Helmut Kobler

I do a lot of documentary shooting where I'm the only camera guy, so I've invested in solutions that a one-man crew can do easily, with little or no effort in the field. Here's my approach with an HPX2700 Varicam: 1) Up until recently, I used five 32GB cards, which cost about $3000. Not a big investment if you're a professional who's doing this as a day job, and not as a hobby or once-in-a-while kind of thing. Having these five cards lets me shoot 6.5 hours of 720/24p footage, and about 3 hours of 1080/24p. That's been enough to easily take me through a whole day without having to worry about offloading (the idea of offloading in the middle of the day seems like a major hassle to me, I'd never do it myself....alternatively, I could hire a DIT for hundreds of $$ for the day to do that, but I'd rather spend the money elsewhere). Anyway, these five cards have actually lasted for multiple days without needing an offload, depending on the project... 2) When around LA, I wait till evening and do a quick offload of all 5 cards using a Panasonic PCD35 5-card reader attached to my desktop (just plug in all the cards, click a few buttons, and all 5 cards are offloaded to a raid 6 drive in less than 30 minutes). If I'm in the field, I would once again wait till evening, and off-load to a laptop with a RAID 1 hard drive attached (Raid 1 being mirrored, so you have an automatic backup). I've done this by connecting the camera to the laptop via USB (which is pretty slow, but easily can be done in few hours), so you don't have to lug a card reader around. 3) I'm actually in the process of replacing my five 32Gb cards with 64Gb cards. This doubles my recording time, and will handle most jobs without requiring an offload while in the field. 4) Editing footage is done on a RAID 6 (an 8 drive raid that can lose two drives and still keep data intact). But for archiving, I have an HP Ulrium 1840 LTO4 drive, and backup software called BRU PE. You can get this set up for about $3500 if you shop around. Backing up a couple hundred gigs of data takes about an hour. Same for restoring. When I capture my cards to the RAID 6, my next step is to slip a $50 LTO4 tape into the HP drive, and start BRU's archiving process in the background. The tape then goes in a safe, secure place, and I'm done. Personally, I love my workflow. It's streamlined and simple enough for me to do myself with very little complication. It's not the cheapest solution, but I don't use the cheapest possible camera, either. I recently wrote some reviews for StudioDaily for the PCD35 and a great Mac-based LTO4 solution. Here are the links if you're interested: LTO4: http://www.studiodaily.com/main/technology...-Mac_11294.html PCD35 reader: http://www.studiodaily.com/main/searchlist/11176.html Good luck!!

Maybe it's helpful when the footage is entered into a database, and people can search by location, without location data having to be manually input for each clip? Just curious: how do you like the camera?? -H

Is it a little odd that NGC would accept footage from the Varicam (which is a 720 imager) but not the HPX2000 (another 720 imager)? I wonder what the logic there is...

I agree, Sedu, the P2 Store (60 gbs) is too small these days, and it's very easily to fill it up. I don't know about Intel Mac compatibility, but I will say that you have an alternative if a P2 Store isn't working for you (as far as I can tell). It's called a P2 Gear, and it's another Panasonic product that weighs about a pound, takes the same battery as an HVX200 (I think), and allows you to insert two P2 cards full of material. You can also plug in any USB or Firewire hard drive to the P2 Gear, and offload your footage to that hard drive. In other words, the P2 Gear lets you dump your footage to much bigger hard drives, and it also lets you use mirrored hard drives (two drives in one case), for data redundancy in case one of the drives crashes. In the Fall, Panasonic will double its P2 card capacity, going from 32 to 64 gb cards. These will also help you store more data in the field, without having to worry about dumping the data in the middle of the day. Personally, I feel P2 will become truly workable for my applications once I have 64Gb cards in my hands...

Thanks for posting, Gus! Is there any chance you could post some raw video, not compressed and resized care of Vimeo? I've just been dieing to see some full-frame, pure video from this camera....