You can also purchase a special device that lets you record directly to a disk. The Firestore connects via firewire. However, it doesn’t support all formats. Specifically, it cannot record in native mode because it cannot be streamed over firewire. The Cineporter attaches in place of a P2 card. But it is not shipping yet. These drives provide 100GB of storage enabling between 100 and 200 minutes of record time, depending on format.
Panasonic makes a couple of devices for downloading cards. One is a battery-operated 60GB disk with a P2 interface called the P2 Store. You can download a 4GB card into it 15 times. The other interface is a 5-slot P2 interface that connects to a Windows PC, and is designed for major production environments.
Panasonic has special drivers that enable the P2 card to be used with Powerbook laptops and Windows laptops. But only the 15” and 17” Powerbook have the Cardbus Type II interface. The 12” does not. Worse, the new Macbook Pro computers (and most new PC laptops) come with Expresscard interfaces which are fast, but don’t hold P2 cards.
You can also put the HVX200 in “1394 device mode”. When in this mode, and firewire attached to a Mac, each P2 card shows up as a disk drive mounted on the desktop. Both are named “noname” and cannot be renamed to something unique, which makes working with them confusing.
The HVX200 can also operate in “1394 Host Mode” and it can work with a directly connected (without a computer!) firewire hard drive. However, there are a few caveats. The camera creates a new partition each time it dumps a card. It can only create 15 partitions, so anything over 60GB of hard disk (with a 4GB card) or 120GB with 8GB cards, can’t be used. You can’t store other data on the disk or use it for any other purpose – only P2 partitions. When you mount the disk on a computer, each partition shows up as a separate disk drive. It would have made a heck of a lot more sense if the camera could just create standard folders on an existing partition and put all of its files for each card inside a folder – enabling use of a 500GB disk drive. Some people are using this method. I find repartitioning a disk drive and then dealing with 15 separate disks unnerving. So this feature has no value to me.
You can also stream any video except 720pN (native) over firewire and capture it in a non-linear editor. I’ve captured 720p and 1080i directly to a laptop and to a desktop without ever dropping a frame. This is a great way to extend the record time. But of course you are tethered by the firewire to a laptop and have to provide power for everything (such as an external disk drive).
Learning to work with digital files is probably the most counter-intuitive and frustrating part of the HVX200. When you put the camera into MCR (“playback mode”), some of the clips may be marked in red and won’t play. This is because the camera needs to be in the same mode that the clip was recorded in to play it back. So I shot some clips in 720p60 and some in 720p24, and I have to change the camera setup just to review the clips.
Part of using the HVX200 is figuring out your workflow. And that workflow may change depending on the application. For example, I read about a person shooting a documentary overseas. And he had 11 8GB cards, two P2 Stores, miniDV tape, and disk drives. He would shoot all day on the cards, filling up and reusing them on the P2 Stores. In the evening, he would copy all the files to hard disks which were shipped home. And he would also dub from the cards to tape during the day, the standard definition copies being his “recording of last resort” if he lost a disk.
Final Cut Pro HD can directly read the files from a P2 card or from a disk. The process of importing a clip from a file rather than capturing it from a camera is called “ingesting” the file.
Digital files are very seductive. They are highly reliable and easy to use; your camera doesn’t suffer from dust, moisture, bad tapes, or vibration; you don’t get drop-outs or have to worry about how many hours you have on the tape heads, cleaning the heads, and so forth; you get random access to your clips; and you can immediately review clips in the camera without worrying about rewinding a tape and possible overwriting what you just shot. Working with P2 cards is much more like working with film, which normally comes in short duration reels. And although there is a learning curve to use P2 cards, and the workflow is complex to figure out, once you have your workflow defined you’ll discover that digital files are superior to tape. I think I echo the sentiment of just about everyone who has shot digital with P2 cards: “I’m never going back to tape”. Really. Once you get comfortable with it, it’s that good.
