Field-Testing the HPX300

DP Peter Nelson and Director Bryan Gunnar Cole on Panasonic's New $10,700 P2 Cam

When director Bryan Gunnar Cole and cinematographer Peter Nelson headed to North Florida to shoot wildlife footage at the 7,000-acre White Oak Conservation Center, the first production question that had to be answered was which camera system to use. They ended up securing one of the first AG-HPX300 P2 camcorders, which the company announced earlier this year to stake out a new benchmark for performance at the camera's aggressive $10,700 price point. For Cole and Nelson, it hit a sweet spot.

Photo: DP Peter Nelson in the White Oak rhino enclosure

Cole noticed a gap between functionality and affordability as he considered cameras for the shoot. “[White Oak] is a non-profit, so they don't have a huge budget,” he says. “We didn't want to work with the HVX kits, but we couldn't really afford the Varicam.”

Nelson, who had been invited to Panasonic's offices earlier in the year to test-drive the HPX300 and was favorably impressed, started wondering aloud whether it would be possible to take a demo unit into the field. “I thought it was a good, small-format camera that would be easy to run around with, yet it would have things that an HVX200 wouldn't have,” Nelson says. Panasonic agreed, supplying the brand-new camera in early April.

Cole and Nelson had worked together in the 1990s on a different program for White Oak. On their return this year, they aimed to tell the organization's story as part of a piece that might serve as a piece of a potential larger project dealing with endangered species. They spent a week shooting interviews and wildlife footage on location — getting as close as they dared to animals like cheetahs, rhinos, giraffes, and Somali wild asses as the White Oak staff advised them closely. “I don't spend a lot of time with rhinos,” says Nelson, “so I don't recognize the subtle nuances when a rhino is getting pissed off. But the people at White Oak do. They'd say, 'Ok, great. Let's go. Now.' And we'd get out of the way.”

Cole says the project mixed wildlife behavior photography with conventional documentary-style shooting, including a sort of “Animal ER” approach to the facility's extensive veterinary program. “They did a root canal on a black rhino, which is a critically endangered animal,” he says. “They had to anesthetize a 4000-pound animal, which is no joke. And we were following a lot of the veterinary teams into the field, getting on-the-fly interviews in a handheld, run-and-gun doc environment. That's what's great about the camera. There's no tape shuttle, so it's lighter than the Varicam. It's larger and has a little more girth, so it's a great shoulder-mount camera. You don't have the same bumpy issues you have with a smaller HVX.”

Nelson was shooting with four 16 GB P2 cards, plenty of room to hold each day's shooting until the data could be offloaded and backed up at night using Panasonic's P2 Portable recording deck for file transfer. Nelson has worked with P2 on past projects, but admits that the new workflow paradigm still makes him a little nervous. “I do have that fear — there's always a question when you wipe the media [every night],” he says. “We worked out a system to transfer the media, verify [the data], transfer it again, and verify it again. We had a redundancy on the transfer before we wiped the media. I said 'This is the way we have to do this.' Once it's gone, it's gone, and you can't just go back to the tape.' It's still fairly new to me, but it is very reliable. I've done a bunch of shoots and I have not had any media, ever, lost.”

Cole agrees that the problem is mainly psychological. “I was a little skeptical because I'm from a film background,” he says. “Suddenly you don't even have a tape you can hold onto and say, 'This is my stuff.' It's cool, but you have to get your head around the idea that you don't have a hard copy. You have ones and zeroes on a little card, so there's a perception [problem] to get over.”

Aside from the P2 workflow, Nelson says there's not much else about the camera that takes time to learn. “You pick it up and pop it on and there you go — you're off and running,” he says. “You're not trying to figure out where the iris control is. Everything is where it should have been in my mind, and that was a real plus. There wasn't a real learning curve as you would have with some of the other smaller cameras where they've changed the ergonomics.”

The only lens available on the shoot was the interchangeable 17x Fujinon lens that comes standard with the camera, and Nelson says it was adequate to the task, though he sometimes longed for a wide-angle option. “It was long enough to do what we needed to do, and I knew for the most part we'd have to be a little farther away from our subjects,” he said. “Being able to use a real lens with a real zoom control and real focus and real aperture control all in the lens, that's a plus — partly because it's what I'm used to, and partly because I just think it works better than the optics in a lens like the HVX200. The viewfinder is good, and I loved the little flip-out side screen as well. The built-in waveform is very accurate and is a nice little plus that you won't find on smaller cameras.”

The footage is mostly daylight exteriors, but the team captured a few nighttime shots and one interior dinner scene using available light. “The interviews looked great without a ton of lighting,” says Cole. “We used a soft box and some accent lights. We did some stuff at night with fire. And we had not only lots of different animals to shoot but lots of different skin tones. We had Masai warriors in full regalia. We were shooting very light skin tones and dark skin tones in bright sunlight, and it held up.”

Judging from Cole's and Nelson's experience, the single major limitation of the HPX300 is its 1/3-inch imager — a shortcoming, to be sure, but a trade-off for the price point. “Bottom line, the image you get is really great,” says Nelson. “A 1/3-inch imager is a drawback as opposed to a 2/3-inch chip. But it's a $10,000 camera with lens. For the right project and situation, that's not a drawback. For the price, it's pretty amazing.”