Sony announces the XDCAM EX

[Chris Hurd]

Originally Posted by Paulo Teixeira

4,000 dollars is pretty steep for your average person.

Thomas Smet took the words right out of my mouth, in his post above... XDCAM EX is not at all intended for the average person.

A unit like this should cost 1,000 dollars and the discs would only be around 10 dollars each...

We're already there. It's called AVCHD.

[Paulo Teixeira]

Sony should at least make a portable Blu-Ray drive that is compatible with HDV and AVCHD if they worry that having compatibility with the XDCAM EX may threaten the sales of XDCAM drives. In this case, a laptop with a built in Blu-Ray drive is your best solution if you’re on a tight budget and there are already drives that are 4X write speed, that’s a little over 4X real time. Basically 1 hour of XDCAM footage will take just under 15 minutes to burn to a disc.
Its too bad Apple doesn’t offer a Blu-Ray drive as an option yet.


Still, like a lot of people are hoping, having compatibility with something similar to the PDW-U1 is a very smart move even if it costs up to 5,000 dollars. I can really see a market for this.

[Greg Boston]

Originally Posted by Paulo Teixeira

Still, like a lot of people are hoping, having compatibility with something similar to the PDW-U1 is a very smart move even if it costs up to 5,000 dollars. I can really see a market for this.

Where are you getting these 4 or 5 thousand dollar prices from? I believe the PDW-U1 is expected to sell for around 3K. Again, the XDCAM EX is not a consumer product and the necessary support equipment isn't going to be showing up at your local big box store with dirt cheap, loss leader pricing.

The PRIMARY market for the PDW-U1 is going to be as a stand-alone ingest device. This is something many post-houses or broadcast facilities can invest in for taking in XDCAM HD without owning dedicated XDCAM HD decks. The decks have their place, but for a facility that just needs to take in the occasional client supplied XDCAM HD footage, the U1 is the right ticket at the right price. And don't forget, when it first comes out, it won't even support writing to disc. That functionality is expected via a software upgrade early next year.

-gb-

[Piotr Wozniacki]

I don't know if this has already been announced whether the EX will write proxies in SxS cards?

[Paulo Teixeira]

Originally Posted by Greg Boston

Where are you getting these 4 or 5 thousand dollar prices from? I believe the PDW-U1 is expected to sell for around 3K. Again, the XDCAM EX is not a consumer product and the necessary support equipment isn't going to be showing up at your local big box store with dirt cheap, loss leader pricing.


-gb-

That’s only because I heard someone say 4,000 dollars for the PDW-U1 so I added up to a grand to that for a unit with more features.


The real point I was trying to make since the beginning, is for Sony to release a portable XDCAM unit so that you don’t need a computer, that’s it.

[Leslie Wand]

just in passing....

i shoot for a number of organisations, incl. national broadcasters. i don't see them paying for cards!!! in house stuff maybe, but stringers and run and gun - no way..... tape is alive and well....

leslie

[Bob Grant]

Our ABC just bought close to 100 HVX200s, guess they'll be buying at least some cards for them.

[Leslie Wand]

well hello there bob, fancy meeting you here!

they might have bought them - but are they going to send me one or two cards up when they want me to shoot? do i send them mine? we're not talking $10 tapes here, and i've had experience with ALL the major broadcasters not returning tapes, let alone cards....

leslie

[Brian Standing]

I bet the workflow will be more like: shoot on flash, transfer to XDCAM disk, portable hard disk or Blu-Ray DVD and send THAT to the network, rather than the flash card.

Yes, it's an extra step. But keep in mind that this should be a relatively speedy file transfer operation, rather than a real time capture.

And who knows? Maybe the flash media will eventually get cheap enough that you can treat it like tape.

[Alex Leith]

Although transferring off the XDCAM EX cards could potentially be very quick, transfer to XDCAM disk is just under twice as fast as real time at 35Mb/s. So if you've shot 90 minutes footage, you're still going to need to find almost an hour to transfer to XDCAM (by the time you've setup the transfer gear).

[Brian Standing]

Hmmm... I didn't realize writing to XDCAM disc was so slow.

Hard drives should be pretty fast, though. They're getting cheap enough these days that they're starting to rival tape in terms of cost per gigabyte.

I could envision handing off a $40 portable SATA drive with several hours of footage on it as a reasonable media for broadcast use.

[Brian Mills]

At NAB I asked the Sony guy the expected price point, and he said it would be more than the Z1, maybe in the $7-9k range. I saw this thing (okay, in a glass case) and it was pretty impressive looking (large, well built looking). I don't think you should expect this thing to come in at the prce range of an FX1

[Greg Boston]

Originally Posted by Alex Leith

Although transferring off the XDCAM EX cards could potentially be very quick, transfer to XDCAM disk is just under twice as fast as real time at 35Mb/s. So if you've shot 90 minutes footage, you're still going to need to find almost an hour to transfer to XDCAM (by the time you've setup the transfer gear).

I think the newer gear is going to be much faster. What XDCAM device are you transferring to in that example above? That's one of the advantages of shelling out for the F-70 deck is that it has about twice the file transfer rate as the camera (F330/F350) does.

With the new flash cards, using an express card 34 reader, you should get some very fast transfer rates onto your hard drive. You can then do a long term archive to professional disc at a later time of your choosing.

-gb-

[Alex Leith]

Originally Posted by Greg Boston

I think the newer gear is going to be much faster. What XDCAM device are you transferring to in that example above? That's one of the advantages of shelling out for the F-70 deck is that it has about twice the file transfer rate as the camera (F330/F350) does.

With the new flash cards, using an express card 34 reader, you should get some very fast transfer rates onto your hard drive. You can then do a long term archive to professional disc at a later time of your choosing.

-gb-

Theoretically all single laser XDCAM HD products are limited to 72Mb/s. I've never used the PDW-F70, so I can't comment about that - but the best you could ever hope for out of a single-laser unit is about twice real-time (if you're working with 35Mb/s material).

Dual-laser systems are capable of 144Mb/s, but they'll be more expensive.

You're absolutely right about hard drive transfers potentially being much quicker. Using a 160GB Hitachi 5K 2.5in drive (faster across the whole platter than their 7K drives) you could sustain a transfer speed that maxes out Firewire 400 - thus transferring 35Mb/s footage at about 11x real time (transfer 90 minutes of footage in 8 minutes).

I hope Sony integrate a hard drive controller into the EX (like the HPX500) so that the camera could control "dumb" portable hard drives to dump material onto over firewire...

[Mark Williams]

I've been following with much interest the press on the upcoming EX as I think it might be my next cam. So I was really excited today to recieve Sony's XDCAM HD Disc Set and could finally get a good idea what XDCAM HD footage looks like on an SD DVD. Wow what a disappointment. I was playing it back on a high-end JVC player and 32 " Aquos LCD which was properly adjusted. Colors were drab and contrast extremely low on the Iditarod video. Orange/red colors, can't tell which, seemed to bleed. Snow was dingy and not crisp. This is contrary to everything I have read about the F-350.

What's going on here, do you think I just got a bad disc?

Regard