FS700U - Portable External Recorder 3G/HD-SDI

[Frank Glencairn]

Originally Posted by Chris Medico

Sony hasn't offered any details on what the 4k RAW itself will look like. We don't know if it will be a paid upgrade or a free one.
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I gonna eat a broomstick if it is a free update. Remember how much the S-Log was?

[Chris Medico]

Originally Posted by Frank Glencairn

I gonna eat a broomstick if it is a free update. Remember how much the S-Log was?

I do know such a feeling quite well as I own a F3 an purchased the s-log update at full price.

[Douglas Call]

I'm not so sure that the power draw would be any different, for the Sony FS700 since it already has the 4K enabled chip in it. I don't think it's going to take that much more juice to run when doing 4K than when in it's running in 1080p 35mm wide mode (that uses the full chip but at 1080p)

My JVC GY-HMQ10 doesn't seem to take anymore battery juice when I'm shooting 4K than when I'm shooting 1080 60p. So I'm using this as a basis for my above power consumption remarks for the Sony.

[Chris Medico]

I would not expect to see a lot higher power usage for 4k and maybe even a little lower. When outputting RAW the signal will skip several processing steps in the system and will need only to be encoded for transport on the SDI output.

[Buba Kastorski]

Originally Posted by Noah Yuan-Vogel

I assume you are talking about Scarlet? Scarlet is 4k raw for <$15k but it draws 10x as much power and requires 10x as much data recording to 10x as expensive media and has 1/10th as high framerates and doesn't perform so well high ISOs compared to the FS700. I am own a Scarlet myself but it is *almost* always very clear which jobs my Scarlet and which jobs my FS100/FS700 should go out on. They are very different cameras for very different projects. Tough to compare for sure.

I own scarlet too, and i agree that it is far from being perfect in terms of power consumption and low light performance,( and that freakin fan!) but the image is so good and so post flexible, it's hard to give it up once you got to try the taste of it, but I would love to see 4K from FS700 although i doubt that AVCHD can look better than raw, well, we'll see, it'll be very interesting!

[Noah Yuan-Vogel]

I was under the impression the 4k from the FS700 would only be available as RAW for external recording. Is there an expectation that 4k AVCHD would be part of the update? It would be nice to be able to record 4k RAW Externally while also recording 1080p AVCHD "proxies" at the same time.

[Chris Medico]

I like the idea of having 1080p proxies and it would be awesome if Sony gave us that feature.

RAW is RAW and won't be AVCHD. It could theoretically be lightly compressed to save some storage space but I would not expect anything beyond that.

[Betsy Moore]

Anyone want to start taking bets on when the firmware update happens (this year?) and how much they'll charge for it and how much they'll charge for the recorder?

[Douglas Call]

I hope it's real soon. I can't wait to start using the 3G/HD-SDI for 4K content capture directly. My JVC has either 4 separate HDMI outputs you need to record or 4 separate SD cards you have to deal with.

Recent Slow Motion Clip:

Ava SlowMo Captiva Island 2012 on Vimeo

[Chris Medico]

I doubt we will see the option go live this year.

I expect the firmware to be free and the recorder to cost $4.5k.

[Olof Ekbergh]

My bet is on the Gemini, for hardware if Sony shares the output from the 3G-HDSDI. I love the NanoFlash and the Gemini is very elegant as well. Currently Gemini is $6000 and uses SSDs.

Sony's version would probably cost 2X the camera cost and be big.