The Panasonic AJ-HPX3000.
Last year, I had the opportunity to work with the Panasonic AJ-HPX500, and I fell in love (see review in DV Sept. 2007). I hadn’t been that blown away by a new camera since the Panavised Sony CineAlta F900 nearly a decade before. Not only was the AJ-HPX500 everything I wanted, the price was unbelievable. Quite simply, there wasn’t a better camera package on the market even close to the price range of the HPX500.
With that understanding, I was very excited to get a chance to work with Panasonic’s new AJ-HPX3000, their flagship full-raster 1920x1080 P2 2⁄3" camera. Generally, when I test a new camera, I don’t like to just set up a couple charts and call it a day; I like to put the gear through its paces on a practical shoot to really get a feel for how it performs in a real-world situation. The timing worked out quite perfectly for me to test the HPX3000 on a feature comedy called Two Million Stupid Women that I was producing and shooting for first-time feature director Jamie Neese.
Holben, with one of the production's two HPX3000s, confers with director Jamie Neese.
Along with co-director of photography Jayson Crothers, we shot for two weeks with dueling HPX3000s and put the camera through its paces on a shoot that consisted of all practical locations, night exteriors, clubs and bars — all handheld and nearly all available light.
GEARING UP
We secured our second camera through Birns & Sawyer in Hollywood, and I started testing by determining the base ISO. Like the HPX500, the 3000 has several gamma presets including the VariCam FilmRec (for film output) and three FilmLike modes (for a “cinematic” look to digitally finished projects). To my eye, FilmLike1 was the most pleasing. I started with a default master gamma of .45, 0dB of gain and 180-degree shutter. I was quite shocked to find the ISO at a solid 250 — about a third stop less than what I had assumed would be the worst case scenario and 2⁄3 of a stop less than I had hoped for. As we were embarking on a project that would be nearly all available light in dark locations — this was not good news. Most digital cameras fall into the 320 to 400 base ISO range (including the AJ-HPX500), so this was a bit of a surprise.
Altering the master gamma to .4, making some tweaks to the matrices and shooting at a 270-degree shutter or a 360-degree (off) shutter for most of the film put us up at 640 ISO. The camera’s imagery is incredibly clean and sharp. I found that we could easily run +6dB of gain without objectionable noise, but +9dB was a bit too much for me. The HPX3000 does have a -3dB setting, which is good, but we rarely had occasion to use that on this movie.
With the FilmLike1 gamma setting, I found the camera has an 8-stop latitude with 4.5 stops of underexposure and 2.5 stops of overexposure. The camera has a Dynamic Range Stretch (DRS) function, which is somewhat of an advanced auto knee function that helps to smooth the gamma curve in high contrast situations to protect the highlights more. For my taste, this isn’t something I’d employ for a narrative shoot as it compresses the highlights and doesn’t let anything blow out. That can give the image an overall flatness that needs to be fixed later. I’d much rather control myself what blows out or not. DRS is certainly a far cry better than auto knee, and has a number of applications where it would be a fantastic tool — namely in situations where you simply couldn’t control the highlights and didn’t want them to go nuclear on you.
The camera has five P2 card slots, which gives about 175 minutes of record time at 1080 24p with 32GB P2 cards in either of the two highest formats: DVCPro HD or AVC-I. Now with the available 64GB cards, that should give about 350 minutes of record time — not too shabby.
The HPX3000 has a couple of cool features, including CAC, Chromatic Aberration Correction, that will recognize certain lenses (eight, currently) and automatically compensate for chromatic aberrations known to those specific lenses. It also has a reverse-scan function to invert the image when working with a lens adapter.
LEARNING CURVE
There were a few frustrating aspects of the HPX3000, however. I’ll address the AVC-I format later on, but we’ll start by looking at DVCPro HD, the camera’s second-highest record format. The 3000 can record in DVCPro HD 1080 59.94i, 29.97p, 23.98p, 23.98pA, 50i, 25p and DVCPro50 480 in 59.94i, 29.97p, 23.98p and 23.98pA and DVCPro50 576 50i and 25p. Unfortunately, there is no variable-frame-rate capability with the HPX3000, even though all DVCPro HD is recorded at 60i (or 50i for PAL). Also, unfortunately, there is no 24p native in DVCPro HD or DVCPro50, only in AVC-I. Both of these were very disappointing to learn.
I complained a bit about the LCD flip-out screen on the HPX500 and have to complain even more about it on the HPX3000. The physical position of the screen has moved forward into an even more awkward place — right at the operator’s cheek. If you’re doing handheld, this screen is absolutely useless while you’re shooting. On the HPX500, the screen was positioned further back and could be open behind the operator’s neck in a hand-held situation so an assistant, soundman, dolly grip or director could see the image. If they moved the screen slightly more forward, then it might be useful, but where it is now it is only workable on a tripod or for clip viewing between takes. There is still no color viewfinder for this camera. I just cannot understand this. For a high-end digital camera there simply isn’t an excuse for not having a color viewfinder. At the very least, offer it as an option. I would much rather pay an extra $20,000 to get an HD color viewfinder.
The camera body is very similar to the HPX500 with a logical layout to standard functions. The HPX3000 has three handy user-assignable buttons. For us we assigned one to switch between P2 card slots (when one is getting close to the end to attempt to avoid cross-over between cards) and I had one for the focus assist. I was very excited about the focus assist when I originally tested the HPX500, instead of doing just peaking or red outlines, the Panasonic focus assist brings up a kind of histogram that visually shows when the image is in sharp focus. Unfortunately it only works on the center of the image and only works under high contrast situations. In dark scenes, or wider shots, or shots that aren’t centered (which most of my photography is not), it’s less than useful. Jayson elected to set the “Get-Y” function to his second user button. The Get-Y function is very interesting as it’s almost a built-in spot meter. It will display the percentage of luminance for whatever is at the crosshairs and give you an idea of that object’s current exposure.
FULL-RASTER CAM
The biggest upgrade with the HPX3000 over previous HPX cameras in the Panasonic family is the integrated AVC-Intra (AVC-I) codec and ability to shoot full-raster 1920x1080 HD. Many cameras, including the Sony F900, utilize less active pixels on the CCD, capturing a reduced resolution and interpolating to get a full 1920x1080. Many cameras are actually capturing 1280 or 1440 pixels and then using internal algorithms to interpolate to 1920. The HPX3000 captures 1920 native in AVC-I codec with its three 2⁄3" CCDs (2010x1120 2.2-Megapixel) in 4:2:2 color space. AVC-I is an advanced version of the H.264/MPEG4 codec using intra-frame compression.
The problem with this, as with all new-and-improved formats, is the lack of support in existing post workflows. AVC-I delivers full raster 1920x1080 4:2:2 10-bit imagery in nearly the same file size as DVCPro HD, and that’s a great thing. I can see, in a year or two down the road, when the kinks have been worked out and all the NLE programs support this format (which, hopefully they will — hint, hint Apple!), then this will be a fantastic production tool. For now, there was not enough of a gain from AVC-I to accept the liability of post issues, which are not insignificant. As was explained to me, currently only Adobe Premiere can work natively with AVC-I format, but I don’t know a single professional (or even aspiring professional) editor who uses Adobe Premiere. Final Cut Pro requires AVC-I to be transcoded to its own ProRes 422 codec. In addition, for a Final Cut Pro system to work in ProRes 422, you must have the latest version of FCP and the latest Intel processor Mac. After a quick poll of six editors I knew — only one of them had a system that could support the requirements of this format, and he, of course, wasn’t an editor we could afford for the project. If that sample-size was statistically correct, only 17 percent of the editors we could approach would be able to deal with the footage. As a producer of the film, I refused to utilize a format that would eliminate 83 percent of potential editors from working with us simply for technological reasons. In my tests, I noted no discernable visual difference between DVCPro HD and AVC-I. For Two Million Stupid Women, there are no visual effects, no desperate need for the extra resolution. Since DVCPro HD is a more openly supported (and tried-and-true) format, we elected to shoot the film in that format. Thankfully, the camera has the option to do both.
After we wrapped the movie, Jayson and I gathered to shoot a short project utilizing the AVC-I format so that we could put that through its paces. The purported benefit to AVC-I is that you get DVCPro HD image quality in a smaller file size. I found this to be absolutely true. For a 30-second clip we had 412MB for DVCPro HD and 320.6MB for AVC-I. That more than 20-percent less for AVC-I. Initially that’s somewhat exciting, but practically I found it really has very little bearing.
IN THE CAN
For Two Million Stupid Women we shot 45 hours of footage (15:1 shooting ratio for a 90 minute movie with two camera coverage). We also decided on a triple-redundancy system having our camera data masters and two clones. We figured we’d need 6TB of space for the footage and two clone sets. Twenty-percent savings on 6TB is 1.2TB of space! That seems like a lot, but when you break it down to each set of data, it’s only a savings of 400GB. So we’d need either 2TB for DVCPro HD or 1.6TB for AVC-I. When it comes to purchasing hard drives for 100MB/s data speeds your choices are really 500GB, 750GB and 1TB. The cost savings of the 20-percent smaller files was practically nothing. We were able to find deals on 1TB drives that were better than if we had only purchased 1.75TB worth of space for each data set. For us, the AVC-I smaller file size would have made no financial difference.
Then the surprise was that the files in Final Cut were much closer in size. Both files require “rendering” or processing to get into Final Cut Pro. The DVCPro HD needs to be “wrapped” in a QuickTime wrapper to work natively in the FCP timeline, AVC-I needs to be transcoded to ProRes 422. The QT wrapper of the 30-second clip of DVCPro HD footage was 423.5MB and 407.6MB in ProRes 422 for the AVC-I. That’s only about a 4-percent difference — certainly not significant unless you’re shooting thousands of hours of footage.
The AJ-HPX3000 produces extraordinary images, as one would expect from an advanced Panasonic camera. We put it through some grueling conditions, and it performed wonderfully. The P2 system is robust and trustworthy. At the end of the day, the HPX3000 is a great camera, but is also dwarfed by its considerably less-expensive sibling with considerable more functionality.