Why I'm in love with the HVX (and why it matters to you)

The Panasonic AG-HVX200 is far and away my camera of choice. Regardless of all of it's amazing features and flexibility, two things set it apart from all other professional cameras that I am aware of.

1) It's remarkably affordable.

The HVX is the most affordable DVCPro HD camera on the market. Granted the image isn't quite as clean as it's big brother, the Vericam, but honestly the only people who will really notice the difference are video professionals who have edited footage from both cameras.

Why this matters to you as a customer is that it brings HD into the price range of lower budget projects. An HVX can create a video that will look amazing on the web and blown up on a 40 foot screen on a stage. The flexibility of uses for HD without losing image quality is vastly superior to standard definition footage. Plus, as viewers, we are becoming so accustomed to seeing HD footage we've become trained to expect cleaner, crisper images in our media than standard definition is really capable of providing.

2) You can shoot tapeless.

That's right, no tapes. The video is recorded to solid state P2 cards, or external hard drives, or fed directly into a laptop. This means several things for video production as an industry.

First of all, speed. The time that it takes to get the footage from the camera and into an editing system is significantly faster than it has ever been with tapes. The turn around time for onsite editing becomes obscenely faster.

What this mean for you as a customer is that at an event (for example) you can film sessions or interviews or attendee feedback in the morning and play those videos during the networking dinner that evening, or have it posted to the event website in a couple of hours. A simple edit could feasibly only take moments (although allow time for exporting out to whatever file format you need to play it back on your AV system). I've turned around videos in under half an hour (not including the time it took to shoot the footage).

Secondly, it changes the way footage is stored. Since there are no tapes, there are no tape backups once the project is over. Companies frequently have archival fees if you want them to keep the files on their systems for a given period of time, and you should probably discuss archival options with them during the contract negotiations so that you aren't surprised by an extra fee and the end of project. Another option is to archive the footage yourself, purchase a drive or have your production company purchase a drive to be delivered with the rest of the final deliverables for your project with all of the raw footage on it.

Again, this should be addressed during the contract negotiations so that a company doesn't suddenly try to tell you that you don't actually own the raw footage, just the final project. This is rare but better safe than sorry because sometimes it does happen that people get a little strange about who owns the rights to what at the end of the day. If you want to keep the original footage just in case, or if you know that you will want to reedit later or repurpose the footage into another video, be sure you own the rights to all of the footage.

Overall, the HVX provides speed, flexibility, and higher image quality. As a side note, it's also great of shoots requiring special effects. I've always had great results with green screens and this camera. The one caveat would be; be sure you know what is happening to your footage once the project is done (but honestly, you should know this regardless of which camera your production company uses).

What kind of video would you create if you could have a finished project in only an hour or two?