These are all .TIF format -- the file names should be self-explanatory.

The download directory is www.dvinfo.net/media/xdcamex or get the individual files linked below.

1. Download them to your local hard drive

2. Re-name the file extensions from .tix to .tif

3. Open locally with any image browser that supports the .tif format

Campfire-1 1080i60.tif (www.dvinfo.net/media/xdcamex/Campfire-1 1080i60.tix)
Campfire-2 1080i60.tif (www.dvinfo.net/media/xdcamex/Campfire-2 1080i60.tix)
Campfire-3 1080i60.tif (www.dvinfo.net/media/xdcamex/Campfire-3 1080i60.tix)
Desert 720p25.tif (www.dvinfo.net/media/xdcamex/Desert 720p25.tix)
Drummer 1080i60.tif (www.dvinfo.net/media/xdcamex/Drummer 1080i60.tix)
Fireworks.tif (www.dvinfo.net/media/xdcamex/Fireworks.tix)
Fountian 1080i60.tif (www.dvinfo.net/media/xdcamex/Fountian 1080i60.tix)
Fountian-colors 1080i60.tif (www.dvinfo.net/media/xdcamex/Fountian-colors 1080i60.tix)
Japan Street 1080i60.tif (www.dvinfo.net/media/xdcamex/Japan Street 1080i60.tix)
Keyboard 1080i60.tif (www.dvinfo.net/media/xdcamex/Keyboard 1080i60.tix)
Movie Girl 1080p24to720p.tif (www.dvinfo.net/media/xdcamex/Movie Girl 1080p24to720p.tix)
Movie Girl Profile 1080p24.tif (www.dvinfo.net/media/xdcamex/Movie Girl Profile 1080p24.tix)
Movie Girl Profile 1080p24to720p.tif (ww.dvinfo.net/media/xdcamex/Movie Girl Profile 1080p24to720p.tix)
Movie Girl-1 1080p24.tif (www.dvinfo.net/media/xdcamex/Movie Girl-1 1080p24.tix)
Movie Girl-2 1080p24.tif (www.dvinfo.net/media/xdcamex/Movie Girl-2 1080p24.tix)
Night Water 1080i60.tif (www.dvinfo.net/media/xdcamex/Night Water 1080i60.tix)
Orchid w-ant 1080i60.tif (www.dvinfo.net/media/xdcamex/Orchid w-ant 1080i60.tix)
Organist 1080i60.tif (www.dvinfo.net/media/xdcamex/Organist 1080i60.tix)
Pink Flowers 1080i60.tif (www.dvinfo.net/media/xdcamex/Pink Flowers 1080i60.tix)
Rock-n-water 1080p24.tif (www.dvinfo.net/media/xdcamex/Rock-n-water 1080p24.tix)
Stain Glass 1080i60.tif (www.dvinfo.net/media/xdcamex/Stain Glass 1080i60.tix)
Stain Glass CU 1080i60.tif (www.dvinfo.net/media/xdcamex/Stain Glass CU 1080i60.tix)
Sun Girl 720p25.tif (www.dvinfo.net/media/xdcamex/Sun Girl 720p25.tix)
TimeLapse_Chicago 1080i60.tif (www.dvinfo.net/media/xdcamex/TimeLapse_Chicago 1080i60.tix)
Wakeboarding 720p24.tif (www.dvinfo.net/media/xdcamex/Wakeboarding 720p24.tix)
Wakeboarding 720p25.tif (www.dvinfo.net/media/xdcamex/Wakeboarding 720p25.tix)
Yellow Flowers 1080i60.tif (www.dvinfo.net/media/xdcamex/Yellow Flowers 1080i60.tix)

All of these frames come from the EX1 marketing video and are provided courtesy of Sony.

Absolutely beautiful - deep noise-free blacks... However in Campfire 3 I can see some nasty mackroblocking in the bright flames area...

Well, nothing is perfect, I guess!

Edit: after downloading all of them, I've mixed feelings... Yes, there is a lot of stuff with quality unobtainable in my V1E (mostly dark areas almost completely noise-free), but elsewhere lots of artifacts and macroblocking. Well, 1920x1080 grabs cannot come from a regular, 6.5Mbps DVD - so perhaps a 19Mbps Blu-ray?

Because they're from official video, they show artifacts of their blueray or dvd encoding (maybe 6.5 Mbit/sec [dvd] or 19 Mbit/sec [blue-ray] anyone could confirm?) I suppose, they're not a sample of 35mb native quality, right? The tiff called "Drummer 1080i60.tif" has the ugliest artifacts I've seen in long gop video....

Because they're from official video, they show artifacts of their blueray or dvd encoding (maybe 6.5 Mbit/sec [dvd] or 19 Mbit/sec [blue-ray] anyone could confirm?) I suppose, they're not a sample of 35mb native quality, right? The tiff called "Drummer 1080i60.tif" has the ugliest artifacts I've seen in long gop video....

Carlo, I sure hope you are right about the encoding. The artifacts are just terrible. And not only in this sample but in many of the night stills too.

I think I've been staring too much at Red stills lately...

Yeah, the campfire and the drummer stills should not be used for promotion, but I guess its good they're being honest..?...

I think I've been staring too much at Red stills lately...

Same here... I guess it will be a bit hard now to take lesser quality. :-(

I believe that a Sony guy has just grabbed those stills from a player with capture capabilities such a bsplayer or videolan player, I'm pretty sure...
I know...I know all of you thinking about some statement declared by Hugo Giaggioni's official video "This system is not as mature as Mpeg2 Long Gop..." when he's referring at other companies' compressions schemes, and watching this stills without know how they are produced can give you a sort of "stoic-feeling" as though you're watchin' the Downfall of a Company and his promises...
I don't believe they could make such mistake with encoding...some macroblocking could happen but this is clearly not native footage... we must wait to download official mp4 wrapped thingy to judge somethin'.
I remember only when I saw the first m2t files from Canon Xlh1, I've just begun to have some ideas how the native footage looks like... just hope soon we can do the same with Ex...

I'd like to know more about these frame grabs..
The 1080 24p girl images look good.

As mention I do see mpeg breakup in some of the images.
This is very alarming. I won't take the jump from HDV to another slightly better HDV.

The Wakeboarding 720p25.tif image also appears to have a lot of noise in the sky. This surprised me since it was daylight.

I have two concerns: Noise and possible mpeg codec breaking up under certain conditions.

I'll need to see more before I'm sold.

I realize it's very hard to judge these images without knowing the particulars, but they're here and it's hard not to be critical.
I really would like to see the camera info with each shot.
Not to mention how the grabs came about.

Also to be mentioned that macroblocking seems to be more effective in the interlaced stills, all the stills in the 1080i60 range has more artifacts than progressive ones.
Probably this is due the transporter stream of hypothetically blue-ray or dvd encoding as I've supposed they came from. Interlaced stream is a different beast, it's hard to do a clean job with it, so if you re-encode it in a blueray and then take some snapshot with a cheap player, ya know...it's time for the Macroblocking Apocalypse! :-(

Well, 1920x1080 grabs cannot come from a regular, 6.5Mbps DVD - so perhaps a 19Mbps Blu-ray?
It could be also encoded in wmv hd and delivered in dvd format too. Many companies adopted this strategy for the lack of blueray players...it's hard to believe that Sony can't provide a blueray player...as I've understood they came from the official presentation at IBC via 4k projector, right? It's possible that this projector was connected to a pc platform or a mac...
Geez! I can't believe original footage shows so many macroblocking problems...

Quite disappointing so far (due to artifacts). These can't be native frames.

Looking at Organist and Drummer, it's looking like images that are displayed at double rez. Shrink them to 50%, and THAT's an image I'd 'take home to meet the parents' - or at least promote to clients.

The aggressiveness of the blocking on edges lead me to assume that the 1920x1080 resolution of these images aren't true 1920x1080. I'd wager that the're upscaled from half that.

WOAH! Stop, delete that.

Just opened the images in Photoshop. Different story.

Sony needs to look at their publishing workflow. I'm seeing two different looks: one from the raw downloaded TIFs in simple viewers, and a different one in PhotoShop.

I'm seeing the MPEG2 artifacts in the Drummer, has this been deinterlaced? The drummer's left hand stick is blurred and I don't see interlacing, but there's tell-tale lumpiness in the black taxi's rear window. And now I see Z1-style edge sharpening again.

Organist shows, maybe, the beginning of CR in the watch highlights, but I like this image. Amazed that it looks so different between Preview and Photoshop.

Sun Girl comes into Preview as a 1920x1080, but is labelled 720 - which is why I opened the image in Photoshop - where it really is 1280x720. Okay, so blown highlights on the knees, bit of boil and a heavy yellow cast in the blue sky, less edge sharpening but I'd still want to turn it down (look under her chin).

I'm very glad I tried a bit harder with these images. Just like everyone else who had a problem with the XDCAM EX movie, if Sony are using these files as marketing, they need to test the user experience. If the community are posting these images, we need to know that so if it doesn't work immediately, then perhaps there's something else we need to do as individuals don't have an army of QC engineers and testers to hand.

If you want to see something scary take a peek in front of the drummer's forehead...it looks crazy...

However in Campfire 3 I can see some nasty mackroblocking in the bright flames area...



Coming from a novice (very novice), what does mackroblocking mean?

Chris,
How do these look when played back off the disc? I'm assuming you have the disc in your possession right?

I'll reserve judgement on this camera till I see some frame grabs that haven't been through some type of re-compression process. A few of these look good, a few not so good, but who knows what was done to them to get em on that DVD.

I'm seeing the MPEG2 artifacts in the Drummer, has this been deinterlaced? The drummer's left hand stick is blurred and I don't see interlacing, but there's tell-tale lumpiness in the black taxi's rear window. And now I see Z1-style edge sharpening again.

Organist shows, maybe, the beginning of CR in the watch highlights, but I like this image. Amazed that it looks so different between Preview and Photoshop.




I would wager that left hand stick is blurred bacause it is moving faster than the shutter. It is all natural motion blur from what I can tell.

Also remember some of these images are labeled as 60i. They've been interlaced from progressive scan. In fact, these images look great when that is considered.

But IMO, looking at still frames is always out of context as to what the actual full moton video looks like. And still frames always force some people to look too closely at small artifacts that would disappear once playing in a MPEG 2 stream.

Don't forget to wipe the nose smudges off your screens when your done.

Just Kidding. Peace.

Cheers.

All I know is that I am very impressed with the 720p 24p shots. The guy wakeboarding looks like it confirms what I said about 720p 24p being almost impossible to break in my "ultimate 720p camera" thread. I have looked very close and I do not see any macroblocks at all considering there is water splashing around and this must have been some pretty fast motion to capture.

The thing to think about 1080i still images is that 1080i really meant to be viewed this way. 1080i was meant to be watched while moving and in motion and not as a still. The progressive stuff so far I am very impressed with. The look of the 720p is exactly what I was hoping for. You can tell right from these images that this camera in 720p has more raw detail then JVC HDV does. Even the 1080p stuff looks pretty darn good although I will need to see more of that. I am really more interested in shooting 720p with this camera and I am pretty much sold if this is really how it will look.

Oh man... I live about 10 minutes away from where the "Japan Street 1080i60" shot was taken... just outside Hon-atsugi station in Atsugi city, Kanagawa pref. There is a big Sony engineering building nearby but I was under the impression they mostly work on celphones there. I'll have to hang out more often and try to catch some of the camera guys. :)

Since I frequent the area I know that the building on the right side, shown under repair in the pic, finished about 2 months ago, so this shot was taken at least that long ago.

I agree that there are some very visible artifacts in some of these frames, but that isn't too surprising. You have to remember that you can't judge video compression by looking at still frames. Artifacts may appear in a single frame and be gone in the next frame. You have to watch the video to judge the quality of the encoding.

Flickering lights like strobes or flames are an encoding nightmare. Extremely fast motion is also tough (like a drummer's sticks).

As Thomas Smet points out, interlaced video will never look great in a still frame. To get the still frame you have to deinterlace the video, combining two fields that were captured 1/60 of a second apart.

I look forward to seeing actual footage at the full 35 Mbps bitrate.

You have to remember that you can't judge video compression by looking at still frames. Artifacts may appear in a single frame and be gone in the next frame.
I disagree, Tom. After analyzing hundrets of HDV clips on a frame by frame basis I have never noticed such severe artifacts in a single frame and then disappearing in the next.
That's why I expect/hope that the artifacts on the demo frames shown in this thread are not on the native .xif frames.