NY1 News Goes for Panasonic HD One-Person Crews

NY1 News, Time Warner's 24-hour news channel for the greater New York City market, is using Panasonic AG-HVX200 DVCPRO P2 HD camcorders for its one-person news units. Each "crew" is a lone reporter/video journalist. (Only a handful of its news crews now consist of the more traditional two-person units.)

The news operation said it uses the camcorder (weight is 5.5 pounds) because it combines HD and SD formats, has multiple recording modes and variable frame rates, as well as solid-state memory. The camcorder has independent intraframe encoding, 4:2:2 color sampling, and uses less compression than its predecessors, making HD content easier and faster to edit.

NY1 News reporters record with 4 GB P2 cards and are currently shooting 25 Mbps DVCPRO. Raw news footage is ingested as AVI files into the news operation's main server using the P2 drive (AJ-PCD20) connected to a Liquid ingest station. The station uses Pinnacle Vortex for editing and plays back the finished news story directly to air from the server.