Lookin forward to it Randy, We'll have to hit dinner again like we did las time, it's always fun hittin the town with you ( or just the restaurant at the bottom of the hotel :) ).

barely more than a month away.

Dave

well i sure as hell wont be selling off my SD gear this yer.. ive still got a huge catalogue of work dedicated to it as down here people are pretty slow to adopt...
Its not jsut about the gear though coz alot of my work is low light so i rely on its low light ability, but im hoping the new Panny is as good as SD.. i doubt it though

bugger.. and heres me hoping to fork out for a spanky new Pana SD150

Time to rethink the EX...

Sorry, Dave, but I have to disagree. I have yet to see (from my clients) any need to "dump" SD. I'm sure that time will come. But that time will be determined by my clients' needs, not my wants.

unless you have all corp clients, why would you want to dump SD (maybe you do)? The surest way to do videos & get them to the public is DVD.

Unless you mean you're still publishing SD content, just not capturing/editing in that format. That I 100% understand as normally HD down converted looks slightly better then SD. At least in my experience.

I have to disagree as well. I would really like to get an EX1, but if I spend that kind of money how do I get a return on investment? I will still be delivering in SD. The only real advantage to the customer maybe is that the SD will be 16:9 instead of 4:3 for their newly mandated requirement by the US government to switch to all digital by Feb 2009 thus pretty much requiring a new television. Is it worth spending that much money on a new camera so that it shoots in 16:9? Right now none of my customers who have widescreen TVs complain about playing my works in a 4:3 window. The war is over and in my opinion the winner was clear all along - SD won. Money talks BS walks.

John

even though I get HDTV OTA, nearly every local commercial is SD. I expect that to be happening for a few years. Many companies paid good $$ for a nice SD commercial & don't want to replace it. That right there will keep people wanting SD.

The TV shows that I've watched in HD don't use the 16:9 ration anyway: they still keep everything in the 4:3 box unless it's also letterboxed in SD. Very annoying. 99% of all old TV shows are in SD that peopel buy on DVD.

So, in theory, people will still be used to SD for a decade or more. You can't make Simpsons Season 1 in to 16:9 w/o re-making part of the footage and odds are that won't happen. :)

You guys might like this article by Tim Wilson over at Creative Cow.
Especially the section entitled:

What if they gave a victory and nobody came?


John

I think Dave's point is that if he sells now, he can get a decent price for his SD equipment. If he waits until the demand for HD is great (Note: you can produce SD material with HD cameras), he will not get much out of his older SD only equipment.

j razz

HD prices will fall too. The $3k cameras will be $1.5k, etc. I wouldn't say not get an HD camera if you can afford it, I did. But I'm not investing in producing HD discs. Not much point.

Stewartr002:

Hate to see my 170 go too. If you decide to part with it and want it to go to
a good home call me........

Actually my church is chomping at the bit for these better quality SD hardware
to hit the used market.

We have been moving slowly on the HD upgrades hoping for better prices and fewer
NLE issues.

Sorry, Dave, but I have to disagree. I have yet to see (from my clients) any need to "dump" SD. I'm sure that time will come. But that time will be determined by my clients' needs, not my wants.

I agree with Jay. Besides, you can have both for awhile. You can still shot in SD, then author in BR at 2-3 times the usual bitrate of standard DVD. While it won't look as good as HD, it will look closer to the original AVI file.

"Hate to see my 170 go too. If you decide to part with it and want it to go to
a good home call me........"

RCourtney,
Will do but doubt that I'll part with it ;-). There are a few on E-Bay for $2000-$2250. If I get another cam, it's the EX for me...right after I hit the lottery.

Randy

I've got a few reasons for my decisions (among which is the idea that I wanted to buy something a little higher quality for the last year or so), and yes I do plan on delivery SD while shooting HD for that added quality boost. I also am looking to break into getting hired as an extra camera with other local production companies so that I can increase my reputation locally and income :). Not to mention having the added experience that buying HD and working with it will give me earlier on in the game

My decision has been made, and selling shouldn't be hard right now, as I've got 2-3 different buyers all lined up with interest in my camera where I don't have to suffer the eBay "experience" and they can know how well, it's been cared for.

While I may not need the HD for the next couple of years, I'd like to start learning HD and working with it enough to feel competent enough to teach others as soon as I can justify it. Plus if I swing that extra for an EX1 I'll have that XDCam name to carry some weight when trying to get hired by other companies for shooting ( sometimes there's quite a bit in a name and it can make the difference between being hired and losing the job to someone else as I'm sure we're all aware ).

Dave

While it is usually true, but changing, delivery is on DVD the comments fail to recognise the advantages of shooting with higher resolution. Ability to crop images without losing quality is valuable in editing run-n-gun material and clients see the greater resolution ("sharp" is a common comment, although I think there are more important aspects that might be praised!).
So of course it is a balance of needs, but the lack of HD delivery is, to my mind, a weak argument in favour of SD sourcing.

And don't forget the EX1 also does very good SD out the SDI port!
It's the full 10 bit 4:2:2 broadcast stuff.
Bob.

So, if it isn't about delivery and it's not about SD and so on, then what is the only argument for not getting the EX-1? Hmmm... now let me think about that for a moment . . ? Nope I'm still trying very hard to think of a really "strong" argument for not getting it ... hmmm... can't think of one . . I'll get back to you on that.

Serena makes a great point, I think having an HD workflow (shooting and handling the footage) is important right now. recent story:

Did a green screen shoot with my JVC HD100, when the footage was given to the Avid editor he was having issues working with the HD footage. He finally cried unkle and I got the call at noon on Saturday to complete the project by Sunday night.

Because I had my workflow down and could do it fast, I was able to meet the deadline and make everybody happy thanks in no small part to Vegas and Serious Magic. Now they are throwing me a bunch of work because I'm the "saved the day guy" and they were very happy with how the stuff looked.

I don't know if you need to dump the SD stuff but I think waiting on HD to "land" has some dangers. I would at least be playing with some HD stuff and getting a workflow down.

as far as the Dumping of the SD stuff, it's all the investment that was made and how much I can make back on it and how much return I'll have made for the overall cost.

Thanks to owning my own gear and having constantly available for shooting in a fast turn around shoot and cut situation, I've likely made just from the camera side somewhere around 50K+ off the time I've had it (I do more than just shooting and sometimes am doing audio only, or just editing for clients) and the investment in it after having sold it will likely be less than 1500 leaving me about 1600-1700 in money from the sale that can go into a new camera. That means that I've had approx. a 50K return in a couple years off of the work I've done with shooting with a camera that will have cost me about $1500. While I sure wouldn't mind keeping this camera, I would like to have that extra money from its sale in the case that I may go for the EX1 which hopefully would allow me to increase the revenue generated by my camera as it would allow me to expand the work that I'm doing.

Oh, and Grazie, I'll tell you one very solid reason for not buying the EX1 :)


.(o)_(o) ..... ($)_($) ... (--)_(--) ... ($)_($)
.._____ ...... _____ ..... ____ ....... ____

I sold my XL2 to get the A1, I sold my A1 to get the EX1. I'm with Frigid in that I always try to sell off before I think whatever I have is about to take a big drop in value. I pretty much eek by on what I make doing video production so the EX1 was not an easy jump. I dug around and sold off a few other things like production monitors, a Firestore FS4 Pro, and whatever else I could find to be able to swing it. Despite the cost it's my hope that being able to say that I can shoot in true HD will be a selling point for at least some clients. Having to explain the HDV thing was sometimes a pain. With the work that I've done so far with the EX1 I can say that I'm happier with my footage than I've ever been, the low light and DoF are something that people notice and like even if they don't know why. =)

Also there are huge time savings in going tapeless, I noticed this and appreciated it immediately. For me there was always some hesitancy whenever it came to importing. For as much as I love production that, at least for me, was the one facet that always always felt like a chore. Can't tell ya how happy I am not ta have to do that anymore. At least till a client calls with a plastic bag full of DV tapes needing editing.

On the flip side I can see how delivery on straight shooting jobs could be a bit of a challenge. Talking to a possible gig yesterday I told em if they have a laptop I can load the clip browser and they can leave the shoot with a copy of the footage with them, this seemed to go over well. I keep a copy clip browser for mac and pc on a 2gig thumb drive I have on my key chain. Obviously there are other ways to deliver but this is at least one option.

- Ray
www.undergroundplanet.com

I agree: increased sharpness when viewing an SD DVD and the ability to crop (zoom in to an area of interest).

I've been able to zoom POV shots of our equipment to 50% and the image still looks better than uncropped SD footage.

In my first HDV project, I had to mix legacy footage shot with our VX-2000 with footage from our new HDV cameras. The difference was dramatic: even footage shot with our low-end Sony HC-3 looked far better than footage from our VX-2000.

After that experience I immediately sold my personal camera, a Canon XL-1, and upgraded to the $800 Canon HV-20. Low-light performance aside, the HV-20 produces a far better image.

With a Quad-core CPU and Vegas 7 or 8, workflow just hasn't been an issue.