Guywithcat:

DVCPRO HD on the other hand which stores on P2, is more like HDCAM. And of course all of this is IMHO.

Having used SD XDCAM since its release date with Avid it is my favourite format in and out of Avid by a country mile. The latest XDCAM HD with 2/3rds chip walks all over P2 again IMO. Have one arriving here in the next couple of months (if Sony ever stop sending their complete production line to the Olympics)

We use the (xdcam pdw510) here in the news room and we can't fault them apart from giving you weird white balances.I use the the HVX 202en for our documentaries and I also love it but must agree the size of files along with the countless amount of clips (2Gig limit) at this stage are a bit over the top. But as I mentioned the picture quality is great....

Avid 99:

Blu-Ray is a no-brainer?  I'm hearing some doom and gloom for it's long-term prospects.

It's a no brainer for me to shoot on P2 and archive to blu-ray. I don't mean I'd distribute content on blu-ray. It's  small in physical size, but large in capacity. I just want to stop adding to the thousands of tapes of archived footage that are becoming the bane of my existence.

You can archive Sony's SxS cards from the EX camera to Blu-Ray Professional Disks and then play the files back on a XDCAM player as video or as a file transfer.  You can't see archived P2 without restoring it or playing the file through a viewer application.  If you want to play it out as video you've first got to restore it either through the edit system or by using the P2 Gear external player/recorder.  I think Sony benefited from Panasonic going first.  Because of limited storage capacity on solid state media XDCAM is long GOP so it's much more efficient for storing decent quality in a smaller space.  100 Mb/s isn't necessarily better than 35 Mb/s if you have to compress every frame as opposed to a much lower number of frames.  In terms of resolution, the HVX200 has SD chips (540x720) that are offset to get HD-lite resolution (720x960) which is then expanded out to 720x1280 while Sony uses full 1920x1080 imagers.  P2 is sorta like the Super-16 of the HD world.

hbrock:

In terms of resolution, the HVX200 has SD chips (540x720) that are offset to get HD-lite resolution (720x960) which is then expanded out to 720x1280

It's payback for comments I made in a video interview about the limitations of P2 with Avid that Panasonic didn't much care for so they had the website remove the clip under threat of losing advertising.  Panasonic does make nice toasters and vibrators and I've got one of their 1080p Plasmas.

hbrock:

and vibrators

AndrewAction:

I always thought they were on shakey ground

Awful.  Just awful. I'd put a little smiley icon vomiting, but there's not one.

adios,
Carl

Guywithcat:

...I must have a few thousand MINI DVs, DVCAMs, DBETAs, BETA SPs, DVDs,  M2 (yuck!) and a few D1s... i think I even have some 1 inch and some 16mm floating around here. Also some DATS, some DA88s, some cassettes...

Whaaaat.......no U-matics!?! 

hbrock:

he HVX200 has SD chips (540x720) that are offset to get HD-lite resolution (720x960) which is then expanded out to 720x1280 while Sony uses full 1920x1080 imagers.  P2 is sorta like the Super-16 of the HD world.

Is this also true of the HPX-3000? They say it's full 1920x1080.

I posted in the off topic forum that I was all but sold on P2, but was interested in hearing from those who have used both P2 and XDCAM-EX.

Thanks

The HPX-3000 has 1920x1080 imagers.  You get what you pay for...