XDCAM EX1 on the road blog

[Phil Bloom]

no this was the second one i got. But sony prime support are superb so am certain it will be back better than ever. Maybe they will turn it into an ex3 for me...

[David Elkins]

Originally Posted by Phil Bloom

Maybe they will turn it into an ex3 for me...

Then I'll be hoping my lcd goes out as well!!

[Dean Harrington]

would get these little problems out of the way~ paint hum! Ultimate 2 should be an improvement and the first one wasn't bad at all. I always said you deserve an EX3 ~ free!

[Dave Morrison]

I had to pack my EX1 up today and ship it back to Sony.....after only 2 weeks. I had one of the older serial numbers (102393) and the paint was coming off of the roller/select control already in spite of my trying to use the joystick instead. However, yesterday I found a piece of crud somewhere inside the lens. I never noticed it earlier but discovered it by shooting into an open blue sky, stopping down to around f11 to f16 and zooming all the way to the widest setting. Shooting wide open and zoomed all the way to telephoto would hide the crud or render it so blurry that you couldn't see it. When I viewed it on a larger monitor, I saw even more dust on the image. Depressing.

Also, what amount of Chromatic Aberation is considered "normal" with this lens? I can see very, very slight red and green fringes in some of my shots were there is a hard edged object in the frame. I'm guessing they will replace this lens or, like Philip, they will wave the Sony wand over it and magically change it into an EX3. ;)

[Andrew Hollister]

Phil
do you think you lcd dying has anything to do with the firewire issue? Thats how mine died.

[Jason Bodnar]

Andrew, what firewire issue are you speaking of...I have not heard of this nor seen a thread about it...

[Andrew Hollister]

I plugged a firewire cable into the camera while it was turned on, and proceeded to fry a circuit and my LCD and EVF died. Sent it back to Sony, when it came back I had a polite note warning about this.

A post on Blooms blog about it, http://tinyurl.com/6paztg

[Dave Morrison]

That is SO weird. It must be something else causing these shorts as there is no power on the 4-pin end of the cable.

[Andrew Hollister]

@Dave: 4 pin no power - THATs exactly what I said!

But Mark on Bloom's blog said it was a result of static charge. Pointing us to an ESD firewire protector...

BUT Bloom said that his Mac wouldn't recognize his 350 with the Kramer spike protector in line

UGH. This all happened to me the first month I had my EX1. AND the LCD and EVF died the night before a big 2 camera shoot. Again, thanks to Adobe OnLocation and its holy-crap thats a long delay for bailing my ass out of a jam.

[Dave Morrison]

I was really surprised that the EX1 only uses the Firewire for streaming output. I was hoping to speed up some of the file transfers out of the camera by using the FW port. I even tried hooking it up but my Mac did not see the camera nor the cards. Oh well, it's USB for me unless I'm sticking the cards into my MacBook Pro.

[Andrew Hollister]

it would have to be FW 800 to make a sh!t of difference, FW400 is actually a tiny bit slower than USB 2 (480)

The FW port IMO is quite useless, unless someone like Focus Enhancements delivers a Firestore with a huge hard drive... AND Sony updates the firmware to send all flavours of resolution beyond 1080i

[Phil Bloom]

Originally Posted by Andrew Hollister

Phil
do you think you lcd dying has anything to do with the firewire issue? Thats how mine died.

never used the firewire on me ex1. the evf was still working, just the lcd died

[Dave Morrison]

Originally Posted by Andrew Hollister

it would have to be FW 800 to make a sh!t of difference, FW400 is actually a tiny bit slower than USB 2 (480)

The FW port IMO is quite useless, unless someone like Focus Enhancements delivers a Firestore with a huge hard drive... AND Sony updates the firmware to send all flavours of resolution beyond 1080i

This thing gets kicked around quite a bit, but these speed differences are SO hardware dependent. Here's the Wikipedia entry on the comparison of USB and FW 400:

<begin quoted text>
Comparison to USB

Although high-speed USB 2.0 runs at a higher signaling rate (480 Mbit/s) than FireWire 400, typical USB PC-hosts rarely exceed sustained transfers of 35 MB/s (280 Mbit/s), with 30 MB/s (240 Mbit/s) being more typical (the theoretical limit for a USB 2 high-speed bulk transfer is 53.125 MB/s). This is likely due to USB's reliance on the host-processor to manage low-level USB protocol, whereas FireWire delegates the same tasks to the interface hardware. For example, the FireWire host interface supports memory-mapped devices, which allows high-level protocols to run without loading the host CPU with interrupts and buffer-copy operations.[17]
<end quoted text>

I don't really care either way. All I'm looking for is the fastest/safest way to xfer files from the camera to my desktop Mac without having to buy the reader. I'm loving the speed of the xfers using the ExpressCard slot on my MacBook Pro, however.

FireWire 800 is substantially faster than Hi-Speed USB.[18]

[Phil Bloom]

There is a new short up called "love from southend..." you can see it on my website and on my blog here: http://web.mac.com/philip.bloom/Bloo...hend_Film.html

Made using the new Ultimate prototype and it also talks about my failed attempt to do a dolly timelapse...that is the next challenge!

[Phil Bloom]

I have decided to run a little film short competition. To get people away from talking about specs and stuff and actually go out there and film.

Find out how to enter here:

http://web.mac.com/philip.bloom/Bloo...mpetition.html