Sean R. Smith
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The Panasonic HVX-200 has gotten a lot of attention in the two years. Since its release in 2005 this camera has gone from a dream to a reality for many larger studios and indie filmmakers. The 200 came at a time when ENG HD cams were not a reality for many producers and shooters. The camera turns out great quality, most of the time, at a Wal-Mart price. Now, I’m not one to relate much to Wal-Mart, but in this chase the camera (compared to ENG cams) is a steal. I could spend three weeks talking about everything this HD miracle machine has to offer – however, I will stick to how it relates to post workflows and processes.

Even though this great addition to anyone’s production lineup won’t let you travel through time, it will bring you sweet looking HD quality while not killing your pocket book – ok, maybe it will go into a coma, but it will come back to life after a while. I like the 200. It does have a dark side, but overall it is a versatile piece of equipment.

HD & You
Working with HD does require some “extras”. Lets see if I can keep the list to 10… More processing power, significant hard drive space, intelligence, tapeless media, significant hard drive space… and more hard drive space. You get the picture.
In the office I’m working in, we are fortunate enough not to keep a stock library in house. The advantage to that is we don’t have to maintain a massive raid server to hold all our HD footage. We’re have five, 750 GB hard drives that the footage is stored on and then later erased when it is not needed any more.

I know that this isn’t the norm for many offices. My suggestions, if you are getting into HD for the first time, make sure your budget can handle purchasing backup hard drives and archive drives for your media. Remember, once you erase the footage off the media it was stored on, it is gone… forever! If your workflow had you storing your SD footage on one hard drive and putting your tape on a shelf (or making copies of it), consider a second (external) hard drive to back up your HD footage after it is erased from the media. If your main media/footage drive dies, you will be able get it all back.

HD in FCP
After you have solved your storage problems, you can get to work. If you have handled HD footage in Final Cut, you probably are aware that it isn’t much different than handling SD footage. As long as your machine can handle it, you probably are smooth sailing with HD. Here are a couple of things I have experienced along the way.

Let Easy Setup be your friend. Regardless of what format or frame rate you are shooting, Easy Setup can put all the pieces together for you, in just a couple of clicks. This solution is great assuming you want to edit HD natively and then down convert when you export or export full-res. And there is nothing wrong with that. While you might not need an HD DVD today, your client may decide later they want an HD file of the finished project. This would provide you this luxury.

Otherwise, you can use Easy Setup to make everything SD. Pull an HD clip into an SD (DV/NTSC) sequence and your footage will come in at 50% scale and it will appear letterboxed. You can choose to continue editing in this style to get a 4:3 letterboxed project. Or you can zoom all your footage to get a full 4:3 frame, your original footage is cropped, but no one will know.

Beyond these two simple solutions, if you are going to DVD, DVD Studio Pro offers you the option of keeping your footage 16:9 and letting the DVD player decide how to handle the aspect ratio. Now, as you read this, the problem with this option may become apparent. Not all DVD players are built the same. The big strong beefy players with all the bells and whistles will handle this task like a strong man handles a VW bug. Old, cheep, weaker specimens will squish or stretch your footage to fit the frame it is playing on. I wish I had a fix or greater words of wisdom, but there really aren’t one.

The option in DVD Studio that provides you this ability is located in the inspector, when you have a track selected. Find “Display Mode” and change it from 4:3 to “16:9 Letterbox”.

24p, 30p, 60p Shooting
The 200 shoots all these formats. They all have their advantages. Your project or output media will determine your shooting format 90% of the time. The 200 does a great job of handling 24p and 60p. 24p you get a little more time from your storage media, and a film(ish) look. 60p uses twice as much space as 30p because it is shooting twice as much.

The advantage to shooting 60p is, in post, you can convert your footage back to 30p and have great slow motion. Or you can shoot 60p, and leave it in a 30 Fps (frames) sequence and have less motion blur from frame to frame. This solution is great for action footage, sports, or dance performances. If you do decide to convert your footage back to 30 Fps as slow mo, you will need to send it back through Compressor.
As mentioned before, Easy Setup will give you all the setups necessary for all the frames shot by the 200.

Output: If you are looking to create an archive file from your edited sequence matching you shooting format, then simply export using Quicktime Conversion, or Compressor. Match your export settings to the sequence settings, make sure you have plenty of drive space, and off you go. You can also take your HD sequence and export it using Compressor for DVD. Unless you want to make sure it will letterbox on a 4:3 TV, the only thing you will need to do is. If you want to present your project as a 4:3 letterboxed, then nest your HD sequence into a SD (DV/NTSC 29.97) sequence, render then export using Compressor.

Summary:
This is only the surface. The 200 has far many more features than simply its record modes. The camera is also shoot DVCPro 50, which is great if you are looking for great color information, and good image quality, at not nearly the file size of HD. The 200 is loaded with built-in and user definable presets for image quality, black levels, white levels, gain, saturations, and so on. My take on many of these options is to make sure your color looks good, your luma levels are not peaking, your black levels aren’t crushed, and forget the rest. Adjusting the image beyond this during production will present you with limited creative freedom in post. Even though I am not a fan of saying, “We’ll fix it in post,” this may be an exception. Create the look in post, not in the camera.

More to come in the coming days. Stay tuned.
For now,
SRS

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ps - Look for posts next week on follow ups on this as it relates to ProRes 422.

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This entry was posted on Friday, October 26th, 2007 at 8:00 am and is filed under Post Production, Production, Compressor, DVD Studio Pro, Final Cut Pro Studio, New Technology. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.