. Another useful point during recording, using the P2 media, the camcorder will be able to remove redundant frames, so a 24p recording session will contain only the necessary information, rather than the limitation of a linear tape based system that maintained a constant tape velocity and needed to always record 60p, regardless of the variable frame rate setting. The output from the firewire interface follows this paradigm, always receiving the full 60p information stream.
This camcorder may be the best product designed for the aspiring filmmaker and documentarian. Though the camcorder is chubby and larger than DV camcorders, the weight is low and controls are well placed, and it offers specifications unavailable in any other under $10,000 HD camcorder. This camera will have four channels of uncompress audio at 16 bit 48 kHz sampling, as compared to the paltry 2 channel MPEG-1 Audio Layer II on HDV camcorder. For a small budget film, or documentary sound is over 50% of the experience, and requires perhaps more care and handling than the picture. Previously, one would need to chain a DAT or MiniDisc recorder to the camera for high sound quality, but the Panasonic rig takes care of that necessity.
Now, the faithful must wait a few more weeks. Panasonic expects to receive shipping AG-HVX200 camcorders by the end of November 2005, but I suspect that it will premiere at the Tokyo Inter BEE 2005 show in mid November, and become more widely available by early 2006.
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At NAB 2005, producers and directors of photographers wondered what would become of the video cassette recorder (VCR), as solid state flash memory devices usurp the legacy tape based formats like DigiBetacam, DV, HDV, and DVCPRO 50. Sony has chosen a proprietary XDCAM format, based on a magneto optical disk, while Panasonic is going to a SD format PCMCIA card called P2.
As a VCR replacement one would have to consider these factors:
Speed must be near real time (one hour video transfered in around an hour or less)
Media should be around the same form factor as a video tape
VCR Information Technology Replacement (4 hour project, 250 GB)
Storage Media
Backup Time (hr)
Media Count
Drive & Media Cost*
Media Only Cost*
LTO 1
4.34
2
$1783
$58
LTO 2
3.47
1
$1780
$30
LTO 3
1.02
1
$5124
$109
VXA 1
24.27
8
$880
$413
VXA 2
11.57
3
$1147
$225
AIT 1
23.70
10
$1140
$470
AIT 2
11.85
5
$1266
$270
AIT 3
5.93
2
$1929
$120
AIT 4
2.96
1
$3002
$60
AIT-E 20
11.85
12
$641
$204
AIT-1 turbo
11.85
6
$673
$138
SAIT
2.37
1
$6681
$207
SDLT 600
1.98
1
$3553
$47
DVD+R 8X
6.73
57
$97
$17
CD-R 24X
20.23
366
$74
$44
* prices from summer 2005 survey
Today, the only viable VCR replacment on a small four hour project is the LTO series, AIT 3/AIT 4/SAIT, and the DSLT 600. In the IT industry, data centers have gravitated towards the multivendor LTO. Quantum is the sole provider of DSLT. Sony maintains a strong following for the AIT and SAIT series.
In an all electronic workflow, producers and directors cannot rely on video tapes or film as an emergency backup. Previously, a still photography or filmaker would keep their negative or positive, and strike new prints as needed. With the advent of digital photography, and soon in affordable digital filmmaking and video production, there is no physical backup, but only the bit buckets, which when arranged properly would describe a vast landscape, a human face, or an airplane landing.
In the still photography realm, image makers have embraced the new workflow, because they realize the potential for new creativity:
Every copy of the image is an original
Since the image is already digitized, it is easily shared
Digital photos are more easily manipulated and cropped
The arduous process of scanning film is eliminated
However, since the bits become supreme, over the film strip or video tape, special storage considerations must be analyzed and scrutinized. Also, still photography describes a single moment in time, while moving images records that same scene but at 24 to 60 frames per second, so a 2 MB still frame file, can become a 48 MB file per second for video, and with Panasonic DVCPRO HD codec 60 GB per hour. How does one store that much data for archiva purposesl and retrieval in the future?
Today, we have current technology, and very soon the future will be now (Blu-Ray Disc, holographic storage, VXA 3, etc). It used to take a simple trip to the Comdex trade show in Las Vegas, to get a bead on storage, but for all practical purposes Comdex has ended, and may never return. Instead, we need to look to manufactucturer events and niche events like Macworld Expo, Storage Networking World, or AIIM Expo.
To manage and harness the growing terabyte requirements in entertainment consider these storage solutions:
Apart from Apple Computer, very many Mac news resources exist on the web. Review this short list of the top sites for your daily Mac technology and information frameworks for your workflows and pipelines.
On the Microsoft Windows OS, iSCSI has reached a very mature level. On Linux, the Linux-iSCSI project has a refined iSCSI initiator. On the Mac, there are only a few vendors, and most are on their first generation iSCSI protocol drivers for Mac OS X Panther 10.3 and Mac OS X Tiger 10.4 OS. This is all going to change in the next several months.
Apple Computer has a SAN solution, compatible with ADIC’s StorNext File System called xSAN, a new disk paradigm that supports Mac OS X application only. In order to use the xSAN file system, one needs to erase completely and reformat any attached drives, including RAID subsystems.
Currently xSAN is supported through fibre channel networks only, and requires a dedicated ethernet port for metadata. iSCSI allows a traditional gigabit ethernet (GbE) network to become dedicated to storage with a moderate performance decrease. One can install a dedicated single or multiple port PCI card for dedicated GbE storage networking and internet traffic.
ATTO Technologies offers the Xtend SAN and Studio Network Solutions offers the GlobalSAN product. In the near future, expect D-Link to have products ready for market that go beyond the 1 GbE connection, stretching the storage platform to 10 GbE, beyond the range of 4 Gb fibre channel.
