HD For Indies

The only question remaining in my mind is... with all those people and all that effort and a network budget... was the rental for an HDcam really that much more expensive? Or even an SDX900 which has a far superior lense option and rents for just maybe 200 more a day... (and as long as there is no greenscreen, just plain looks better)... was that not considered?

I can see an indie using the HVX200. I've shot with it for style pieces... but a network pilot? Makes no sense to me.
 

Anonymous - that math is absolutely worth running. I think the particulars of this job - they already owned two of the cameras, it was for SD deliverable, the out-of-house director & producer had already decided on the camera for the job, and that they needed a total of three cameras for a one week shoot steered that decision.

Extra personnel? Already had two guys on staff to handle workflow and P2 shuttling.

If you were looking at an all rental, all per diem crew situation, the math could well come up with a different recommendation - but it is worth chugging the numbers either way.

One extra person to do shuttle duty, enough hardware to handle the ingest/logging/verification tasks - those costs definitely add up.

On the other hand, HDCAM does incur tape costs (light cost though), but DOES guarantee a higher post production cost - no FireWire ingest at HD res, MUST use an HD-SDI based ingest system, high quality finish should be done uncompressed, etc.

When looking at the TOTAL cost/quality, it does get a little dicier.

But the HDCAM cameras would unquestionably generate nicer images.

-mike
 

The one thing about his workflow I find quite unbelieveable is that he kept all cards on a single Lacie drive during the day and didn't make a backup until evening came. He keeps talking about how slow the P2 Store - G5 combination was and how RAID1 with removable drives didn't work, but why didn't he do a disk-to-disk copy once the P2 card was on the computer?

I was recently somewhat involved with the (post)production of a short movie shot this summer with a HVX-200. They did just that: they made 1 copy from card to computer and copied the data to 2 other independent disks afterwards. The card was erased only after the 3 copies were finished. They had 3 hard disk failures during the shoot but lost no footage because of this rigourous backup-scheme.

I don't see the point of making DMG's either. Nothing on the P2 card relies on metadata in resource forks or other strange Mac'isms. It will just complicate finding footage between a stack of cards.
 

Ben - one nice thing about making disc images - you then KNOW you have a perfect backup of the source in case any other oddness occurred, and you can then VERY safely wipe the source after you know you have a disc image. Drag/copying has had its issues with the loss of the magic lastclip.txt or whatever it's called file.

-mike
 

I'm struck by the incredible hours this all took - so much for time saving digital devices

my hope is that if you do continue your career as a producer that you treat your employees better than you treat yourself. I appreciate that it was 'only' a week - any longer mistakes would have crept in regardless of holes in the security of the plan.

As for the move to 'edit on set' that is a recipe for more mediocre product. Editing takes time and concentration away from the noise, in every sense, of a set. Maybe at the end of the day a director can really give their attention to a cut. The logic, for more effeciency, would be to write on set too. No one is suggesting that, are they- or does this 'impro' model mean just that?

As an editor and director my guess is sorting out the mess of this production model will take many weeks in the edit.

Still all being , I admire your dedication perseverance and ability to absorb so much info in ashort amount of time, well done