Sony FDR-AX100

[Jim Giberti]

Originally Posted by Noa Put

Seems like a new trend with Sony, none came with my rx10 either, would be interested to know if it also takes so painfully long to charge the battery, I have a suspicion Sony is deliberately slowing that down so you"d get frustrated and buy their optional charger. My biggest battery from my sony cx730 - which lasts over 4 hours - charges a lot more quickly using the camera then what my rx10 needs to charge that tiny battery that lasts about 40 minutes.

FWIW Noa, the Wasabi wall charger and batteries are cheap and charge quickly for the RX10.
There's also a much better users guide available for the RX10 now.

[Dave Blackhurst]

@ Mark -

Dang, I think some water actually splashed onto my desk... and that was just at 1080 resolution...

My reservations about 30p are looking like less of a concern...

Now I'm just hoping the RX10 and RX100M2 will intercut well and not look "soft"... poop, those two just made all my OTHER cams look "soft"...

At least I'll have lots of stuff to sell off to afford an AX100! Now to figure out the computer upgrade needed to deal with 4K... bigger, faster, sharper... sigh. Worst part is my eyes aren't even that sharp anymore!

[Ron Evans]

Yes Dave, On my last ski trip last week I had my AS30V, HX30V and NX30U with me and the BC-TRX and BC-TRV between charged all the cameras, the remote for the AS30 and my Xperia Cell phone. Took the charger for my Asus Tablet as it has a special connector on it.

Ron Evans

[Ron Evans]

Originally Posted by Steve Mullen

The question is assuming one can export XAVC can one load it on an SD card? If one can, then one can carry one's AX100 to a location with a 4K tv and play it back.

On an other list someone mentioned that there was a software xavc encoder available.

Steve there is a big difference between XAVC and XAVC-S and not sure if the FDR-AX100 will playback XAVC if you put it on a card. Must try on my FDR-AX1 though since the FDR-AX1 and PXW-Z100 are almost the same it may well playback XAVC. It is my understanding at the moment( will change sometime this summer ) XAVC is 10 bit 4:2:2 intra frame and XAVC-S is currently 8bit 4:2:0 inter frame( LongGOP ) at lower bit rates. Initially Vegas and Edius supported XAVC and this played back on both easily. Then later XAVC-S LongGOP was introduced with an update and this is the processing hog for both NLE's. Neither NLE will play back XAVC-S smoothly at realtime on my system, close but not quite there.

As I mentioned Vegas encode is about 8 times realtime for XAVC-S on my i7 3770 running at 4.2Mhz, 16G RAM reading from one hard drive and writing to another. Vegas will encode the same clip to XAVC in about 6 mins !!!

There is a software encoder its called Vegas 12 comes free with a lot of Sony cameras.

Ron Evans

[Dale McClelland]

A question for those who have their AX100's:

A while back, someone here or on another forum posted a link to an abbreviated manual. On page 21 it says: "While recording movies in XAVC S 4K format and [30p]/[25p] frame rate, video signals are not output to external media."

I am wondering whether this means it won't output to HDMI while recording 4K internal to the internal card. If so, that would mean you can't use an HDMI-connected field monitor while recording 4K. Am I interpreting this wrong? (I hope.)

If you can output to a field monitor via HDMI while recording 4k, what resolution would it output? I don't think my 1024x600 7" field monitor would know what to do with a 4K stream. The manual says it supports 1920x1080 coming in, which I know from experience that it does. But I suspect it won't accept 3820x2160 coming in. Is there an AX100 menu item to set the resolution sent out to the HDMI port, independent of the resolution being recorded?

[Bruce Dempsey]

Looks to me like the whole sony video lineup will be 4k capable pretty soon
Sony Global - IMX147LQT

[Ken Ross]

Dale, it's my understanding the AX100 won't output via HDMI while recording internally. However it will output 4K via HDMI when not recording internally.

I have the AX100 but I don't have an external drive. I have seen the live output from my AX100 on a UHD TV where I bought it, so I have confirmed it does output 4K via HDMI.

[Ron Evans]

With the AX1, one can choose what the output is even when recording from 3840x2160, 1920x1080i or p and 720x480 . Composite video is always 720x480i.

Ron Evans

[Dale McClelland]

Originally Posted by Ken Ross

Dale, it's my understanding the AX100 won't output via HDMI while recording internally. However it will output 4K via HDMI when not recording internally.

I have the AX100 but I don't have an external drive. I have seen the live output from my AX100 on a UHD TV where I bought it, so I have confirmed it does output 4K via HDMI.

Thanks, Ken. That is bad news. When I shoot elementary school stage events on a tripod, I use a field monitor to help set the manual exposure more accurately. It's hard to see little faces on the camcorder's screen when there are 30 of them on stage and I'm shooting wide angle. Each face is tiny on the screen. It's easy to over-expose faces without noticing it on the small LCD screen, even with zebras turned on. The larger field monitor helps greatly.

I would think this would be bad news for a lot of users who use field monitors.

I did see in one of the newer un-boxing videos on YouTube that there is a setting in the menu to set the resolution of the HDMI out, which was my second question. But if the HDMI out doesn't work while recording 4K then it doesn't matter what the HDMI out resolution is set to.

[Dave Blackhurst]

@ Bruce -
Looks like that will be the "consumer" 1/3" (plus or minus, dang I hate that outdated fractional "measuring" system!!) sensor that will go in the basic Cybershots and Handycams, bringing the pricing for 4K down a few more notches!

Not a whole lot of room for more product announcements on the typical product announce/release schedule, but maybe there will be a few "surprises" coming soon?! If as your link indicates, this sensor is ready "now", you'd expect "consumer" product to announced to be on the 2014 "Christmas shelves"...


The rumour is a 4K Alpha of some sort is in the wings and announced soon, I'd not be shocked by a RX series with 4K in the near term (we KNOW they can... AX100 proves it).

Not sure about how well lower end lenses of the sort you'd have in sub $1K cameras will hold up for 4K sensors - the sensors now require the glass to be pretty high grade, or you'll just get huge numbers of mushy distorted pixels, I suspect!


But yes, looks like 4K should be the de facto "consumer" resolution in fairly short order, like under 12 months...

HD is dead... long live... oh, nevermind...

[Steve Mullen]

Went to buy Class 10 cards tonight. For the last year I've had my nose deep in RAW cameras that have SSDs -- which is great because I've learning a lot.

http://www.creativeplanetnetwork.com...vors-raw/65577

But, it seems these days there are now "speeds" associated with Classes. Who knew!

So I bought one Sandisk Class 10 Ultra 30MBps and one Sandisk Class 10 Extreme Plus 80MBps.

Which do I need?

[Phil Lee]

Hi

Originally Posted by Troy Lamont

One can. The newer UHD TVs that support 4K content via USB will play back XAVC-S with no problem (again realizing it's just a variation of AVCHD/MP4).

My LG set plays back all the AX100 clips raw from either a USB drive or HDD. Some of the first gen models from Sony, Samsang, LG don't support 4K through USB so you'd have to check the manufacturer.

So one can mosey on down to their favorite electronics boutique loaded with 4K content and view it till their hearts content.

Thanks for the info.

Also Sony Vegas 10 will deal with the clips just fine, even though Sony offer a download update only for Vegas 12 to add support for XAVC. Of course XAVC is nothing new except for a trademark, and is really just a restriction placed on top H264 Level 5.1 or 5.2.

Support added to editing packages for XAVC-S will essentially just be adding an encoding template to set the right parameters, which is more restrictive and less efficient than most default MP4 encoding profiles, I'm guessing to keep things as easy as possible for this first generation of consumer 4K camcorders, so it is no bad thing to export without using the XAVC-S templates for less generational losses at the same bit-rate.

Of course what to playback on?

Things will improve for media players and TV playback, the key is to ensure when these arrive that they show support for H264 Level 5.2 and have HDMI 2.0 before purchase, this ensures the player will support 60fps at 4K which will soon become the norm.

4K just needs new silicon to arrive to support video frame-rates at 4K, currently the manufacturers are just over-clocking better yields of the same HD LSIs and can't go as high as 60fps in a consumer product yet, probably where the Sony CX900 comes in, using up the silicon that didn't make the grade for clock-rates required for 4K.

4K is really crying out for a new codec, something like H265, although the complexity and processing requirements probably means this will not arrive anytime soon for real-time capture and may not make for a good editing experience when it does. So H264 looks set to become a similar workhorse for 4K as MPEG2 has become with HD, as it's easier to increase the bit-rates of existing codecs.

H264 Level 5.2 will support 4K at 60fps at around 700Mbits/sec at 10bit, so plenty of life in the old H264 codec yet. I expect H265 will be used for delivery only for quite some time when it does arrive en mass.

Exciting times though and what better excuse for PC upgrades to the other half :)

Regards

Phil

[Ron Evans]

Have you tried Vegas 10? My Vegas 10 will not recognize XAVC-S or XAVC files. Says invalid format and refuses to put on the timeline.

Vegas 12 works fine as expected.


Ron Evans

EDIT: XAVC is an mxf wrapper and XAVC-S is mp4. Neither will work in Vegas 10 or Vegas 11 on my system.

[Ron Evans]

Originally Posted by Steve Mullen

.
So I bought one Sandisk Class 10 Ultra 30MBps and one Sandisk Class 10 Extreme Plus 80MBps.

Which do I need?

Both will work just fine though the Extreme will transfer to the PC faster if you have a fast card reader.

Ron Evans

[Monday Isa]

Well I just picked one up from my local Best Buy. No time to shoot anything till this evening :(
A couple of things I noticed. The lens ramp starts on the early end. ND-filters has a switch on the back of the cam. Pretty cool location for this size. I read that Sony didn't include AC adapters with the units. Mine comes with one. LCD is awesome. Nicer then my FS700. Rolling Shutter on the long end of the lens is pretty rough. I'd say as rough as DSLR's with long lenses and no IS on them. I'm never that far on the zoom without being on a tripod or stabilizer. So it's easily manageable. 4K (XAVC-S) only works with SDXC UHS-1 cards. Will shoot a ton tonight and dropbox the files as that's what I was hoping someone would do by now. Great job with the cam Sony. It replaces my VG30 that I now need to sell :)