Sony announces the XDCAM EX
 

I thought the web magazine following link might be of interest.

http://www.studiodaily.com/main/video/8017.html

In particular, the accompanying video from NAB
with a Sony rep being interviewed about the camera.

That guy is much more than a rep....he is Hugo Gaggioni, their Chief Technology Officer. Hugo is a compression guru that really knows his stuff.

-gb-

What we know so far...
3 x 1/2" Sensors (New advanced high resolution sensors CCD? CMOS?)
XDCAM format, 35 Mb/s (MPEG-2 MP@HL, Long GOP, 1440 x 1080 or 1280 x 720)
14x Fujinon lens - fixed. Manual zoom, focus, and aperture / iris.
SxS (ExpressCard using PCIe) flash memory storage - 2 card slots.
16 GB cards available now under $400 each, 32 GB cards available in a few months
Price - under $8K
Official announcement / details expected July
Availability / launch (IBC?)

I'm a noob - and know it. So my ignorance shows. What a surprise.
But at least you looked - so the post wasn't a total waste, I hope.

If it was under $4K I would be more impressed. How long till this gets here again?

Check out the video that Bill Koehler linked to...
http://www.studiodaily.com/main/video/8017.html

In this video, Hugo Gaggioni said "we are going to do the official launch of this camcorder in July, and at that moment we will release much more information."

Here's what's cool...The V1u shipped a bit in December and more in January at around $5000. By late April, with a $300 mail-in-rebate, it was going for $3500 or so. I asked my local dealer, and she said it's because the camera was very popular.

If the EX starts at $8000, and sells well, I could see it dropping in price within a few months. We saw it with the HVX200. I swear the camera cost $8000 and now goes for, what, $6000?

heath

50 Mb/s and 422 unlikely for the EX since it appears they have reserved that for the much more expensive 2/3" XDCAM HD model. Sony has to protect their higher end models.

July! Darn it I can wait that long... I need more info NOW. :-D

Although the details will be finalized and 'official information' will be released in the July timeframe, the shipping date is still slated for mid to late fall.

-gb-

Bill, I wouldn't have known Hugo either before late November '06. I had the pleasure of receiving a 3 hour presentation from him on compression technology and why Sony chose MPEG2 long GOP for XDCAM HD.

-gb-

I hope we will see it live on the IBC.. we can touch &tryout the camera in a showdisplay on a tripod or something with some nice girls to focus on -;)
Sofar with mentioned price, i'm in love and maybe this camera will be for me the final step from SD to HD.

Erik

I will freely admit that a camera like this is strictly drool material.
As a practical matter the price point is simply way out of my league.

But also as a practical matter I am intensly interested in the
transition to flash memory as a recording medium.

Tape has well known problems. No need to rehash.
If you have a builtin hard drive, what do you do when it fails?
None of them so far is user replaceable. It's not like you go to
BestBuy, or anywhere else, and pick up a notebook drive to pop in.
So replacement/repair is very expensive.

But flash should be far more reliable than either.
And if a stick fails, replacement is easy.

What does interest me is a camera like the Canon XH-A1 being updated
with this sort of technology. And this is a technology that would be very
easy to migrate downward to consumer camcorders.

I haven't had any reliability problems with tape since the 3/4" days. However, I do think different things will eventually replace it, but not for many years. The high end HDCAM and Varicam cameras are going to continue using tape for a long, long time, and so are the HDV cameras.

With its complete system, ie., not just the camera but the cheap XDCAM disc burner that allows you to make XDCAM HD discs of your footage from the SxS cards, Sony has made a tapeless workflow actually useable for people like me. There's still the hassle of having to load the data from the cards to a computer and then burn the discs, but at least you have a way of getting the contents to disc easily and economically. It would be better to get an XDCAM HD F350 and record directly to discs, but a guy can buy the EX and the burner for half the price of the bigger camera. Actually, when you throw in a decent lens for the F350, EX looks even cheaper.

My first Betacam camera with lens cost about $40K. The current DVCAM package was about $25K. The two decks were $10K each. The XDCAM EX is only $8K. Assume another $2K worth of cards, and about $3K for that XDCAM disc burner (it can be networked, so no need for two in our place), and switching to XDCAM HD is a no-brainer for us when we get ready to retire the old camera.

The only question will be, is the cost savings of EX worth the hassle of having to spend the time burning all the footage from cards to discs, or would it be best to spend more and go for the F350.

Bill, you only have to burn to disc if you want that as an archival medium. Otherwise, you can store the stuff on your hard drive if you trust it as an archival system. Some folks say okay, while others say nay. As cheap as hard drives are getting, setting up a mirrored RAID for integrity wouldn't be a totally bad idea.

-gb-

What discs do you use if you're shooting on 8 or 16 gig cards? That would have to go to one of the HD DVD formats, wouldn't it? My understanding from other boards is that you can't go into the folders and split up the data without creating problems.

Sony has made a cheap XDCAM Disc burner for capture (well, transfer) and archiving on XDCAM Discs. I guess it will have automated software.

BTW, when is this camera supposed to be released??

Bill,

Sony has it's own BD (Blu-Ray) disc format for XDCAM in 23gb and soon 50gb size. There is also a unit about the size of an external harddrive that will allow you to dump your XDCAM EX footage via computer (not sure if it will allow you to just go straight from the camcorder or not; I doubt it). This is a great option for archiving (though expensive at $3500.00)

Todd

Hopefully the V1 will go to $2K to $2.5K in an line shakeup, so the production cost saving XDCAM EX falls to $3K to $3.5K in short time. This really allows for an big growth expansion opportunity fro this new format in future, 4:2:2 35mb/s, 4:2:2 50mb/s, 4:2:2 10-bit 50mb/s, 4:4:4 50mb/s, 4:2:2 10-bit 75mb/s, 4:4:4 75mb/s, 4:4:4 10-bit 75mb/s, 4:4:4 10-bit 100mb/s, not to mention an switch to AVC. Tape is so inflexible, compared to file systems that take an range of rates. That's many years of camera upgrades.

For those who haven't read it yet, there is an article on XDCAM and the XDCAM EX at:
http://www.broadcastnewsroom.com/art....jsp?id=148318

The part I found interesting is following in quotes from the author Mike Jones:

"XDCamHD EX shares all the specs of its disc-based sister; MPEG-2 IMX, 18, 25 and 35mbps. We assume the new 4:2:2 color sampling Sony announced at NAB07 will be part of all future XDCam HD products including EX."

Maybe this is the surprise I've heard hinted at?? Who knows, interesting though.

I've been wondering, with the XDCAM format, is progressive also written within 1080i as PsF - like the 24/25/30p on the V1, for instance?

Well that first sentence is DEFINITELY wrong! It's MPEG2 Long GOP, not IMX. The IMX is found only on the PDW-530 SD XDCAM camera and is 30, 40, or 50 mbs with 4:2:2.

I think the author got his wires crossed.

Update: I read the article in question, and the author has posted a response to the original with the corrections. So Gabe, you got your hopes up for nothing.

-gb-

That portable xdcam recorder does sound expensive, but it also makes archiving your footage pretty simple. So assuming you had your laptop, the recorder, and bunch of xdcam disk with you - it'd be pretty simple to transfer your footage to an archival medium when out in the field.

Should hopefully mean that dropouts are a thing of the past!

You might as well have a laptop with a Blu-Ray drive built in. This is why Sony must make the portable drive compatible with the XDCAM EX. I know that XDCAM discs might be more reliable than standard Blu-Ray discs but you will save a lot of space this way.

Since Sony already makes a stand-alone consumer DVD burner, and there are many units out there that will take a memory card and transfer the contents to a hard-drive (portable media players and video storage units - both consumer priced), I figure it won't be too long before someone makes either:

1) a portable hard drive that lets you dump memory card data to it. These are already out there and primarily used to put photos or movies onto a hard drive, then take it to your livingroom and play them on a TV. Since the new cards will be made by many manufacturers and should start showing up on most new laptops, I expect there will be machines of this type that accept the EX's cards within 6 months or so. Consumer units should run about $300 maximum.

2) a stand-alone unit like #1 that uses a blue-ray DVD instead of a hard-drive. For those that don't trust archiving your material to a HDD, this would be optimal, right?

I would want something like #1 but with a removable hard drive. I just picked up a 1TB drive for less than $250 and would have no issues loading up a drive and setting it on the shelf to archive my footage. I already do it with smaller drives (mostly 320GB and some 500gb) and like to keep one project per drive since they are now so very cheap.

OK, that's my hope for the future. I am very excited about this new camera and am already bugging my local rental house to get some - so I can try one out before purchasing.

Just my $.02 (or probably only worth $.01 or so...)

Andrew

I can't help but feel that the need to offload to HD in the field not going to be something that is quite so in demand.

The XDCAM HD cards are much lower in cost and have a higher capacity (in terms of minutes of recorded footage) than P2.

Many people will be filming less than 90 minutes of recorded footage per day. And even if you average 2 hours per day you only need 3 x 16GB cards ($300 a piece). Okay so $900 isn't the price of three HDV tapes, but it's more within the financial grasp of lower-end PSC camera-jockeys than 135 minutes of P2 cards.

I'd quite happily spring for the extra cards just to avoid the headache of working out where and when I'm going to shift my footage from card to HD.

A lot of the freelance work I’ve done were over 90 minutes of shooting and if your producing a documentary or a film, you may need a minimum of a few hours of footage each day and there is an event that I want to tape overseas that may be up to several hours of footage each day for around 3 days or more. For that situation I would obviously get a laptop to dump my footage but it would be a lot quicker if they had a portable XDCAM unit. You mention that you can always buy more memory cards if you need longer hours but for my case I would have about 15 hours of shooting and if it lasts a whole week, that’s about 35 hours of footage. Now that’s a lot of memory cards. Sony should also make a more economical unit that uses standard Blu-Ray discs instead because 4,000 dollars is pretty steep for your average person. A unit like this should cost 1,000 dollars and the discs would only be around 10 dollars each since you can already get 25 gig Blu-ray discs for fewer than 15 dollars apiece.

We have many dance concerts every November and December and we are looking at these cameras for good low light performance to take over from Vx 2000's. (FX 7 is just not good enough for dark concerts)!

The longest concert is just under 4 hours, with three cameras, repeated next day! Last year I had 24 hours of tape to wade through!

So you can see I'm VERY interested in economical workflow for these cameras!

Cheers Vaughan

I don't think it would be quicker or more convenient to have a portable XDCAM disc unit in the field (I'm guessing we're talking about the professional media discs rather than hard drives...?)

It's not going to run at much faster than real-time. If you shoot 3 hours of footage in a day, then generally you're working pretty flat out - and I'm guessing you're not going to easily find another 3 hours to offload footage from your cards. You could double up on your cards, but by the time you've done that you can shoot your 3 hours anyway! If you're working with a laptop at the end of the day that's more practical as transfer speeds are going to be faster (given that an HD can transfer faster than Sony Optical Media), and you don't have to interrupt your flow if (like me) you're working without an assistant to help transfer files in the field.

Well thats why the camera is targeted at the pro market. It isn't aimed at an average person. XDCAMHD is in no way designed to be cheap for everyday people to use. $4,000 is not a bad price considering my old DVCAM decks cost more then that and the tapes were about the price of what a XDCAM disk costs. Thats the price of the pro market.

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.

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

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.

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-

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

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.

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

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

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

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.

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).