Juan Carlos Oganes' film-making and work blog.

Wednesday, March 12, 2008

The waiting is over....the HVX200 is here.

The new HVX200 has now arrived. After doing research thoroughly for months which HD cam to purchase, the Panasonic one won by far my votes.

The JVC ProHD was a close contender together with the Canon XL-H1 (despite its steep price). In fact this last one was a strong choice for me in the beggining as I have not only owned but worked for the past eight years with the XL-1 and it's following models. The interchangeable lenses is definetly a plus for film work.

The JVC GY-HD110E has that same feature, but both latter models are just HDV which to my taste (and many) has proven not quite good to handle in post (the long GOP makes it diffuclt to edit)....so that left me with HV200.

But the HVX200 didnt just win because of price. It makes a filmmaker reluctant to choose a camera with no interchangeable lens but its has other premium features that is the non-plus-ultra of any person coming from a film background: more than a dozen frame rates, four video formats (SD and HD), 24p, 30p, 1080i/p, the pristine DVCPRO-HD codec (not the faulty HDV one) solid-state P2 memory card recording option and of course... being the big brother of the popular DVX100 it comes loaded with those beautiful gamma curves that simulates film latitude very well as it's big brother: the VARICAM.

It will be a true complement to our Cinematic Digital Process, saving us one step in post of simulating 24fps.


I was happy to notice that in the box came the excellent HVX BOOK written by the well-known Barry Green. We happened to email back and forth about some workflow topics with this cam and also ordered his popular HVX Bootcamp DVD which explains in detail what the book shows also.

Im happy with this investment.

After buying the XL-1 years back I felt the same and was happy to see that that cam was so good, all manufacturers began making accesories for it....now, the same is happening with this little-big cam.

The HVX200 is here to make history.