Canon's new 50Mbps MPEG-2 Full HD (4:2:2) codec

[Tim Polster]

So let me get this straight,

If I put footage from the EX-1 using SxS and the Nano in dual record, the SxS footage will encode to Blu-ray a lot quicker than the Nano footage?

I will test this to see the difference.

You are saying it will be 2.5 to 3 times faster than the 4:2:2 footage.

Sorry, I misposted earlier, an hour of 4:2:2 footage encodes to Blu-ray in an hour, a 1:1 ratio.

I have not compared the two and I apologize for not getting your point.

[Robert M Wright]

What Tom is talking about (if I understand correctly) is the time savings of not encoding (compressing), by smart rendering, which in essence is copying the video streams as they were encoded by the camera, rather than re-compressing.

[David C. Williams]

The short answer is XDCAM EX mpeg2 is blu-ray compliant, it will play straight back in any blu-ray player. So with the correct software you can butt edit and write to blu-ray with no re-encoding at any point.

[Peter Moretti]

But where you add titles, effects, color correction, etc. and at trasnitions, you will need to render, correct? And that rendering isn't going to be much faster than 4:2:2 rendering? Right?

[David C. Williams]

Pretty much spot on.

[Thomas Smet]

Not every job is a full CC post production process either. Sometimes you may shoot a highend piece for a client and they want a rough edit to view. In fact sometimes you could go through many rough edit revisions depending on how complex of a project it is. In these situations smart rendering can really help out a lot. Editing is a fluid process and it doesn't always follow a shoot, ingest, edit, CC and deliver path. Time is money and some solid production companies still need a pretty quick workflow, especially if a client is sitting there waiting for the final to finish. We cannot tell our clients to go to lunch and come back in 3 hours to pick up their video. Sometimes they need the rough draft right away to take back for their CEO to look at.

[Tim Polster]

Thanks for clarifying.

That is what I thought the concept was in an earlier post about basically not editing the footage just placing it on a blu-ray. I still will test the two file types side by side during output to see if there is a large speed difference.

I do not know how one gets footage out of Edius without encoding. The encoder is aware of the 4:2:0 footage and might just pass it through.

[Dom Stevenson]

Over on his excellent mac video site Rick Young is speculating that this camera may well have a fast lens overcoming - to some extent at least - the low light shortcomings of a 1/3 chip camera, and suggests that the slots at the back of the camera are too big for HDSC cards suggesting Compact Flash or -God forbid - a proprietary format.

Many have talked about whether this is an EX1 Killer. Seems doubtful due to the smaller chips, however with all the other goodies (422, 50 mps) Canon are putting into this camera, they may well come up with something that produces a superb new camera. I'm particularly interested to see what glass comes with it.

Having recently returned to a project shot on both the Z1 and XHA1, i was astonished to see just how much nicer the Canon footage is against the Sony. If Canon have jazzed up the lens - more width please - and come up with a top notch 1/3 sensor, i for one will be very happy to own one of these cameras over the Sony.

[Chris Hurd]

Originally Posted by Dom Stevenson

however with all the other goodies (422, 50 mps)

Not to mention HD-SDI, GenLock and TimeCode In & Out (not officially stated, but the port covers for
these jacks are located on the mock-up in the exact same space as they are on the Canon XH G1S).

[Robert M Wright]

If this cam has an imaging block capable of cleanly resolving as much detail as the EX1 (which is not beyond reason, by any stretch of the imagination, especially if Canon surprises us and goes with CMOS*), records to widely available low cost memory (by design), and a version of it is priced similarly to the A1, I would think it would cut into EX1 sales quite considerably.

Not everyone needs better low light performance than 1/3" imaging chips can deliver. The glass is pretty much a sure bet to be pretty dang decent, and with 50Mbps MPEG-2 at 4:2:2, if the imaging block does indeed resolve 1000 lines of detail cleanly, recorded images really should be a little bit better under a lot of very typical shooting conditions.

*Look at what the HMC40 and the HPX300 imaging blocks are capable of, using 1/4" and 1/3" CMOS imaging chips. Getting 1000 lines of detail pretty cleanly from 1/3" CMOS imaging chips is very doable.

[Dom Stevenson]

"Not to mention HD-SDI, GenLock and TimeCode In & Out"

Yep.

And to think i took a half glass empty approach to this camera only a couple of weeks ago.

More fool me. Now my credit card is beginning to burn a hole in my pocket.

Rick seemed to think the camera was physically bigger than its predecessor, though i'm not sure how he figured that out based on the evidence we have at present. I know i'd like to see a faster, wider lens, and am not too bothered about it being a little shorter. Then there's the sensor?
Very exciting. Canon have taken their time with this camera, but in spite of my initial skepticism, i'm beginning to think it was worth the wait after all.

[Mark Fry]

Originally Posted by Dom Stevenson

Having recently returned to a project shot on both the Z1 and XHA1, i was astonished to see just how much nicer the Canon footage is against the Sony. If Canon have jazzed up the lens - more width please - and come up with a top notch 1/3 sensor, i for one will be very happy to own one of these cameras over the Sony.

I edit footage from these two most of the time. The Canon is clearly the better image, except in really low light (after dark, using available street lights) when the Sony has the edge. That's not too surprising, since the Canon is a newer design. I'd like to see output from the Z5/Z7 alongside the XH-A1. I'm told they are pretty close. My expectation is that the new Canon will have a similar improvement over the Z5 as the XH-A1 had over the Z1. However, I'm also expecting the new Canon to be signifcantly heavier and/or more expensive than the XH-A1, which will make me consider alternatives when my XH-A1 needs replacing. Let's hope I'm right about the first point and wrong about the second!

Going back to the discussion of re-rendering just those sections that have had transitions/captions/CC - The thing that really appeals to me about Blu-ray as both an archive and a delivery medium is that my HDV footage can go mostly unrendered from tape to timeline to output, provided I choose the right bits of software. I'm still expeimenting with Blu-ray, but I think my choice of Avid Liquid 7.2 and TMPGenc Authoring Works 4 gives me that possibility. However, with a 50M 4:2:2 source codec, one is back to the situation in the DV/DVD days - the finished (or otherwise!) timeline must be down-converted to the output format prior to authoring the disc. In which case, one might as well go for AVCHD (at perhaps 16M?) to make the most of the disc's storeage. The 35M XDCAM EX codec is, I suspect, somewhere between the two. Most of my customers still want DVD, of course, so there is an inevitable down-conversion batch-job, but with AW4, at least, that comes right at the end of the process.

Personally, I'm not too worried about having more width in the lens - I see a bit too much of the old bending of verticals with the XH-A1 (Z1 does that too, a little). I'd much rather they kept the long end really long. I like the way the XH-A1 lets me stand on a hill top and get a good clear image of an approaching steam loco from at least a mile away!

[Jack Zhang]

With no mention of Sony NLE collaboration on this codec, will we have to wait much longer (for instance, until Vegas Pro 10 comes out) to use the new Canon 4:2:2 codec or is the current XDCAM HD422 decoder enough? (which I'm hopeful for, but have by doubts for at the same time)

[Perrone Ford]

Huh?

Transcode the footage and go to work. Why would you need to wait for anything?

[Dom Stevenson]

"I'm also expecting the new Canon to be signifcantly heavier and/or more expensive than the XH-A1,"

Not sure why that would be the case Mark. Unless they give us a significantly larger lens. Panasonic reduced the weight when they went to solid state over tape.

No reason why it should cost more either. Particularly since customers will have to pay for new media as well and they'll wish to keep it in line with the competition. Unless of course they see the EX1 as the competition, but given the sensor will be 1/3, i imagine they'll want to keep the price attractive.