Happy Holidays, everybody.

I have to ask. Why so excited about the KA-MR100G other than going tapeless? You can already go tapeless with a lot of other add-ons at, I'm sure, a much lower price. You can't tell me this thing is going to be in the sub-$4000 range.

The XDCAM spec doesn't give any better color space, still 4:2:0. Sure, I've heard nice things about the compression compared to HDV, but it's still compressed and still 4:2:0.

I guess I'm missing that exciting feature or spec that will take my shots to the next level. If it were based on the XD CAM EX422 spec I'd get it. Right now I don't get it.

For the money the Flash XDR looks like the real deal as soon as they fill out the features. Honestly I'd rather see Cineform step up to the plate with their direct-to-disk concept.

Anyway, I'm bored at work and was hoping for stimulating conversation.

Thanks and have a safe holiday.

Two words: professional workflow.

HDV is regarded at one step over a sketch book by a lot of broadcasters. By simply placing our images into an XDCam EX wrapper, it fits into a pro workflow much easier, and a workflow that broadcasters have invested in and understand.

Okay, Shaun. I can buy that. For you guys in the broadcast world that makes sense. Me, I'm just an independent filmmaker. I just want a capture device that will improve my image quality and compositing/color correction results. So this new gadget isn't targeted at guys like me. That's cool.

I suppose over a relatively shot period of time having it in that wrapper right out of the camera will save time and money for you guys. Well worth the investment. But us filmmakers will just have to wait for the third-party guys to get their new gizmos to the plate.

Happy Christmas!

The XDR and soon to come Nano from Convergent Design provide a recording medium/deliverable file format that takes the best that most cameras have to offer via HD-SDI and makes it a portable solution.

If the camera/camcorder has an HD-SDI (and recently some have suggested component>HD-SDI converter) output, you bypass the limits of HDV or the lesser codec bitrates and color space to go out to an HDCAM 4:2:2 final real-time file based product.

You are still required to work with the front end glass and sensor type and size. But you remove the impediments thereafter.

I personally agree with Chris Hurd on the high values of HDV. It seems that as soon as an affordable quality bump in format hits, the elite work hard at roadblocking it.

The XDR knocks down many of those elitist roadblocks for the time being.

From a broadcast perspective, what the end-viewer of our products sees on the best of systems is greatly degraded by the distribution bandwidth - why aren't these same engineers concerened about this ratio of the quality supplied vs. the final end distributed product to the end-viewer? The spread between the measured quality of what product is supplied to what the distributors end of getting to their customers is growing to a point that isn't making a lot of sense.