It was officially released at the DV expo west this last Wednesday. The footage looks great and it looks like street price will be about 10% under list. Whether I buy or rent, my next major project will be on this cam.

http://www.dvxuser.com has some sample footage, including 1080p footage which looks awesome!

Thought ya'll would like to know.

Awesomeness. I wish I could say my next project will be made with this camera. Recently, I've begun to reconsider my Canon loyalty in favor of Panasonic.

amazing! My computer can't actually play those. I get like 1 fps.

Canon is f***ed! Their reps at DV Expo West were completely embarassed by their camera (XL H1) and defensive about it to boot. Currently, no NLE supports "24F," Canon's pseudo-progressive mode. HD-SDI is great if you're shooting in a studio with an expensive HD deck or HD DDR, but Panasonic is clearly the winner here. They were the star of the show. The HVX looks great!

Hopefully there will be some inexpensive student packages and maybe film schools will adopt them in a few years. True, the P2 workflow will take a few tech sessions taught by know-little TAs, but I think it's doable!

Hey joren (or TD, or anyone else who knows...)

When they first announced this cam we were discussing it on this forum and the topic of alternatively recording to a hard drive via firewire for 1080 footage was said to be a possibility...any idea if this made it to the final product? Or is it really only the P2 cards that are capable of capturing the footage?

by the way, happy holidays to everyone and sorry for my pretty heavy absence on this site for the past six months...i'll come back eventually lol busier than ever...

jeff, my understanding is that, incredibly, you can connect ANY firewire drive to it and the camera will control it. You don't even need a firestore (but otherwise you'll be tethered to the wall for power). This is great! Now, you can get storage for a few hundred as opposed to a few thousand. Now, I will say that I haven't really been blown away impressed with any of the footage I've seen yet, but I also haven't seen footage that wasn't doubly compressed (i.e. WMV or mp4). But, the jury is still out. So long as their DVCpro 50 looks awesome and their DVCpro HD looks incrementally better than all the mpeg-2 HD cams (especially after grading/CC), this cam will be a winner.

Of course, it records DV-25 to tape still, but I assume you're talking about DVCpro 50 or HD.

hi,

I am looking to purchase a a couple of direct to disk hard drives and looking into the Shining HDV (http://www.shining.com) for my current Sony Z1 and maybe even the new Shining Citidisk HD for the new Panasonic HVX-200 I have on order. The pricing seems better than the Firestore from focus enhancements. From what I was able to glean off the specs it seems to be a great solution for the price. I just want to record to disk and that's it. No other special features needed.

Any suggestions for a good solution at a good price?

Thanks,
Steve Austin.