Author and filmmaker Robert Goodman gets a sneak preview of an engineering prototype of the Panasonic HPX170/171, the P2-only addition to the company's handheld camera range.

Article first published: July 2008

I’m in the process of producing a guide to P2 cameras, so I had the chance to get a sneak preview of the Panasonic HPX170 (HPX171 in the UK). I’ve had a little bit of time to play with it and go through it's features, but I've not had the opportunity to do a full test.

I’ve been shooting with Panasonic cameras for three or four years, most recently using the HPX2000, which is their high-end 720p camera. It’s a full-sized P2 camera, which does AVC-Intra, which is a great new codec that makes absolutely lovely pictures. But I've also shot with the lower-cost HVX200 and the HPX500.

The HPX170 is the latest successor to the HVX200. There's also an HVX200A, which has the same features as the 200, but with a better digital signal processor, a little less noise, a wider angle lens. But the HPX170 does away with the tape drive completely; it’s a P2-only camera, so it's a smaller, lighter version of the 200A with a bunch of new features: variable frame rates, it’s got locking 6-pin Firewire connecter; it has HD-SDI out of the camera so that you could record uncompressed HD-SDI if you have an external recorder.

Panasonic was the first company to introduce solid state recording media, and to offer a file-based workflow. It has taken a while for people to really understand the principle benefits of that, which is that it’s way quicker to get a recording and to edit into any kind of post-production system. You can also get rid of bad takes if you want to, saving storage space and having less to look through later, which is something that you can’t do with a tape-based workflow.

The HPX170 has two P2 slots and a lot of new features, including the ability to enter metadata into the camera in the field, which can be a very powerful tool for filmmakers trying to manage the large amounts of footage they’re shooting. It not only has two slots, it also has a slot select button, so that if you're recording on one P2 card and you need to pull it while your recording, you can hit the slot selection button and change which slot is recording.

The camera now is just 4.5lbs (>2g), where the previous model was 6.2lb (2.8g), which is to my mind a great, great thing. Now you have a slimmer camera; it’s a little more ergonomic. It might be my age, but my preference is for smaller, lighter, more compact, because it lets you get into more places. You can get back against the wall; you don’t have to find a location with bigger rooms in order to make something happen in the shoot, which lowers your cost overall, if you’re an independent. If you know you're working for a Studio, it doesn’t really matter, but for the vast majority of film makers having a smaller, lightly, more efficient camera to work with is a good thing.

You have three ND filters on the camera which, is very helpful for shooting outdoors, and the user buttons have new functions, including 'delete last clip'. In the past, if you recorded a clip in a different format, then you had to go into the camera menus and reset the camera to the same frame rate and same system as the clip in order to play it back, but now all you have to do is press a button, and it automatically switches the camera from the P2 menus so that you can play back a clip.

They added a locking 6-pin Firewire connector to eliminate the problems which existed with some of the external drive products (you can record on a hard drive in addition to recording on the P2) of pulling the cable out.

The HVX200 and HPX500 don’t let you change any of the metadata in the field. So if you wanted to change the user clip name so that it reflected the scene you are shooting, you couldn’t do that except by loading an SD card with information you'd created on your computer. With the HPX170, you can do it in-camera, just scroll down to where you want to enter the letter; it’s not a typing keyboard – you only have cursor keys – but at least you can enter the camera operator’s name, where you're shooting, and the program names.

If you're shooting long-form, where you know you're shooting for years and dumping all your stuff to hard drive and want to find what you shot two years ago in a tape-based workflow, you have to remember exactly which tape it's on. With P2, you can find it by searching for the person who shot it, the subject you shot, the place you shot it, and find just those clips in a couple of minutes.

The HPX170 records DVCPro HD, so you know the workflow is brain-dead simple; everybody supports it. The one thing I will say in Panasonic’s favor is that the file formats have stayed the same, and on the same P2 card you can record all flavors of DVCPro and AVC-I: it’s codec agnostic. As long as you have a way of connecting the card to your computer, either with a PC card reader or an adaptor so that you can plug in a PC card via firewire or USB, it’s in the computer, and it’s easy to edit. Even $30 software supports it. You're not on the bleeding-edge here, which for an awful lot of people is a more comfortable place to be than trying to figure out a new workflow every week.

Robert Goodman Robert M. Goodman is an Emmy-nominated director and award-winning independent producer with credits in commercial, corporate, and feature production. He's the author of Goodman's Guide series, the first field guides for SD and HD cameras to be written for cinematographers, videographers, and independent filmmakers.