Advice on Sony PXW X70

MartinE wrote on 4/11/2017, 3:14 AM

I may be in the market for a new camera later in the year and starting to look around. I do run and gun, church events and weddings. My Canon xf100 has served me well for a few years with no complaints and the mpeg 2 MXF files edit like butter but the single 1/3” sensor can only do so much. I’m interested in the Sony PXW X70 and it’s 1” sensor. I’ve searched this forum a bit and the main issue seems to be the codec. I use Vegas Pro release 453, can it read the XAVC files from this camera. I don’t want to edit the native files (any flavour of H264 is too much for my low powered laptop) but I would like to batch transcode off the timeline using vegasaur to MPEG 2 MXF 50mb/s and use these from then on. Does this sound a workable workflow? Anyone got actual experience of using the XAVC files in Vegas? Also with the 1” sensor focus will be more challenging, anyone had experience of the auto focus on this camera, I use AF a lot. Maybe I’ll hire one and try it out but wondered if anyone has real experience of this cam.

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NickHope wrote on 4/19/2017, 6:49 AM

Are you sure Nick? It had a rather small sensor and has been surpassed by the Z150, which indeed is a great camera too.

That's what I thought too when I saw the number "150" but actually the Z100 will shoot XAVC-Intra 60p at true 4K while the Z150 is limited to XAVC-L 30p at UHD. Big difference! I think the Z100 might also "win" in terms of bit-depth and chroma sampling but not sure without more research.

The smaller sensor of the Z100 I actually see as an advantage in terms of depth of field and focusing, which is usually harder underwater than above.

On the other hand the Z100 is probably rubbish in low light. I haven't used one but some reviews say that. It's also much more costly on storage, but conversely that's probably the key reason for the higher recording specs.

Part of my liking for it has been because of this great zoom-through underwater port for it, which is unavailable for other 4K cameras.

NAB starts on Saturday so who know what will come along then.

OldSmoke wrote on 4/19/2017, 9:13 AM

I can see your points. When I got my AX100 in 2014, I took it to my usual camera rental place and we compared it to the at the time top of the line Z100. The image quality of the AX100 was on par and better at low light with less noise at higher gains.

MartinE wrote on 4/19/2017, 5:54 PM

More tests on xf200 tonight in low light. Canon have included a custom picture file called S/n or something which has a lot of noise filtering. Works very well. Virtually no visible noise at 9db gain and only very slight smoothing of the image. So low light footage may be usable out of the box. Since noise was the only negative for me with this camera it's looking good. The on screen waveform monitor is very clear and useful. Not sure if other cams have billy in scopes.