I recently saw a demo of this Sony XD Camera. It shoots HD and 24p. It is used by a lot of documentary camera crews as well as TV news programs. The 24p really looks like film and I was impressed. With all the bells and whistles the camera runs about $23,000.
An interesting thing about the camera is that it records media files to disk, not to tape. Very soon there will be no more tape. All of our footage will exist in a digital, file based
format. The Panasonic cameras can record to DV tape, but most people go directly to files with the P2 cards. This is the future- no tape.
Without real-time digitizing, (30 minutes of tape takes 30 minutes to get into your computer) everything moves much faster. However, at the demonstration I saw a guy in the audience still complained that the files took too long to load. I guess you can’t please everyone all the time, but digitizing 30 minutes of footage took about a minute. That’s fast enough for me.
More on this later, including some workflow terms I was unfamiliar with such as editing by proxy and meta-data.
PeterH
