PDW-700 Owners – Please Read

[Don Greening]

Perhaps you could contact the company that shoots the Survivor television series. They own 16 of the PDW-F700 cameras and might be willing to jump on your bandwagon.

https://digitalcontentproducer.com/hdhdv/depth/dirt_on_survivor_in_hd1014/index.html

– Don

[Tim Gibbons]

Thanks Don.

Tim

[David C jones]

Hi Tim-

Are you 100% sure they’re discontinuing the 700? In another thread, John [Sharaf] indicated Sony was going to continue the 700 series, and that they’re are already about 4000 units out there.

Dave J

[John Sharaf]

Sony is not discontinuing the 700! The PDW800 is a much higher priced option ($11000 more list price) that is not for everybody. If you do not need standard def write to disk or 24p (in 1080) or variable speed recording you won’t want to spend the difference.

The whole 24p thing is something of a trap anyway (I’m talking about 1080 24p because the camera already has 720 24p built in and there is no way to write NTSC 24p at all). If you need 24 over 60, that is to play out to broadcast or transmit over uplink or fiber you will need either the PDW-HD1500 (@ $21000 list) + $5000 option card or the PDW-HD1600 (@ $28000 list) or the PDW-HR1 ($21000 list), it cannot be done with the camera alone. Furthermore you’ll need these same playback devices to play 24p into a 24p timeline. Of course the upgraded PDW-U1 should move the files to you NLE and is therefore the most economical method.

My advice is not to buy the $4500 24p option and just use the included 720 24p and transcode to 1080 24p on output. You should be able to pull the “A” frames from the timecode.

Despite the added features in the 800, it still is not really a digital cinema camera, mainly because of the long GOP 8-bit recording. That’s not to say that adding a 10 bit file based recorder (like the AJA, Convergence or S.One) will not make it such.

Sony is playing a marketing game here, charging dearly for added features that in reality not everyone needs/wants. I believe that they will still sell many more 700’s than 800’s because of the cheaper price. If for example you want the slomo, just shoot it at 720 60p and transcode into your 1080 24 or 30p timeline. Is 48fps really a deal maker? For some it will be. As a multiple camera owner and provider, I’ll most likely add one 800 to the three 700’s I own now to accomodate the need for the added features on an occasional basis.

The real problem, which I brought to Sony’s attention at NAB (for what it is worth) is that you cannot write 24p to NTSC on the disk. The only way is to have the 24p option in the 700, or the more expensive camera and the deck with the 24p option or 1600/HR1 deck and use the downconverted output. For those of us servicing SD network news/magazine shows that sometimes want 24p it will be impossible to deliver for playout in their current PDW1500/R1 decks.

[John Sharaf]

Tim,

While Band Pro is efforting such a tradein/upgrade program as you suggest, I doubt very seriously that they or you will be successful or that you would find the terms that result workable.

At best, they will want to depreciate your camera at the usual 3%/month and then apply that to the full list of the new camera, and despite Sony’s promise of June delivery, just remember last year at this time when they said the same thing about the 700 and the cameras never appeared in number until February and March this year. Although 24p is only of interest in the US and Australia and the big 700 backlog was because of European delivery of cameras that already came with 25p/50i.

There still is a program in place that would buy back PDW510’s after 18 months (if you bought in a two month window last spring) against a new 700 at this 3% per month depreciation, so that figure is well established. Do the math, you loose again. You never win with Sony as regards pricing, features or service. The are only superficially interested in what the customers want when they’re planning cameras (unless you are a large network and plan to buy 100+ cameras) and once you’ve bought you’re stuck.

[Ryan Doyle]

Hi John,

Thank you for your post. I just wanted to add my two cents of knowledge because we went through the whole “should we buy a 700” debacle a couple of months ago:

1. You said, “If for example you want the slomo, just shoot it at 720 60p and transcode into your 1080 24 or 30p timeline.”

-I want to dispell what seems to me like a myth that I’ve heard several times from different cameramen. In my experience, you can not do this. Shooting 60p HD and slowing it down to 24 or 30 will give you some sort of slo-mo, but it’s not that velvety smooth stuff… it just doesn’t look good. I could be wrong… so if you know a way to do it, I’d love to know.

We shot several tests with a PDW700 at 720 60p at our facility and tried transcoding it to 24 and 30. The motion looks nowhere near as good as real slow-mo (IE Varicam, EX-1/3 in-camera slow motion). It looks steppy, interlacey… whatever you want to call it. We tried several different sequence settings, digitizing settings, etc. and it simply will not look like “real” slo-mo.

2. “My advice is not to buy the $4500 24p option and just use the included 720 24p and transcode to 1080 24p on output. ”

– I know for sure that Nat Geo and a few other networks do not accept 720p originated material… This seems to be a growing trend… so this isn’t an option for us at least.

My best,
Ryan

[John Sharaf]

Ryan,

Yeah, if your client is NatGeo you probably will have to bite the bullet and buy the 24p option, but you’ll make your money back on a regular account. Although my understanding is that they (and other picky 1080 networks) still accept Varicam for origination? My own tests comparing the 700 to Varicam at 24p show the 700 to be sharper both from the camera and also in the recording, requiring turning down the detail, but otherwise was able to matrix a very good match.

As regards the 720 60p for slomo, I don’t understand why there would be any difference between the 700 and a Varicam, except of course that there is only the one off-speed rate of 60 on the 700 vs variable frame rate on the Varicam. What method did you use to convert to 24/30?

JS

JS

[Ryan Doyle]

Hi John,

Thanks for getting back to me.

As far as Nat Geo goes I don’t believe they accept the old tape-based 720p Varicam anymore. They’re totally 1080. Shooting for Nat Geo, cameramen are in a somewhat tough position if they want a variable frame rate camera. They can’t use the Panasonic 2700 because it doesn’t meet their strict standards for megapixel resolution of the camera’s sensors. Only the 3700 does, and that doesn’t do variable frame rates.

For Discovery, as of today they do not accept XDCAMHD for “Gold” standard productions and only as “Silver”… despite what Sony reps at NAB might be saying. I believe this has to do with the compression… something about LongGOP that I’m not going to pretend to understand…

On the slo-mo front, the difference as I understand it with the tape based Varicam is that the camera always records to the tape at 59.94, but uses “frame flagging” when you’re shooting off-speed (IE 32 fps, 45fps, 60fps etc.). You then use the Frame Rate Converter software to extract the flagged frames and get the nice, smooth slo-mo from your files.

The 700 does not use this frame-flagging method and there isn’t a proprietary software from Sony to extract that smooth slow-mo. There might be some other software out there that can do this, but we haven’t found it. As far as our exact methodology goes (what frame rate we ingested at and the sequences we dropped it into) I can’t remember. But I promise, we sat there for hours and tried every different combination of settings we could and just couldn’t get a nice slo-mo image.

I do remember however that what worked the best was using a 29.97/59.94 1080i image from the 700 and slowing that down by 50% or more in our timeline. That looked the smoothest, but still it wasn’t on par quality-wise with what you can get from a real variable frame rate camera.

My best,

Ryan

[John Sharaf]

Ryan,

I think you’ve hit it on the head; that there is no dedicated software to extrapolate the 60p into 24/30p. That does not mean it cannot be done. I believe AE does this, and in lieu of “a” frames, can use the time code “00” fields to identify each unique frame.

JS

[Ryan Doyle]

John, what is AE?