CASE STUDY: HD Production with Panasonic HVX200 and Final Cut Pro
Cinematographer Shane said at midnight Sunday night, "One day we'll look back on these early tapeless days and laugh."
I hope to the HD Production Gods he's right. Cause right now, low budget HD production for an event has some major issues. I use the qualifier 'at an event' because we're not dealing with a controlled set. This was verite, documentary, run & gun, MTV-news style coverage. If we'd had a controlled set, we would've had better access to DC power (and hopefully a larger budget).
Imagine a cluttered office the size of a large closet. In this office are the usuals - Desktop Mac, files, file cabinet, boxes, crap. In our case, this office was for the facilities manager of the venue, 111 Minna Gallery. All security personnel, assistant managers, and other staff were in and out of the office throughout the event. Despite this chaos, we were graciously given real estate on the corner of the desk (huge props to them, by the way). Two digital photographers were also using the office to transfer their pics to a MacBook - this crammed office shoulda been in an Apple commerical. We had our trusty MacBook (props to Devorah for the loan), 400 GB external firewire drive, and firewire hub crammed on the desk ... why?
We're shooting DVCPRO HD 720p with the Panasonic HVX200 - so approximately 1GB per minute of footage. We hoped to shoot somewhere in the neighborhood of 2 to 3 hours of footage over the 8 hour long event. The only way to manage this amount of data is to record to the FireStore Portable Direct to Edit Recorder, which will hold 100GB of data. So we figured only 1 or 2 data transfers throughout the day.
Except the transfer time is somewhere between 150% and 175% of real time (100 GB would take between 50 and 75 minutes). Since we only had one FireStore, we couldn't afford to be down that long. So we shot in shorter chunks and transferred data three times during the event and once after. We ended up with approx 150 GB of HD footage - and it looks so, so, so damn good.
But getting the data transferred from the Panasonic .mxf format to Quicktime isn't as straightforward as you think. First off, one of the Firewire 400 ports on our external Seagate drive was bad ... good thing I had a Firewire hub ... because the MacBook has only one Firewire 400 port and we're trying to hook the Firestore and the drive to the computer simultaneously.
And then our Final Cut Pro is Version 5.0.1 but only Version 5.0.4 and newer support the import of the .mxf format. We'd run some tests prior to the shoot and knew we could see our clips like this:
but we could not use FCP to covert them to Quicktime .mov files onsite. We knew we'd have to wait until we could run them through FCP 5.0.4 post-shoot.
The last issue to mention - and the most frustrating - is the FireStore. It's menus are straight out of 1983's War Games. They are completely unintuitive. But the UI issues paled in comparison to the battery issue. Our FireStore FS-100 has an internal battery, so we couldn't keep one charged and swap it with a dead one. We had to stop shooting to charge the FireStore several times, because the battery would deplete within an hour to ninety minutes at most. (our assistant camera / utility crew member Kyung was phenomenal!) We finally resorted to plugging in a 30' stinger to a cigarette lighter / DC converter (thanks to Toms Shoes and their truck!) and bringing interviewees to us instead of catching them in the crowd.
In the waning thirty minutes of the concert, we resorted to shooting on the two 4GB P2 cards in the HVX200 instead of the FireStore. However, due to pre-production tests, we knew that getting data off the cards was finicky - only the perfect storm combination of correct Mac OSX version, correct FCP version, and laptop model would enable us to import the .mxf files cleanly. We resorted to using FCP's Capture Now to bring in the interview on the P2 card (thus, creating the Quicktime .mov cleanly).
Not to mention our SD mini-DV camera that we fed directly from the two sound boards as our primary band / DJ audio source. Because these two boards and related stages were in different locations, we were constantly moving the camera and sticks. In a perfect world, we would've had two fixed cameras, in secure locations.
But at the end of the day, the HVX200 takes some pretty, pretty pictures ... which I hope you'll see soon!
Labels: FireStore, GOOD Magazine, HD, HVX200
