Review of the Panasonic HVX200E and Gates housing

The HVX200 represents a new direction in HD cameras, moving away from both the large tape format and from Sony’s smaller miniDV HDV tape format. The use of two P2 cards (which are a RAID system of SD cards) means that the HD system is tapeless and this solves some problems, but also adds new ones to the mix. There are plenty of reviews of this camera and P2, but I’ll focus on how it works for underwater shooters.

The main problem with the new P2 format is the lack of space on the cards for recording time. Topside you can plug straight into a hard drive or you can hot swap the cards for endless recording, but underwater tis not so simple. The 2x8GB cards give you 17 minutes of recording time at 1080/25p, 33 minutes at 720/25PN, or much longer if you want to shoot standard definition. The camera also has a miniDV tape so you can at least still record SD if you manage to fill the cards. Bigger P2 cards are on the way 16GB and even 32GB have been mentioned.

The limited recording time is seen as a major hurdle, but to be honest I have very rarely filled the cards. I do tend to shoot at 720 most of the time, partly because of the longer record time but also to take advantage of the variable frame rates only possible at 720.

A very cool feature of the camera is PRE-RECORD which caches what the camera is seeing and allows you to record from before you actually pressed the record button. This is a major space saver on the cards because rather that shooting 5 minutes of rubbish footage waiting for a frogfish to yawn or a shrimp to come out of its hole, you just point the camera and wait, when the action happens, you press record and you catch the action you would have missed with any other camera.

In terms of workflow, I have come up with a system that works great on a liveaboard which is pretty much all I have done (working on NAI’A) and it goes like this…. Get out of the water, dunk the camera in a rinse tank, take the back off the housing, plug in a laptop connected to a 2TB RAID drive and another hard drive to make two copies of the data, go and eat, come back 30 minutes later, clear the cards, put the back on and go and do it all again. Very simple really, but I could see it being a problem on small open boats without AC power. For 2-tank day trippers, a laptop with a powered external hard drive like the LaCie ‘Rugged’ works for one dump of the cards between dives, maybe even two or three dumps, depending on your battery life. You just need to work out a system that suits the conditions.

The Gates housing is brilliant. Its one drawback is its size and weight. For travelling it is a beast, my Pelican case with housing, lights, monitor, tripod and all the bits weighs 32kg. Airlines love that. Getting it in and out of the water can be tricky too, especially if it is rough and you don’t have a crew of strong Fijians to help you out. Once underwater, though, all is forgiven. The housing is well balanced, and with the buoyancy aids from Gates you can make the rig neutral or slightly negative. Once you get used to the controls, they are easy to use and all line up beautifully. Some controls are optional, but get them all. There are loads of controls on the camera, and six “scene files†which are presets that you can setup topside for different underwater shooting conditions. The Fathoms SW44 superwide angle lens is awesome, costs an arm and a leg, and I think is crucial to the system. It has great zoom-through capabilities so is a good all-rounder. At full wide it is really beautiful, these HD cameras need a lot of light and this port lets in a much a possible. The flat port for macro shooting works well because Gates have added two flip filters which you can fill with one or two diopters, or a diopter and a red filter. Only the red filter can be used with the Fathoms lens due to space and optics.

Overall the learning curve is steep. It took me a while to figure out the basic settings and I still don’t have it right yet (I am not totally happy with the noise in the blues and blacks) but it is a great system and I am pretty happy with the results I have got so far. I have a demo reel filmed with this system at www.underseaproductions.com/stock_footage.html if you want to see what this rig can do.

Happy shooting and go Gates.

Josh

Excellent review Josh..

Loved the Pre-record funtion..Thats a great feature.

Can you please go and buy a Endeavour or 'Gates equivalent' with the V1 and come up with a decent review for the rest of us who cannot afford the Panny

Dive safe

DeanB

Good review Josh

Sooo, how many hard drives do you own then?

All those backups must be painfully expensive, thats one reason i can't look at this sort of a system.

How much backing up do you do? A month or two of good liveaboard shooting must yield a fair number of GB.

Could you tell us how you are working out storage and back ups? I assume you are keeping backups on land as well?

Thanks

All those backups must be painfully expensive, thats one reason i can't look at this sort of a system.

Yeah overall everything good has a downside, did not know what the pricing is where you guys are, but FWIW 750 Gig Drives have dropped alot lately - about $250 U.S. now - can't remember the storage space due to binary, but off the top of my head but using 680 gigs and rounding down each will hold about 12 hours or so at the high end recording of the camera (16 gigs = 17 minutes) and comes out in the neighborhood of 40 dives - or about $6 a 17 minute dive to store if all the footage is a keeper. (Though probably double that for redundency).

Hopefully other media back up will drop in price/become available - what was an issue one year ago in any of these things become less expensive non-issues, at this point with hard drives dropping in price, it usually it is harder to keep them in order.

Make a deal though, if you get the camera and housing and I somehow get out your way, I will gladly bring a hard drive or two along for you if you let me play with it

HA!! The Panny! hahahaha

I am still paying off the Phenom and Z1 for another couple years...

Visa cards SUCK!

Wow you have some nice material there.

I gota move somewhere the water is blue.

Nice review.

Sticking to tape here as the cards don't hold enough for me and it's all way to $$$.

Thanks Josh.

As we discussed, the Panny is a bit noisy but the kind of noise you get isn't gain noise but chroma. That's life with digtal.

If setting the black levels still doesn't get satisfactory results, I suggest you try using cine V, and B press gamma. I'd be careful about messing with detail coring too much. -7 and you lose a lot of detail but for wider scenes that may be fine.

Also what are you viewing with? If it's a laptop, the noise is more pronounced. Use a HDTV and see if the noise is better there.

Btw, 8gb cards are now $700, down from $1300 just 6 mths ago.

Good review Josh

 

Sooo, how many hard drives do you own then?

 

All those backups must be painfully expensive, thats one reason i can't look at this sort of a system.

 

How much backing up do you do? A month or two of good liveaboard shooting must yield a fair number of GB.

 

Could you tell us how you are working out storage and back ups? I assume you are keeping backups on land as well?

 

Thanks

Thanks Mike

Yeah, i own a few drives. The main two are RAID drives. I use LaCie because they are cheap and i am hoping the RAID will give me enough safety. Everything is on 2 2TB drives which is enough for now(one on land, one on the boat). And i have a stack of 200-250GB drives left over from my TRV900 backup days so i use them to back everything up on the boat until i get on land and can backup all the keepers to the other RAID. Luckily, i had other jobs on the boat so wasn't able to shoot full time(only 1 or 2 dives per day with the camera) so that has saved lots of disc space.

As we all know, the price drops fast on these things so have only bought what i have needed so far, everything is pretty full now so i will have to buy another 2 soon.

I have spent a ton of money on the system and only just started selling the footage(apart from trip videos) so hopefully oceanfootage.com will help appease the VISA gods.

Cheers

Josh

Wow you have some nice material there.

I gota move somewhere the water is blue.

 

Nice review.

 

Sticking to tape here as the cards don't hold enough for me and it's all way to $$$.

I would give my left one for some good whale shark footage wags, maybe we can organise a job exchange...

Thanks Josh.

As we discussed, the Panny is a bit noisy but the kind of noise you get isn't gain noise but chroma. That's life with digtal.

If setting the black levels still doesn't get satisfactory results, I suggest you try using cine V, and B press gamma. I'd be careful about messing with detail coring too much. -7 and you lose a lot of detail but for wider scenes that may be fine.

Also what are you viewing with? If it's a laptop, the noise is more pronounced. Use a HDTV and see if the noise is better there.

Btw, 8gb cards are now $700, down from $1300 just 6 mths ago.

Thanks for the tips Drew, i am back in water in 2 weeks and will give those settings a go.

I am using a laptop which blows, but its all i have, i am still moving around too much with too much gear to buy a HDTV.

16GB cards are due out in May and 32GB by the end of this year so they say.

Well if you come on over I'm sure we could get you onto a boat.

To get a blue blue water day you have to be out there every day or be very lucky to nail it.

Although don't come right now....not much happening out there.

Kelly's going mad driving around all day...no sharks ...no sales