Los Angeles-based director of photography Samson Chan had no sooner acquired and unpacked his new 5lb DVCPRO HD P2 camcorder than it was off to China with him to shoot features on China’s powerhouse figure skaters for ESPN’s telecast of the World Figure Skating Championships held last March in Calgary, Canada.
The HVX200 has since racked up trips to England, across the United States and to the Caribbean, capturing mesmerizing footage with unique shooting techniques.
Chan began his career shooting film but purchased a Panasonic AJ-HDC27 HD Cinema VariCam as soon as it was introduced. Chan also acquired an AG-DVX100 Mini-DV 24p camera, and now with the HVX200 has “a camera the size of a DVX100 which is 24p and HD,” he said.
The HVX200 combines multiple HD and SD formats, multiple recording modes and variable frames rates, and the benefits of P2 solid-state memory recording in a rugged, compact design. The DVCPRO HD P2 camcorder offers contribution-quality HD with independent intra-frame encoding, 4:2:2 color sampling and less compression, making HD content easier and faster to edit and better able to stand up to image compositing.
Chan’s debut shoot with the HVX200 in China went smoothly. He shot DVCPRO HD in China using five 4GB P2 cards in rotation and cycled the P2 cards into his P2 Store while shooting throughout the day. Overnight, he downloaded files from the P2 Store to a G-RAID hard drive and reformatted the P2 Store for the next day’s shoot. He noted that the deadline for his figure-skating features was so tight that “if it hadn’t been for the fact that I was able to ship a hard drive with the footage already digitized and frame-rate converted, the editors in Calgary wouldn’t have been able to work with the footage so quickly and easily.”
For more information, visit: www.panasonic.com/broadcast.
