http://www.bebob.de/international/zoe-EX_e.htmlzoom control[/link]

http://16x9inc.com/products/chrosziel/ac-450-ex1k.htmlmattebox[/link] or 110:91mm ring.

We are planning on transferring to a hard drive ASAP but I would have no less than
3 cards as while one card is being used the other one can be swapped.

Z1 battery won't work in the EX.
You'll need extra.
Memcards? Prolly at least one extra, dumping card to a laptop is very fast though, if you have an Xpress port on the laptop.
Gotcha's?
Power switch sucks, IMO, and cover for SDI port could have been more intelligently designed/attached.
I don't care exactly for the way the screen works, but it works. Makes it tougher for mattebox.
I wish it had more assignables/button for PP's. That would be nice. On the flip side, today we did tests on blue against the F900, and everyone was blown away. It did better than the 900 did.

"did tests on blue..."
Not to get off topic here, but does that mean you did some chroma keying tests?
Is blue better for these cameras (than green)?
I thought green was the colour of choice for the digital formats...
(I'm asking because I plan on doing a lot in the very near future.)

Sorry Vic. I don't want to hijack your thread. Jump back in there and bring us back on target.

While I am real excited about this camera it does have limitations. It is only 8-bit so no full color gamut and Bob reports that when trying to get more detail in the blacks and highlights by selecting gamma curves/knee etc. it does not have the data rate to properly process the middle which looses contrast. Of course, the better cameras we get the more we want and to take care of these two issues probably means spending a whole lot more.

EDIT: I may wait until there is cheaper 16meg media. The current 8 meg as full HD gives a max of 25 minuets, so to shoot 2 hours hot swapping one needs five 8meg SxS cards which are not cheap yet and no generics either.

I've got an extra battery on order and am counting my pennies for a 16 gig SxS card but lemme just say that I friggin love this camera. I've always been passionate about what I do but the EX1 has taken it to a whole nother level. Just about every other day I grab the camera and head out to shoot with no real subject in mind, it's done nothing less then completely changed the way that I look at things. And I can say that every time I go out on one of these little random little shoots I am simply stunned by the images I see when I get home. I even went out and got the smallest bag I could get just so I could keep it simple on these occasions. While matte boxes are nice and I'd love a 35mm adapter, it's been liberating to just get down to basics and still have footage that I'm as proud of as anything I've shot.

And the workflow, thats probably half the reason I've felt free enough to just wander around getting random shots. No tape to mess with, no capturing (in the traditional sense anyway).

I'm not saying it's a perfect camera but I personally cannot emphasize enough how amazing of an experience it has been to use. There may come a time when a bit of the charm and "newness" wares off a little and mayhaps in a couple months I won't be wandering around town shooting random buildings, skylines, and storefronts, but the fact that I'm doing it at all blows me away. I've been pretty giddy about new cameras in the past and would always do a bit of shooting to test the camera or get used to it but not solely for the sheer enjoyment of it all as I have with the EX1.

- Ray
www.undergroundplanet.com

Ray:
What did you jump up from? I'm wondering if you had an HDV camera like the FX1 and if so where you see the improvemnt.
Have you compared the full HD to the 760p?

Very happy with mine.
Obvious things that others have mentioned, extra big battery.
Matte box AND ND filters. This is a very senestive camera and we've found in our harsh sun the camera is regularly saying Too Much Light and we've got nothing left to turn down. Only an issue if shooting 24/25p with 180 deg shutter. Figure on needing ND 1.8, maybe even a ND3.0 and that's a LOT of ND combined with the ND2 filter in the camera.
Plenty of time to test, test, test. More image tweaks than you'll likely want to deal with.
A HD SDI monitor could come in handy.
If you want 10bit 4:2:2 recorded from the camera, Convergent Designs XDR CF recorder would be a nice addition, at $5K it's a bargain.

Bob.

"If you want 10bit 4:2:2 recorded from the camera, Convergent Designs XDR CF recorder would be a nice addition, at $5K it's a bargain"

Bob, explain plea. Sound interesting. You can get 10-bit out of the EX1? At full HD?

Mike

"Bob, explain plea. Sound interesting. You can get 10-bit out of the EX1? At full HD?"

The SDI port feeds 10bit 4:2:2. Sony have stated it's the real deal, not 8 bit paded to 10bit. I've yet to read of any independant verification that it is true 10bit as it's not trivial to test this. This is only of real use if recording live, needless to say.
The XDR will record that at a minimum of 50Mbps, all the way to over 100Mbps using Sony's XDCAM codec. I don't know if Vegas will handle this. It'll probably read it OK but ditch the last two bits and and process it as 8 bits. Again not real easy to test this.
The XDR records to CF, the unit has 4 slots. Expect to spend a fair bit of money on fast CF cards as well as the cost of the XDR. The XDR will run off batteries.
Cineform also I think have announced a recorder at lower cost than the Wafian (it's over $10K). Again far from certain if Vegas could handle the codec.

Bob.

In answer to the original question, for someone of Vic's expertise, is to get hold of one and try it out. The camera picture profiles are extremely flexible and learning to use this flexibility is a steep curve when coming from less professional cameras. Not helped by Sony's whimsical descriptions such as "calm and quiet effect" instead of graphs (for various gammas). One can get very wide brightness latitude with the cine gammas (no more blown-out clouds) and I was surprised to be able to keep outdoors detail in an indoor shot (window in shot). Being on holidays I can't comment on how all that handles in post, but it is very clear that one should do as much processing as possible in camera -- that is, set up the look you need so the 8 bits contains the data needed for that tweak in post.
You can upload data from the cards, so you can store more specific picture profiles than the 6 allotted, but such an upload will revise all camera data as well as PP. However not a problem if only PPs are different.
The camera is sold with an 8Gb card, so an extra two 16Gb cards would be recommended. The Chrosziel matte-box for the Z1/FX fits the EX, without problems with the LCD. I machined a little out of the transition piece to allow it to fit over the lens (as it did on the Z1), but not necessary.
Very nice camera, with reservations on the fiddly buttons. Looks like it has resolved my hankering to return to film and the immediate penalty is struggling up that learning mountain.

I'd like to endorse Ray's enthusiasm about the camera. Whilst I like to think I've always been careful about frame composition etc, knowing the quality of image I can now get makes me reapproach shooting in a much more "photographic" way.

Yesterday I received my double DVD set "Mastering the Sony PMW-EX1" from Vortex Media, featuring Doug Jensen, and even after one viewing I've learned heaps of new techniuques/details. He even, afer showing how to ingest for FCP on a Mac, has a section on how to do it with Vegas Pro 8. Vegas really seems to have leapfrogged the other PC NLE's in context with this camera - I hope the Madison gang continue to take advantage of this with future streamlines/updates.

Regarding SxS cards, I'll probably get a 16 Gb card when they become available at "reasonable" cost, but ultimately I'm looking forward to owning two 32 Gb cards. Does anyone know when this is likely to be possible?

Peter

If you're looking for a matte box Cavision have built one specifically for the EX1 and it's a screw onto the lens or mount on rods unit. For the basic box with adaptors you pay under USD 600 which is pretty affordable. I have no idea of the quality but from the pictures it looks pretty decent.
We've also found our old original Formatte 500 MB fits nicely. No options for rod support and it is a very big MB, take care in strong wind when using one :)

Peter,
I think the 16G cards are still pretty new, the 32GB cards might be some way off but I'll try to get an answer for you. The good news is the Sandisk 16G cards are out and USD100 cheaper than the Sonys. When the 32G cards come out I'd expect the 16G cards to drop in price. I'm not buy either anytime soon. The 2 8G cards are enough for me except for concerts and then I can record to my M15 to get 4.5 hours per tape. SP is more than good enough and the extra low light performance of the EX1 should be a huge bonus.

Regarding gamma curves etc, there's a sticky thread at DVInfo.net for people to post custom settings etc, worth a regular visit.

One thing worth a mention only because it's rarely mentioned. The XDCAM codec uses PCM audio which is an improvement over HDV's mpeg-1 audio.

Bob.

Bob:

It;s 5:33 here pacific time so maybe it being weekend you did not get to bed yet. I'm even more intrigued and more confused now about the 10-bit out from the SDI. The manual says that the SDI out signal is the same as the recording format and the brochure says that color sampling is 4:0:0. If you can get 10-bit signals out of this camera then why would only 8-bit be recorded to the SxS cards? Surely if 10-bit was available you would use it. I must be missing something here so could you expand. I'm looking at the Cavision matte box; very good value I think.

.

Still working hard :)

It's all about datarates. Most high end cameras including the EX1 I think internally have 14bit A->D converters. Sure it'd be nice if we could record that but that's a monster amount of data.
From that they can get 10bit 4:2:2 and feed it down HD SDI, that's about all a single HD SDI connection can handle. To go better than that I think you're into dual link HD SDI and there's not much point squirting that down a pair of cables if the other end cannot handle it and today a recorder to cope with that'll set you back around $100K. Seems a kind of dafty option to have on a $10K camera me thinks.

Same goes for what gets recorded to the SxS cards. They have to be able to write the data at a SUSTAINED data rate that keeps up. That's harder than you might think, don't forget you can delete clips and keep recording so the data gets fragmented, that involves reading allocation tables which is more bandwidth being sucked up while you're trying to record. So to get a reasonable record time per card and to keep the SxS cards at a reasonable price they've gone for 8bit 4:2:0 recording at upto 1920x1080, not to shabby at all. I recall Sony saying that in overcrank you can be writing data to the cards at 200Mbs. If you compare that to P2 cards which only let you record 1280x1080 but at 4:2:2 and fill up very fast, you're doing very nicely.

You can hang the XDR recorder off the EXI and record a higher quality signal BUT it uses 4 CF cards in RAID 0, they'll fill up pretty quickly at 50Mbps and you're writing to 2 at once. Great option but realistically could cost you more than the camera. And don't forget having recorded something you have to edit it.

Bob.

Thanks Bob:
I understand and have learnt a lot in your few words. I've been reading how the JVC 200 series outputs full-res 4:2:2 from the SDI terminal. However I have read all the EX1 literature I can find and have had no reference to the EX1 doing this. Do you have a reference to this?

Mike

Page 127 of the manual specs the SDI output of the EX1 as conforming to the two SMPTE standards.

From there on is where it gets messy. The HD SDI spec I believe says you shall have 1920x1080 4:2:2 10bits. If you don't you haven't met the SPMTE spec and whatever you connect the signal to almost certainly will not work with it. Just the same as DV over firewire.

The thing that this doesn't tell you is what's inside those bits going down that coaxial HD SDI cable (or a firewire cable for that matter). Sony have said yes, we're taking that signal from a full 1920x1080 image, the chroma sampling is full 4:2:2 and the quantization is 10bit, we're not padding 8bits into 10. Given that the chips in the imager are full raster it's very likely this is true. However more than once these kinds of claims have been made by marketing departments who've just looked at a spec for how something is being recorded and taken that as the beginning and end of the story. In this case there's not much reason to doubt what's being claimed. Still I wouldn't take it as gospel until someone who knows what they're doing independantly tests and verifies it. Same goes for the JVC 200.

To look at it another way around. Last night I digitised a VHS tape over firewire. What ended up on my HDD is 720x576 8 bit 4:2:0, it has to or it's not going to work. That doesn't mean that what was on the VHS tape magically becomes the same quality as whats on my HDD from the day befores capturing where the video is from a big DVCAM camera.

Bob.

>>>>Regarding gamma curves etc, there's a sticky thread at DVInfo.net for people to post custom settings etc, worth a regular visit.<<

Custom settings can be useful but do not provide knowledge. Working through all the permutations is one way to learn the system, but very slow to do and may not yield understanding. It's a common problem for video DPs and undoubtedly why there are specialists in the subject. Gamma curves are just a small and the easiest portion of the possible manipulations available. I know VASST is putting out a training DVD on the camera in which they work through these things, but I don't know at what depth.

And with so many factors to play with that's why I think truthful monitoring is important and I'd like to know to what extent the EX1's LCD can perform that role. I believe from what I've read that the EX1's LCD goes some way to doing this. This is important to me as I'm looking for cleaner and more detailed blacks than I get with the FX1. The best thing I've read about this camera is Serena cry of "no more blown out clouds"! Because I'm looking for shadow detail I'm always blowing clouds so I hope your right Serena.

Here are a couple screen caps of some clouds I shot with the EX1, pretty happy with em.

Clouds Pic 1

Clouds Pic 2

- Ray

www.undergroundplanet.com

Good to see your camera isn't affected by the VinDieseling problem.

Bob.

Presently I'm on dial-up and haven't downloaded your cloud images. The thumbnails show sky images, which I assume are your shots. Look good, but really want clouds as part of a normal scene. The EX makes it easy, but keeping cloud detail in a normal scene is quite possible with the FX as well. In fact someone recently interrupted a showing wanting to know how I maintained cloud detail in a shot and my general answer was that I didn't over-expose. I also use cinegamma, but the FX has only one. However I agree that holding clouds together with deep shadow detail is asking a lot with the FX.

EDIT: the LCD on the EX is good and will allow checking of image settings, but it is small and that is limiting. I daresay one could use the expanded focus and examine parts of the field of view. Or zoom in without changing aperture to separately scan the shadow and highlights in the FOV. Haven't tried that technique but will check.

Custom settings can be useful but do not provide knowledge.

A very good comment.

I remember a long time ago, a newspaper owner got the idea to save money by having the writing journalist take photos also, so the paper wouldn't have to pay for two people on assignment.

So the next day the journalist, now on assignment at a racetrack, called one of the photographers at the newspaper and asked, "What's the right exposure to use for horses?"

The photographer hadn't been told about what was going on, but immediately figured it out. So he said, "1/8 and f/2."

This of course resulted in the journalist coming back with massively overexposed shaky horse photos, none of which could be used.

The greedy/frugal owner quickly saw the light, and "f/2 for horses" was a legend for decades afterwards.

It seems to me that the collections of standard settings for video have something in common with this. I can't help thinking that there just is no substitution for really really knowing your camera.