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On Location With The XDCAM Ex?
I desparately want to move to this camera but am worried about capacity. On location as a documentary maker I dare not have less than say three hours HD capacity. The 16 Gig cards cost currently about
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29 Replies
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How about a MacBookPro (or Vaio) and then burn to disc of your choice (DVD-R, DL-DVD, Blu-ray, US>XDCAM recorder).
Given the likely initial price of 32GB cards, you can probably buy a laptop with 34 port for around the same price.
The good thing about the laptop workflow is that you can send back discs to “home base” and have a backup stay with you.
Actually even two 8GB cards and a laptop can certainly rival having to bringing a box of tapes.
Now I’d really like to see a “sub-laptop” for this.
The advantage of cards vs tape for doc work is:
1) the ease and speed of which you can make backups compared to tape
2) the ability to keep shooting with one card while offloading the other card compared to having to stop and change tapes. -
Doing media management on location while your shooting is insane. Working on a set or roving location is hard enough without adding IT work on the side. This new static memory thing from Sony Sandisk is overly expensive, (Sony seems not to have learned anything from the P2 fiasco) and unusable for many types of shoots, as in needing lots of tapes.
Chris
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I think that prices will fall quickly for the SxS cards. Sony will see others using compact flash (infinity etc ) and have to drop the prices. I have ordered an EX1 and intend to have enough cards for a days shoot. I don’t think that it is feasible to mess around with downloading whilst shooting – too much pressure. One wrong move and disaster is at hand.
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I totally agree with those that decry downloading on location. As you say shooting a doc. “as it happens” is hard enough as it is! Anyhow buying laptops and drives is probably no cheaper than buying extra cards in the end. I wonder if there will be a rental market for cards just to supply the need for emergency extras for the one shoot?
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As the cards are relatively ‘cheap’ I cannot see a profitable market for card hire. There is another possible avenue to go down – the Convergent Design new card recorder that could be plugged into the HD SDI output socket. This unit will use ordinary fast compact flash cards. This unit could transform many cameras in an economical way to produce files for direct ingest into an NLE.
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When I go to film I end up easily with 15 hours footage. Three tapes per day or so.
My idea is a laptop and two 250Gb FW800 HDs to the field. Then back in town, data BlueRay for archiving.
BTW I have a question that I placed here but not answer. When you download from the memory cards to your HD, which kind of file your getting there? Are you downloading the original MPG2? can you bring those files directly to the FC time-line?
RafaelPPC G5 2x2Gh 4GbRAM/BlackMagic SD/PMBP 17″Core2Duo 4GbRAM
JVC DTV-17″/FCS2/AE CS3/COMBUSTION/SHAKE -
Juan Martinez of Sony has said that a firmware upgrade will happen to allow the EX to take cheaper cards. During his Power Point display he showed a potentially compatible 8GB card at about $190.
One rental house where I’m located has already quoted me a price of about $50 a day for an 8GB card.
I have no problem downloading during a shoot with an assistant. I like the idea of burning discs as security. One can easily have hard drive and two disc back ups done in the time it takes to copy a tape. The xfer time to laptop is VERY FAST. It will take about 5 minutes to copy 50 minutes of video. You can burn DVDs at 16x or Blu-ray at about 2-4x. I also feel more secure sending a set of discs to a client knowing a have a set of my own. There’s NO easy way to dub tapes during a shoot unless you happen to bring a deck or want to go back and forth from camera to hard drive to camera. With laptop, the client can even view the video on the monitor and decide whether we stay at a location or move on. That’s a lot easier and less risky than screening tapes in the camera.
Keep in mind that burning on to disc along with the clip browser also means the client will not need a compatible deck to play the shots.
Sony also says if you change the .mp4 to .ts the files can be copied to Blu-ray disc (without any further compression) and the client can play the video on a Blu-ray player or PS3. The 35mbps falls within the 40mbps playback of mpeg2.ts files.
All this makes it much easier to deliver masters securely (you can easily have backup for yourself) to client for easy viewing from location.
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Sony has an XDCAM xfer plugin for FCP 6.0.2. It converts the .mp4 to .mov.
You can certainly backup the .mp4 to hard drive or optical disc. Sony also says you can change the .mp4 to .ts and the resultant file can be played on Blu-ray player or PS3 (which is a Blu-ray player).
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Might be worth taking a look at the new Sony HVR 7 camera which records to both solid state and tape
https://www.creativevideo.co.uk/public/view_item_cat.php?catalogue_number=sony_hvr-z7e
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But doesn’t compare to the EX1. 1/2″ vs 1/3″ chip and I doubt it will come close to the low light performance of the EX1 which can be critical in many doc situation. It’s also an HDV camera and that’s another can of worms I won’t go into.
35mbps XDCAM has already been approved by some broadcasters/cable for acquisition which is not the case for HDV.
If one MUST have hand held tape you’re going to have to live with a lot of limitations that aren’t there in the EX1.
There certainly can be situations where card based recording can be a problem but I’d find HDV 1/3″ and poor low light performance much more of a limitation.
[Glaremedia] “Might be worth taking a look at the new Sony HVR 7 camera which records to both solid state and tape
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