Having been shooting Full-HD for a few years now with our trusty Panasonic HDC-SD900, thinking it's approaching time to upgrade again. Looking at the market, we could get Panasonic's current top-of-the-line consumer 4K camcorder, the HC-VX870, for slightly less than we paid for the 900. But on the other hand, we could alternatively get one of these for about sixteen hundred quid - which a bargain compared to what they used to cost.
Question is, would we, or the viewers, actually notice the difference between what we currently shoot and what the AG AC160A AVCCAM HD would produce? And if we went with the 870, is there actually a market for 4K WAM videos, or is the reluctance to download large files going to keep that restrained (or even keep the default format to ordinary HD 1280 x 720) for a good few years to come?
Aside: Does anyone do insurance for risks like dropping a business-use camcorder in the mud or a river? Up till now have just taken it as risk of the trade, 600 quid camcorders aren't that hard to replace, but almost three times that would be trickier to recover from. So far it's not happened, but sooner or later I'm going to fall over while wading chest-deep in one of the estate pools during a shoot.
I don't think I'd ever recommend buying anything but the newest tech. You can shoot at any resolution with a 4k and newer tech always means better light sensitivity and faster/better error correcting.
In my experience, both bottom-end pro and high-end consumer offerings often use the exact same chipset. The main different being BUTTONS. Nothing pisses me off more than having to wade thru layers of menus to change a critical setting during a shoot. Pro cams usually have either a dedicated button for nearly every manual function or a group of programmable buttons along with the basics so you can set up the ones you use the most.
I have business insurance for a couple million $ (mostly for liability) but I mainly use tripods, so there's not much danger of tripping and dropping mid-4-figures worth of camera in the muck. When I do carry a camera around, my grip is so tight they'd have to bury it with me if I keeled over and died at that moment
soundguy said: I don't think I'd ever recommend buying anything but the newest tech. You can shoot at any resolution with a 4k and newer tech always means better light sensitivity and faster/better error correcting.
Good point. And up till now I've always gone with "buy the best I can possibly afford", and never regretted it. My Panasonic S7 sVHSc camcorder from 1992 still works.
The problem is to me it looks like the new 870 has gone gimicky - they've added a system that lets you wi-fi link in a smartphone to record a second view, which gets inserted picture-in-picture into the footage. Which to me is utterly pointless (presumably they wanted a second crack at making money from the p-in-p patents which I think they own), and puts me off the camera.
soundguy said:In my experience, both bottom-end pro and high-end consumer offerings often use the exact same chipset. The main different being BUTTONS. Nothing pisses me off more than having to wade thru layers of menus to change a critical setting during a shoot. Pro cams usually have either a dedicated button for nearly every manual function or a group of programmable buttons along with the basics so you can set up the ones you use the most.
For outdoor work I tend to leave it on full auto - the UK's ever changing weather means that conditions on a shoot constantly alter by the minute, and the only thing I change for the studio is the white balance (purple walls and models who completely change colour, brightness, and reflectivity as they get covered tend to confuse the auto white balance). So for me that's not really been an issue so far, the settings I need to change are near the top of the menu trees.
soundguy said:I have business insurance for a couple million $ (mostly for liability) but I mainly use tripods, so there's not much danger of tripping and dropping mid-4-figures worth of camera in the muck. When I do carry a camera around, my grip is so tight they'd have to bury it with me if I keeled over and died at that moment
LOL! Know what you mean about keeping a solid grip! Unfortunately for the kind of mud scenes I shoot using tripods would be impractical, I follow Rob Blaine's old advice "you cannot shoot decent mud scenes unless you're willing to go right in with your models". One thing Panasonic have really got right is image stabilisation, plus I have very steady hands (with a VXR lens on I can hand-hold my Nikon down to 1/30th and still get steady shots, or 1/40th with a plain lens), and of course being up close and personal means no zooming in so far less shake anyway. It's more the chest-deep water shoots I worry about, generally the video camera is on a tripod with the head a few inches out of the water, while I hand hold the SLR from close by. Most of our river locations have very uneven rocky bottoms full of boulders of varying sizes, so keeping footing can be tricky for me and for the girls.
Ta for the comments, appreciated. Will need to check the new Panasonic 4K cameras out in the metal.
I have been considering getting back into it and I like the look of the Blackmagic Design Production 4k. I like how it combines the professional spec recording system with the EF mount option plus it records directly to SSD so you can caddy it onto a pc. Its not cheap it will set you back roughly 3000 to make a useable kit with body, lens, tripod, caddy and so on and you can keep adding pro accessories until you are broke lol but it looks great. Coincidently Tascam now do a tripod mount 4 channel audio recorder that can go under the camera and use on-board stereo mics or up to 4 remote with 48 MHz sound (I think in wam sound is hugely important. my last girlfriend had no experience of mud or mess at all but when I showed her a top quality mud clip she said the sound turned her on, how true) This will enable me to get a good soundtrack with either the tripod mount camera, gopro pov, maybe even drone.
Wouldnt mind love but will take anything I can get
I think I got the best of both worlds with the AG-DVX200. It records beautiful 4K, but has many FHD (1080p) modes that record very nice video. The DVX200 has a feature I've never had built in, before, and that is a wave form monitor. After shooting with the DVX for a week, I don't know how I ever got along without one. My exposures have been as close to perfect as I could ever expect on every shot I've done.
In 1080p, the camera will record very nice quality video at 50Mbps. That is double what I've been shooting, but it's not ridiculous. The 150Mbps is over 1GB/minute. That adds up really fast when letting the camera run.
There are too many features to get into all of them. Some more useful than others. There is a 4 second buffer that WAM shooters might find useful, that allows you to start the recording a few seconds after the action happens without missing anything. That could be handy when something fun and spontaneous happens while the camera is on and paused. A few seconds is long enough to hit record, as long as you're close by.
I've been awed by the quality of the 4K video, but I don't think that feature alone would have made me feel good about spending $4000. The other features the camera has (the ones I mentioned and many more), definitely make it worth going with a professional camera. I've been doing everything the hard way since I stopped shooting with my Canon XH-A1 to get away from magnetic tape. However, this new camera makes my XH-A1 feel like a toy.
p.s. I shot a 25 minute scene over the weekend. I generally back up my shoots to a 25GB Blu Ray disk for archiving, but this one won't fit because I shot it at 150Mbps (mostly just because I'm still exploring the camera's capabilities). However, not being able to archive a single camera 25 minute scene to a single Blu Ray disk is really inconvenient. I generally shoot longer than 25 minutes and run multiple cameras, so this isn't even a realistic test case. When I'm shooting a TV commercial or music video, it's different, I can't be using 100GB of storage for fetish clips that people are going to watch on their iPhones.
p.p.s. I haven't noticed any problems with editing the 4K footage on FCPX with a 2, 6 core processors and 20GB of RAM.