JVC goes XDCAM EX

[Nick Righton]

I wonder if DVCPRO HD’s 100Mb/s bitrate is a limiting factror for use with the SDHC cards. I know that there are many that can handle a reported 20MB/s (160Mb/s) but that is the top speed of the card and cards generally do not sustain their top speed.

I wish I was good at one thing rather than average at many, but oh well.

[Michael Slowe]

Great Craig, no worries then but I thought that Sony wanted the S X S to become an industry standard. Are the SDHC virtually the same thing and only the overcranking feature the difference?

By the way, I agree the EX1 screen is good but only when you can see it! In bright daylight (never mind sun) precise focus is tricky and impossible without a very deep hood indeed. There is an ingenious “Hood – Pro’ device with a glass in the top which, whilst not quite EX3, helps a good deal.

Michael Slowe

[Rafael Amador]

As you say Craig, a puzzle. In this business you never know. The VHS won but the Betacam became the world standard. When PANASONIC launched the M-II, at least in Europe, couldn’t go to far away.
For the big companies must be really difficult to decide to put a new format in the market when they know they are already cooking something better.
“This is a time of miracles and wanders..” so many things coming. We will end up recording raw RGB and PCM audio in our mobile phones.
Cheers,
Rafael

http://www.nagavideo.com

[Craig Seeman]

[Michael Slowe] “I thought that Sony wanted the S X S to become an industry standard.”
Never that I know of. Sony was talking about 3rd party card support even before the EX came out. I went to one of those events months before the camera came out and they were talking 3rd party support.

I think they want the XDCAM EX codec to be the industry standard though. I think that’s the motive for the alliance with JVC. As I mention before, it’s no longer media but codec. Media technology changes too quickly for there to be an “standard” for more than a few short years. Sony is battling AVC variants. I understand that given the nature of the MPEG2 standard, there’s significant latitude to improve encode/decode so I suspect Sony believes that’ll have life for many years. We’re already seeing 50mbps 4:2:2.

I’d love to see the MPEG2 vs AVC arguments somewhere. I know AVC Intra supporters say that as long as you have GOP you can have “predictive” issues and the supporters of MPEG2 will say file efficiency will always be critical yet MPEG2 can expand as more quality is needed (hence 50mbps 4:2:2).