Time Warner's 24-hour news channel NY1 News has upgraded its existing Panasonic DVCPRO camcorders with new AG-HVX200 DVCPRO P2 HD models. Reporters are currently shooting only SD with the cameras, but when the channel decides to transition to HD, the reporters will be experienced in shooting in HD.
Looking for a light, compact camera, the station chose the HVX200 because it offers a good fit for its newsgathering crews, according to Michael Dudley, field operations supervisor for NY1 News.
Leveraging the benefits of solid-state recording, the HVX200 acquires images on a P2 card as MXF files in 1080/60i, 30p and 24p; in 720/60p, 30p and 24p; in 50Mb/s DVCPRO50 and in 25Mb/s DVCPRO or DV. The HVX200 can capture fast or slow action in 720p at various frame rates. The shooting frame rate in 720p native mode can be set for any of 11 steps between 12fps and 60fps including 24fps and 30fps.
The DVCPRO HD P2 camcorder offers independent intra-frame encoding, 4:2:2 color sampling and less compression, making HD content easier and faster to edit and more able to stand up to image compositing versus long GOP MPEG-2 systems.
NY1’s reporters record with 4GB P2 cards and currently shoot 25Mb/s DVCPRO. The news footage is then ingested as AVI files into the channel’s main server using the P2 drive (AJ-PCD20) connected to a Liquid ingest station. The station uses Pinnacle Vortex for editing and plays back the finished news story to air directly from the server.
As a result of the conversion to solid-state acquisition, the news production process at NY1 is now much faster. The reporters are equipped with laptops with news editing software. For ingesting footage, they use the P2 Card Reader (AJ-PCD10), connected to a Pinnacle Liquid Edition software station, which uploads the data at about 4x real speed and converts it to AVI video, which then goes directly to a main server.
Raw video from the P2 cards is archived to DVDs to preserve all of the original metadata. The P2 cards are then formatted and put back into rotation.
For more information, visit www.panasonic.com/HVX200.
