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Went to the Apple/Sony XDCAM HD Road show today in Seattle.
For those interested, I thought I’d post a few of the things learned today.
Some of this info has already been brought up here at the cow.
I’ll be talking about the top of the product line, the PDW-F350.The camera output looks very good but if you look close at footage
recorded to disk, there are artifacts, for instance, in a snow bank when panning.
This is being very critical, which is appropriate when evaluating a new
piece of gear. But I think most people will have to be shown the artifacts;
they won’t see them from general viewing.
You don’t see the obvious stuff like stuttering you see on
the broadcast HD football games…nothing like that,
but there are a few artifacts. Everything is a tradeoff these days, but this
is the best picture I’ve seen from any camera in this price range.
It’s very clean and nice looking video.
Much better than Z1U, not as good as HDCAM or Varicam, but very close
and it will be great for news and docu shooting. It does good looking slow-mo
when shooting at 60 frames per second. It does nice, real 24p. Simple to set up and use.
Timecode in and out too, for you multicam guys like me.
4 hour battery life is typical. 60 minute recording time at the
high quality HD setting of 35 Mb/s. 2 inch color LCD monitor
on the side and a nice pro B&W viewfinder. On your shoulder
it feels good and is less heavy than a Betacam 600 for instance
but not much less than a DSR-570. Maybe a little less.The proxy files the camera records along with the main video files
look pretty good for picking footage, but you can’t load them
into FCP and edit the proxies, then uprez. You can only see
the proxies in the Sony-camera interface software where you
pick your stuff to ingest. Bummer. They know it’s a bummer.
The Apple guy told me it’s brought up at every show they do.
He also said it’s not a Sony issue, because Sony’s software
delivers the proxies to FCP. He said it’s up to Apple to
make the proxies available for capturing.
He said this is the first venture they’ve done with Sony
and they are learning as they go.( on a side note.. while AVID can use the Sony video files,
it’s much less elegant getting the stuff into AVID.
Sony and AVID have not worked on the ingest software
like Apple/Sony has. This, according to the guys at this
same seminar who also sell AVID ).The 35 Mb/s (highest quality) setting is not able to be imported
via the Sony software, only the 25 Mb/s version. The Sony guy
said they are working on it but can’t say when it will be
available. Again, bummer. This takes away most of the
advantages of the disk based random access ingest system,
which believe me, is impressive. No more shuttling tape around
to find and mark takes for capturing. For each take you see a
first frame of video, then you pick what part of that take you want to
capture and that’s it. Very quick.
You can still shoot in 35Mb/s and output via the HDSDI output
if you use an AJA or Blackmagic card, which most of us do.
But this is real time recording just like we do it now with tape.Using file transfer mode, FCP will see your video 1.8 times
faster then real time. Not nearly what I was hoping for.
Yes, it’s better than real time but I was thinking it would be
more along the lines of file transfer speeds in general.
The bottleneck is taking the Sony mpeg file and making it
a quicktime file FCP can use. Both Sony and Apple expect this
speed to increase as they improve their software, both Quicktime
and Sony. You get the files into FCP via firewire if it’s the camera.
Their deck has both firewire and gigabit ethernet.I think this camera will sell very well. It’s priced right, at $25K without lens,
a fully loaded camera, lens, case, power, batts.. probably around $35 to $40K.
This is less than half the cost of the Varicam and the pictures are
very close to as good. The disks run about $25 to $30 each, which will
most certainly come down, but still not bad.Dan
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11 Replies
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I went to the NYC show, they were projecting the video material on a 10 or 12 foot wide screen. This is not the way most people will be watching HD. As good as the projection was it adds its own artifacts to what it projects. I too had an issue with one shot. I later asked one of the guys to load the shot so I could see it. The only way they could show it to me was on the lap top, not such a good way to inspect but… When viewed the shot did not have the issues I saw in projection but showed other issues. Nothing like a CRT to answer artifact questions.
I too was impressed with the Sony product. I got the impression that I could bring 35 Mb/s footage into FCP vie FireWire. We were told that the footage we were viewing was shot at the 35 Mb/s rate and cut on FCP. In other words, if you can only ingest with the new software and will only want to work with the 35 Mb/s stuff, you will not be editing anything. But, if you bring in vie log and capture throught firewire, your good as gold, just like we have all been doing it for the last six years with FCP and years before that on the Avids.
This whole file transfer thing blows me away, but not in such a warm and cuddly way. The state of mind people have seems to be that without it no editing system is worth using. 99.99999% of all shows are diged, today, right now. When did it become the standard methodology to file transfer? I cut 8 one hour shows last year with XDCAM, it all came in vie firewire.
I like the idea of file transfer but, most edit systems are set to ingest vie fire wire or some card, I know we all have to get hip but, who snapped their fingers and changed all of our lives so quickly, I didn
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[Danrnw] “Using file transfer mode, FCP will see your video 1.8 times
faster then real time. Not nearly what I was hoping for.”They’re not the only working group to have this problem – usually it’s because the mxf wrappers are different, and need to be converted. Every time someone promises a high speed ingest system, it all falls down on this. Apple need to sort this out – I understand it to be a QT issue.
A Cameraman friend of mine has looked at this, and the Panasonic HDDVCPro version. At the moment, he is leaning toward the Panny, he said he prefered the ‘look’ and we all know that HDDVCPro works really nice in FCP.
My two pence.
Ben
Editec Broadcast Editing Ltd
EVS & FCP specialists for live OB operations.Producer/Director “The Supercar Run” now available for international distribution from http://www.electricsky.com
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Blue,
My interest in file transfer isn’t because it’s a geeky new way,
it’s because I do many 4 camera multicam simultaneous timecode shoots
over two days and end up with 5 or 6 reels each, that’s 24 hours of
material to capture. I’m looking for better ways to get editing sooner.
The faster than realtime ingest is a big deal in this situation, if it works.The place where they did the seminar (Key Code Media) had a $25K
Sony CRT monitor to look at the footage in addition to the big screen,
so I got to get up close and really see what it looked like and play with
the deck and camera.Dan
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File transfers from Sony’s XDCam HD Transfer software can run in the background, so you can import clips and begin editing with them as they are written to your media drive folder. If importing clips for 40 minutes, you can continue editing on your project, adding new clips as they finish to your bins, and save all that time you would have been watching your Log & Capture window.
Unrelated to capturing, I read in the manual that variable frame rate recording on the cameras cut the vertical resolution by half, which makes it difficult for me to believe you’re recording in HD anymore.
mschirad
http://www.wmaeug.net -
Yes, the background file transfers is cool. The Apple guy did a demo of that yesterday.
It’s something that could be useful however, in my workflow, I need to have
all the cameras from all the takes in the system so I can make multiclips.
Then when everything is in, we start cutting. With some shows we do, yes,
it would be useful to capture in the background.The slo-mo footage I saw that was shot 60 fps looked nice but now that you
mention it, it wasn’t as crisp as the 24p footage. There are always gotchas 🙂Dan
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We are currently using the XDCAM HD system and yeah there are some drawbacks and things that need work BUT overall for the price and the workflow, it is the perfect system for television broadcast that there is on the market. And that’s my opinion.
As for the variable frame rate stuff. You do know that this part of the camera is the same as the F900 series CineAlta cameras. So, if it looks bad on XH HD, why doesn’t it look bad on the high end F900 camreas? I may be wrong… but I was told these were the same.
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Wayne Carey
Schazam Productions
http://www.schazamproductions.com -
Wayne,
I agree with you, this camera has a lot going for it.
I’m looking at all the good and bad I can find out about it.
This is my evaluation period before I jump in a do a shoot with one.
This is a big Panny town and I happen to like Ikegami and Sony,
so I’m on a island by myself a lot when it comes to cameras.The slo mo footage I saw looked very good. Like I said, if someone
had not pointed out the loss of vertical resolution I would not have
noticed it. If, or I should say when Sony gets the software to allow
ingest of 35 Mp/s files and Apple gets FCP to allow ingest of the
proxy files to edit with, then I’ll be really singing the praises.Dan
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one other thing that I like about Sony’s implementation of their XDCAM Tranasfer tool (but which I’m still struggling to adapt to) is the fact that I can capture (transfer) in the background whilst still logging … the fact that I can continue to use FCP whilst the clips are being captured in the background is already fantastic, so caturing in the background whilst still loggging just makes it even better … by the time I’ve finished logging the whole disc, half of the clips have already been imported 🙂
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Yeah, this is something I didn’t really “get” until I saw the demo.
And the more I think about it, the better it appears to be.
It’s almost like being able to hand off the batch list to another
FCP workstation while working on logging the next reel.
Yes, this background transfer feature is pretty cool.What quality level are you shooting and importing….25 Mp/s?
If so, how does that look as opposed to the 35 Mp/s ?Dan
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Any thoughts/problems with the footage being in 4:2:0?
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