Gear Review: Panasonic AG-HSC1UPY –or– “The B-Cam”
Panasonic was kind enough to supply us with this wonderful thing called the “AG-HSC1UPY” - or more appropriately named (by us here at Scribe) “The B Cam.” We love this camera for the jobs where we are tasked with being mobile, being alert, and getting pretty pictures with a minimum of fuss. Its rugged,and easy to use. It is so rugged in fact, we are sending one to Antarctica with one of our Scribe coworkers to film glaciers and penguins.
It shoots astounding quality HD footage in 1080i 60fps on wee little “SDHC”compact flash cards using the AVCHD codec. A 4 GB card holds 40 minutes of footage at the highest quality setting (which I recommend if you want the best out of your camera), and an 8 GB card holds (as one would expect) almost 80 minutes of footage… and that all offloads into the supplied hardrive/storage system with as few headaches as can be imagined. Capture into Final Cut Pro 6.0.2 is easy and relatively painless - the only gotcha is that the footage currently has to be transcoded into Apple’s Prores codec to be used in Final Cut wich comes with the burden of needing additional disk space for your working files - to the tune of a 10 to 1 ratio. So, if you shoot 3GB of footage and transcode it, you will need 30GB of space for the transcoded working files. Hopefully, native support of AVCHD is forthcoming from Apple, though I won’t hold my breath. Answer: buy more/bigger external disks.
So what is it? Well, it is a great gift idea for the film nerd/ journalist sweetheart in your life, or if you owe somebody a pretty big favor for keeping you out of jail/divorce court/fending off the IRS/beating up the bully in 3rd grade for you… you know who you are. Or, alternatively, you could do what any sensible technophile does, and go out and buy one for yourself and not wait around for those that owe you big time to stop being Luddites and get with the whole digital thing. Besides, it is pretty dang inexpensive for the kind of visual techno treasure trove they stuff in the box.
Best “B” camera under $3000!!! (current pricing -> ~$1699)
Drew is a Producer/ Cinematographer/ Special Effects Geek at ScribeMedia. He has been making stuff for people to watch for over 10 years.
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