Despite having my (at the time) expensive video gear, I haven't used it in awhile. I've had it now for about two years, and I have to say, I love using it. But yikes, the last significant amount of use was for Maverick's media day! I nearly paid it off with some contract work in '06, but that's certainly no reason not to use it more.
I'm going to take it to CP tomorrow and have a little bit of fun with it. I know the kids will love whatever we shoot and post on PointBuzz. Diana is gonna take a shot at being my field reporter, which is super fun.
The thing about the HVX200 that sold me was the P2 format, the solid state, high speed recording media. The thing that keeps me from shooting more with it is the P2 format, because I only have a pair of 4 gig cards for it. That's only 20 minutes of 720p at 24fps, or 16 minutes at 30fps. That makes it a pain in the ass to shoot HD. I shot all of the Maverick stuff in standard def, though it looked pretty amazing because it'll record progressive scan, and the optics and 3 CCD's are pretty kick ass when they downsample to 720x480. But that's still not the HD eye candy.
Two things excite me though. First, Panasonic finally released P2 viewing and copying software for the Mac. That means that using the Cardbus adapter, I can plug in P2 cards directly and pull down more than 4 gigs in under 2 minutes. That is awesome! I can even view the video right off the card, full screen, in HD.
The second thing is that the P2 cards are getting really inexpensive (relatively speaking). The camera actually comes with a 16 gig card these days, and you can buy them for about $800. That's 40 minutes of 720p at 24fps, or 32 at 30fps. In case you're wondering, full blown 1080p is a gig per minute regardless of the frame rate, but man is that beautiful. I think if you wanted to shoot at that rate, it's best to tether to a computer and record directly to hard disk, which is also nice because you have a nice big monitor on the computer you record to.
So the bottom line is that I'd like to go out and shoot more video this year. It's really long overdue, and I want to take advantage of the gear I have. Unfortunately, it's not easy to travel with if I travel by plane. Either I need a big anvil case or I'd need to ship it.
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