HD For Indies

In an email conversation with Noah Kadner (friend of the site and demo artist for Panasonic at NAB this year), he mentioned that the Panasonic 1200A has just started shipping in the last week or so. The base retail price is $21,000, the FireWire interface is $4000, and the HD-SDI i/o board and SD output board (HD & SD on same board) is $6,000. So $30K with all the ins and outs you might want.

This is the deck that lets you capture the native Varicam footage into your Final Cut Pro HD system via standard FireWire 400. So even a 1 GHz PowerBook G4 can capture and edit HD. If all you are doing is straight cuts, it is EXACTLY as good as the $65,000 Varicam shot it.

I've had a couple of friends of the site looking for these - my guy in NYC said he couldn't find any anywhere...so this explains it. They only announced the decks at NAB this year.

-mike