HDW-F900 With XDCAM HD
 

Has anyone had good results doing a multicam
shoot with XDCAM HD & F900 or the other high end Sony HDCAM Cameras
in conjunction with the 350/300Ls?

We have used F750's with F350's and in most shots it's very hard to tell the difference.

Alister, that's good to know.

Did you use the same or similar scene
files across all the cameras?

It's certainly possible to get a reasonable setup match between the cameras, on the shoot day if you have someone who knows what they are doing.

We used the standard BBC F900 setup on the 750s and created a scene file as close to the BBC setup for the XDCAMs and it was pretty close. This was with the old firmware, I think the current firmware would give a better match. I included a copy in the scene files I uploaded to the scene file thread on this forum.

Alister, my main concern is the aspect ratio:
If you are cutting from the different camera angles
and the output is 1920x1080, won't the XDCAM 1440x1080's
images appear a little fatter? A side by side comparrison
of an F900 1920x1080 frame and a XDCAM HD 1440x1080
frame of a persons face for example, the XDCAM would make
the person's face look fatter because its stretched sideways to fit the 16:9 ratio...see what I mean?

Both XDCAM HD and HDCAM "squeeze" the same 1920x1080 frame down to 1440x1080 for recording. The frame is then stretched back out to 1920x1080 on playback. There is no difference between the two formats in that respect.

HDCAM SR records the full 1920x1080 frame and so should appear slightly sharper but no format should appear distorted if played back properly.

Thank you for your post Mike.

If an image is widened it will look sleightly distorted.

Is there anything that can be done for shooting
to compensate for this percentage of stretching?

Any lens adaptors? How about any thing that can be done in post?

Rob, you should read up on Adam Wilt's site about "anamorphic". All the HD tape formats do this, with the exception of HDCAM SR.

You're worried about a non-issue, the problem doesn't exist. Both HDCAM and XDCAM HD take a 1920x1080 raster, downsample to 1440x1080 for recording, and then stretch those pixels back out to 16x9 dimensions for playback.

There is no distortion, just a slight loss of resolution in the H direction.

Nate, thank you.
Sony does not help with how they market in their brochures.
In the HDW-900R brochure it almost implies recording is
done in 1920x1080 rather than 1440x1080. Being that
I don't have a 900R I had no way to be sure what the
result would be. Thanks for addressing such a simple issue.