P2 Camera

[Guest gafferdave]

Company just bought 4 new P2's. Anyone used these yet? Any feedback would be appreciated.

 

Cheers.

 

Dave.

[Mark Allen]

If you mean the HVX200, I've used it on location shoots when I needed to do greenscreen work (which is does well because of the 100mbits bandwidth at 1080. Good keys.

 

I like the look of it - but it goes grainy fast and despite the 1080 it isn't the sharpest camera out there. The autofocus seems to not even work - thankfully it has the focus enlarger for the manual focus. All in all a good camera. seems to have the best 24p as well.

 

You could get a technically better image if you can tether to a comuter and capture direct to disk on one or more of the competing cameras probably - but in practical use, I think the higher bandwidth is good.

 

 

 

Company just bought 4 new P2's. Anyone used these yet? Any feedback would be appreciated.

 

Cheers.

 

Dave.

[Matt Workman]

I operated/AC on a HVX commercial. And I handled the downloading of the P2 cards.

 

The best thing about the HVX is hands down the variable frame rates. We shot 1/3 of the commercial at 72fps and you can play it back instantly. Can't do that with the varicam or film. Well the varicam if you have a computer army with you.

 

The HVX has a 422 color space but I still don't like the way it renders greens. All the HVX footage I have seen has something weird in that area.

 

Panasonic made the focus increments in feet/meters instead of their arbitray 00-99. The P2 workflow is great, but I don't really trust it just yet. Computers crash. And electronics can be erased / destroyed very easily.

 

Have fun with the new P2s!