Sparky,

I think quite a few people here would be interested in hearing more about why you traded your F350 for an HDX900.

What do you see as the pros and cons of each?

How did you find using the camera?

I had to trade in the F350 because it just wasn't good enough in low ligt situations especially those where you weren't in control of the lighting, I was shooting press conferences and functions and I was always wide open usually with some gain up as well just to give myself some dept of field.
At least the HDX900 has 2/3 inch ccd's as should perform much better, as well as shooting 100/mbs as well.
The F350 was great in good light and the slo motion feature was great, it is just the low light performance that's making me move.
Sparky
www.sparkymedia.net

the HDX900 has 2/3 inch ccd's as should perform much better, as well as shooting 100/mbs as well.

The low light issue is important to know about, appreciate the info.

2/3" should help for this, 100Mbps won't.

100mbps DVCPRO-HD intra-frame compression is actually more compressed than 35 Mpbs XDCAM GOP compression.

Sounds funny, but true. By storing only changes between frames, Groups Of Pictures store much much more image information for the same bit rate.

Course, although i've learned to accept HDV and actually like it a lot for certain projects if u compare footage from large chip camera (such as HDX900) on large screen with anything shot on HDV (even at 35mbps) u will see that DVCPro is supperior to HDV.

Of course u can't compare certain things. Panasonic's HVX200 is as crappy of a camera as all those 1/3" HDV cameras -- superior compressor simply doesn't get u much if your chip is so small -- on big screen all footage shot with small chip cameras looks average at best. It's the 2/3" cameras that do produce images if varrying quality.

mahedy, honestly i didn't even get to touch the cameras as i had cam ops and ACs doing all the work while i was lighting. But from what i saw, it's a really nice and very impressive machine. I chose it cause of 2/3" chip, the fact that it could do 1080 (though for purpose of the show 720 would be enough) and the fact that it was tape based (i love P2 but for that specific job it would be too much hussle).

Patryk,

My understanding is that XDCAM does not follow the HDV standard at all. They use the same TYPE of compression (MPEG-2), but there is a world of difference within that.

I like DVCPRO-HD from a Varicam. Visibly low resolution, but quite pleasant footage.

I also noticed that the HDX900 has, per Panny, a "1-million pixel 3-CCD system" which is just slightly less than what's in my 2/3" Standard Definition camera.

The choice of a low pixel count (with correspondingly larger pixels) will certainly help low light performance, but it won't exactly help the resolution (which seems to have never been a priority for Panasonic).

So 720p may end up recorded in its native resolution, while 1080p will be uprezzed at least twice (first from the sensor to the limited resolution of the DVCPRO-HD format, then from that to 1920x1080).

Since early 2007, when Adobe purchased Serious Magic, DVRack ceased to exist under that name. While there may still be product in the pipeline under that moniker, it is now Adobe OnLocation CS3 and, as far as I know, only available bundled with Premiere. I've only used it for SD and the AVI files [Type2] that it produces. Vegas 7 and now Vegas 8, treat those files exactly the same as DV files captured from tape. I've only been using it for the past 4 months so I can't tell you how earlier versions of Vegas would treat them, but I strongly suspect it would be the same, as the files are the exact same bitstream you would get during capture. There is no conversion, what the camera outputs is what gets recorded. The HD bitstream is either MPG or M2T type, see page 56 of the http://help.adobe.com/en_US/OnLocation/3.0/onlocation_cs3_help.pdfOnLocationCS3 User Guide pdf[/link].

Thanks for your feedback. on everything.
I am less worried about resolution and more on low light ability. I am picking up the camera tomorrow. I even considered the option of picking up a PDW-530 (digibeta standard on disc), but going back to SD may be a step backwards in the current day.
I hope Adobe on Location handles the DVCPRO HD footage okay, as you say I believe it Vegas brings it in as an avi file. Shame I have to buy the whole Adobepack to use it though!
Anyone else been using this with Vegas to edit DVCPRO HD material?

THanks, Mark

Since OnLocation is a Windows only app, and it comes bundled with Premiere for the Mac as well, you should try to find a Mac head who's bought Premiere and has no use for his copy of OnLocation. It comes on its own disc, a separate activation code, even a separate paper manual. That's what I did to acquire a second copy for myself.