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XD HD 350 vs. F900
Anybody do any side by side comparisons of the XD 350 & an F900 or other HDCam like 730? Care to share results?
Thanks a bunch. -
10 Replies
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Well to start the F900 CCD is 1080×1920 thereby allowing full raster recording to HDCAM SR. The 350 is 1080×1440 so no full raster recording is possible.
This is a major difference if you need the maximum spacial resolution for your purposes.
Tony Salgado
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HDCam and XDCAM HD record 1440×1080 but output 1920×1080 from the cameras and decks. The F900 has 2/3″ CCDs and the F350 uses 1/2″. You’ll find that the F350 actually produces less noise in the blacks. HDCamSR records the full 1920×1080. You’ll need an F950 to record SR in 4:4:4 as well as a connected deck. Unless you are planning for a 2K output, HDCam and XDCAM HD are fine. HD is only delivered today as 4:2:0 MPEG.
We found that XDCAM HD in HQ mode is indistinguishable from HDCam. However, you can see the difference with HDCamSR, but only on a high end HD monitor. It is not worth the additional cost for us to use SR at this time. We are extremely happy with XDCAM HD for acquisition. We have HDCam, DVCProHD, and XDCAM HD in-house and we are shooting primarily now on XDCAM HD.
Tapeless workflow is HUGE plus for us as well. Several solutions will be released for this soon. But you can always digitize as if it were tape. The advantage of going native is a savings of hard drive space during post. I had over a TB of space in use on a music video captured at uncompressed via HD-SDI. The same original data transferred as MXF was under 75 Gigs. My workflow is to use native MXF but do all processing and rendering as uncompressed 1920×1080. Even though we acquire on XDCAM, we are still outputting to HDCam tape. We keep the original XDCAM discs for archiving, and usually save a backup copy on XDCAM HD as well. But, this is not a format you want to bounce to and from very many times. Neither is HDCam, but this is where SR comes in — so that you can save uncompressed finals of your hard work for the future.
In the post process, I find that XDCAM holds up every bit as well as HDCam and much better than DVCProHD. Color correction, compositing and keying are all excellent.
td
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What are you cutting with?
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Cutting with Matrox Axio / Adobe Production Studio. It’s great being able to mix anything together from HDV, SD, MXF, DVCProHD, P2 MXF, all on the same timeline with the ability to render to uncompressed or MPEG2I-frame.
td
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If you don’t mind helping me understand, I’d like to know what your workflow looked like coming from the F900 to hard drive. We are looking for an alternative to recording to the HDCAM tape, as we’ve heard it is compressed a great deal. How long was your music video that used over 1TB uncompressed? Thanks a bunch.
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Uncompressed HDCAM 8 bit is 5 gigs per minute.
Steve Wargo
Tempe, ArizonaIt’s a dry heat!
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OK, a bit more
A 50 minute HDCAM Tape is 250 Gigs & 4 tapes or 200 minutes would be a Terabyte. Almost every feature we’ve dealt with has been 23 to 25 tapes. I did this from memory at 1am so I hope it’s right.
Steve Wargo
Tempe, ArizonaIt’s a dry heat!
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I really appreciate the reply, Steve. Also, do you know how compressed tape is versus capturing the data streamed uncompressed? Is there a noticeable difference in quality? Thanks.
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According to our dashboard widget
1 minute of uncompressed 8 bit 4 chan of audio 1920 x 1080 23.98 is 5.99 Gb
1 hour of uncompressed 8 bit 4 chan of audio 1920 x 1080 23.98 is 359.4 Gb
The widget is located on the Apple site under widgets as “Videospace 1.0” from Digital heaven Ltd.
Maybe now I can get some sleep.
Steve Wargo
Tempe, ArizonaIt’s a dry heat!
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What edit software are you using?
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