Well, the moment of truth: the first two days of shooting. Got 15 out of 19 pages shot, good deal. The hvx eats more light than I thought, gonna have to rethink how to do some night lighting.

4:20 pm

Interesting, especially the part about bundled DV Rack functionality.

10:23 pm

Here’s a sample of some of the footage I’ve shot with my HVX. Enjoy.

I still haven’t found a good system of dealing with the data in the field, though.

7:54 pm

The HVX arrived…and I’m in love.

The noise issue is overblown. Same for the naysayers who said that 1080p mode was the same. It’s not, both my dad and brother could tell the difference side-by-side. FCP makes the whole import process easy. Slide in the P2 card, hit import, and viola. Color correction is a breeze and the whole thing runs smoothly on my three year old laptop.

The future is now.

1:05 am

Ordered a HVX200.

1:32 am

Well, the date has come and gone. About ten people have managed to get HVX200’s, and have been quietly posting footage and comparisons. The ones on the various wait lists are wailing and gnashing their teeth.

What I’ve seen has been pretty impressive so far. DVCPRO-HD is essentially 4 DV data streams together. The image quality is roughly the same, but they improved the color sampling so the end result looks much cleaner. The HDV GOP and blocking issues seem to be solved, my main reason for leaning against the FX1.

My little laptop handles 720@24p fine. 1080@24p seems to kill it, but it seems to be less a CPU issue and rather the max transfer rate of my 5400 rpm internal laptop drive. I’ve been holding out for Seagate’s 160GB drive, but maybe a 120GB 7200 rpm one would be a better choice. My brother gave me his old hard drives out of his machine, so I picked up another 600GB of disk space. I need to figure out how to consolidate everything, but it should put me over the terabyte mark.

Is this the year? We’ll see.

10:54 am

Footage.

7:05 pm

Shipping December 29th. Importantly, the P2 prices dropped over half in price. I was all ready to make do with a 2GB card, and now 8GB costs the same amount. Woot. And the trend should only continue in the future. In a year or two, they’ll be giving away 128GB cards with cereal boxes.

My brother promised me another 450GB of space once he clears it off. Staples had 50 packs of DVD-R disks for $8. Bought a couple and decided to finally make proper backups of all my data. Then all I gotta do is make sure I’m keeping up to date going forward. The piece of tech that would be super-cool is a DVD autoloader combined with a jukebox.

12:06 pm

Mmmm.

6:56 pm

Still no updates on the HVX200 front. I was hoping by now some footage would leak out. The latest semi-official word is the first (few) units should be shipping late December.

Got QMaster + network batch encoding working with Compressor. Distributed network applications are cool stuff, although hopefully stuff like Avivo will simplify the encoding process in the future. Coolness: GPGpu’s.

11:33 pm