The Reel Show have reviewed the EX1 (along with other bits and pieces) with the help of a man from the Beeb who give the camera "11 out of 10" on their "Z1 comparison scale".

You can see the review here: http://www.reel-show.tv/ (you have to register, which is free) and the EX1 is reviewed in Show#1 in the second half.

I had a bit of a rant on my blog about the BBC saying the camera wasn't suitable for their HD output because their minimum reqs are 50MB/sec and the 35MB/sec of the EX1 is too low. This got me a reply saying something about how while the output might be acceptable on a cinema screen "at a high bitrate" it was insufficient for HD TV.

I'm now totally confused. How can 35MB/sec be considered "high" when used for a cinema but "low" when used for HD TV??!!!!

Hi there

Maybe the Beeb have similar concerns to Disco HD's in that a transmitted image undergoes much degradation in its workflow, and so anything that starts at a borderline bitrate ends up not making the QC grade at the end of the flow.

In a film finish, of course none of that is involved, and the only things we're meant to be doing to the image is trying to make it better. There are degradations, naturally, but nowhere near as severe as those imposed by broadcast and bandwidth regulations, I'd imagine.

I did see a demo by Disco HD where they showed what happens to their HD originals before and after broadcast, and, in particular, what happens to the MTF curves of HDV footage from a Z1 after being crushed, squished, transmitted, received and processed thereafter (note my highly technical terminology here). The end result wasn't very pretty, but then again they were trying to make a point, I'd guess.

I'm now totally confused. How can 35MB/sec be considered "high" when used for a cinema but "low" when used for HD TV??!!!!
Chris has got it pretty right, I think. I can't fully explain it, but there was an interesting piece in TVBEurope some months ago about EBU experiences - http://tvbeurope.com/pdfs/TVBE_download/2006/11/TVBE_November_P03-12_News&Analysis.pdf - scroll down to page 8.
NRK principal engineer Per Bohler was receiving calls from leading newspapers in Norway asking why the first HDTV pictures from Germany were so poor.

“I had to admit it was poor quality, and at first we couldn’t explain why. The EBU satellite feed was fine, giving us MPEG-2 422 profile at 24 Mbps. We recorded it to DigiBeta, and our transmission output looked good when it left us — but the viewers received disappointing pictures.

“It really astonished me that the pictures from the satellite looked so good, but collapsed so quickly when we compressed them for transmission. It seems that concatenation of different compressions from acquisition, to the EBU and on to us, meant all the headroom in the signal had been lost by the time it reached us, with nothing left for the last encoder to work on,” he said.

the sound of the reel-show is ugly distorted. very professional...

Yep, it's all in the compression.

Alan Roberts (ex BBC and rather clever bod) explains it really well in Question Time no 2 on The Reel Show.

BTW, we are aware of the low quality of the sound on the panel programmes. Unfortunately we were at the mercy of the exhibition organisers here. Still, we made the decision to go with what we had because we felt the content was still pretty informative.

Best

Denise
_______
The Reel Show
Showreel Magazine
www.reel-show.tv

Denise
EM'd you about the audio just now.
Cheers
Chris