I sent the link from top of this tread: http://www.dvuser.co.uk/content.php?CID=158 to a colleague and his response was “seemed more like a Sony marketing gush.”

Would anyone like to respond to that or thought the same?

Thanks

"Would anyone like to respond to that or thought the same?"

I'd say you friend has a loyalty to, perhaps, Premiere or FCP. I thought the article was typical of anyone who sits down and gives Vegas a shot. I think I gushed a bit the first time I sat down and took Vegas for a spin.

John

I think we all do it regardless of what the product is.
I flew a King Air for the first time recently; can't shut up about how good it is (see, I did it again).
Bought an AT 1800...IMO it's the bes thing ever for wireless.
While I use other apps, rarely do they "speak to me" the way Vegas does, and if you're using XDCAM, Vegas doesn't "speak" to you, it screams good stuff.

Damn, a King Air, now I am jealous, forget Vegas. The King AIr is one of the two aircraft I most want to fly left seat.. OK, the DC3 is the other. There just is no sound and climb like a King Air.

Hope you had fun!
KK

Awwww man! You just had to let me talk more about it. I loved it so much I now own part of it (90b)
With where the floater bar is on this aircraft, you can mount a V1U perfectly behind the portside wing while avoiding the prop wash. The interior is so large, bright, you can shoot inside very easily. It's not an Otter, but fun. Easy to move around in, as quiet as a twin turbine is gonna get, and FASST!!! The climb rate is ridiculous. Nothing faster in its class except the new PAC 750, and even that isn't much faster.
Didn't know you flew, Keith. Very cool. C'mon out, we'll go play in the blue. I've got camera mounts all over this thing. Manfrotto clamps are seemingly made for this.

One thing about a Twin Otter---it can fly on one engine, two engines or no engines, it can land and take off in roughly 50 ft, it comes equipped with wheels, ski's or pontoons. and it's kind of cute.
JJK

I love the Super & Standard Twins, too expensive, but they're now back in production, or soon to be. You can easily mount a cam internally with that aircraft. All the Remax, Disney, Superbowl aerials were shot with the Super Twin, using XDCAM HD inside the aircraft and HDV outside. The HDCAM EX would be great mounted under the wing on a Twin with that monstrous door. ;-) (Gotta stay on topic, y'know)

Somehow I've always seen Spot as more of a glider kind of guy.
Maybe I should say sailplane, I think that's what they're called in the USA.

Bob.

Nah...can't jump from a glider very easily. It's really a BASE jump instead. Opening the cockpit canopy in flight is challenging, not to mention illegal if someone exits. Can't wait to get back to Picton this autumn to play in their new PAC though. World Cup is being held in Picton/Syndey this year.
We'll be there with XDCAM EX.

Still More on the EX, indicating a formal announcement in July, for a September or October launch, with a price of "under" $8,000.00USD.

http://www.studiodaily.com/main/news/feed.rss/8017.html

They certainly are drawing this out. I would have bought it 5 years ago, if they would just get it out.

"I would have bought it 5 years ago, if they would just get it out."

Yeah well, 5 years ago much of the technology in the XDCAM EX didn't exist and anything close would have cost at least $100,000. Anyway, considering how much is involved getting it getting it to market, it doesn't surprise me that it will take another five or six months. I'm guessing that it may take that long for the flash memory manufacturers to build out the capacity to make all the new SxS modules that we'll all be wanting for our new XDCAM EX cameras.

When I mentioned 5 years ago, I was speaking retorically. I know fully that they could not have made this unit back then. It was the timing, or rather the LONG time delay that I was commenting on.

They PRE-announced it 15 April, with an announcement due in July, maybe. And then it will appear on the market in "September or maybe October, or maybe November.

My main "gripe" is that the PRE-announce things so far in advance that they:

1) Stop people shopping for just about any other Sony camera that would have competed;
2) Frequently disappoint those who sat around and waited and DREAMED when the product doesn't deliver heaven; and,
3) Give the competition an EXTRA long time to get their products on the development road, or modify their plans, while they fiddle with their own products.

If I were a company which had a really hot new product like the EX I don't think I would have a 6 or more month pre-announcement period before it was put on sale. Doesn't seem all that smart, to me. As a stock holder, I CERTAINLY don't like it.

Makes for lots of disgruntled non-customers, especially the ones that manage to believe that the pre-announced product is going to be more than it really is.

And the next probable "event" will be that they will pre-announce something else about the time that the EX gets to market, and the whole thing starts again. As a stockholder it makes me shudder.

"If I were a company which had a really hot new product like the EX I don't think I would have a 6 or more month pre-announcement period before it was put on sale. Doesn't seem all that smart, to me"

Oh yeah, that pre-announce marketing strategy has really hurt the interest in the RED camera. I would have liked to have seen the working RED camera at NAB, but I didn't want to literally spend over an hour waiting in line to do it. From what I heard from people that actually did wait the hour to get in, RED is going to deliver on every promise they made over a year ago when it was just a dream. Patience is going to pay off for the RED's customers.

I'm certain that the EX will be everything Sony says it will be. Personally, I appreciate that Sony has pre-announced this so far in advance. I, too, grasp and actually embrace the concept of delayed gratification. What would disappoint me would be to spend $8,000 on a soon-to-be-obsolete camera on Monday only to have Sony release the EX out of the blue on Tuesday.

I agree with John..
Sony learnt from pana that Solid state is the way of the future, and the workflow of solid state has ben proven, albeit rather disjointed due to Pana's wierd relationship with certain NLE manufacturers.
Many people have held off their purchases of the Canon H1, JVC and the HVX simply due to this annoucenment alone.. I am one of those.. instead of getting a H1 and a A1 as B roll, im getting an A1 NOW, and an XDCam when its released.. and with the tweakability of both cameras, making them match wont be an issue IMO.
Theres also the existing support from our favourite NLE< and fair enough its not 422 colour, but the XDCam format sure makes up for it...

the fact that teh speed of PCI bus cards are stupid fast (compared to p2) make this a viable solution to long form work. Thos eof us waiting for P2 to grow in capacity were heavily dissapoitned, in turn making that camera choice null and void.. if it or its components cannto do what i need it to do, then i'll look elsewhere.. i dislike HDV, but its there and its a workable format for waht i need.

The integration of a BD disc system with this workflow also allows the file type and structure to be integrated with Vegas, whereby instead of tape, we archive to disc, in turn those discs can be used to edit directly or with proxy through vegas DIRECTLY. Much like existing XD cam.. edit straight off the disc.. no need for stupid amounts of HDD space, however better than this, we have the fact that PCI3 buc is MUCH faster than PCI, and P2 is markedly slower.. Editing directly from P2 is vastly different to editing directly from XDCam/BD disc.. trust me
In the ned though, the PCI card which hold our footage are over 6 times faster than P2, so editrign straight off the card itself wont be an issue.. even on teh lowliest machine.
The point here..?? Choice..

THIS IS WHAT SOLID STATE editing is all about.. INSTANT editing with no friggin transcoding..

i cant say the same for P2 MXF as it either requires transcoding or runs like a bag of crap on even the highest end machine.. too many compromises to call it a true solution IMO
Fair enough on my edius SP and AXIO shop machines the bastard rips, but were talking over $12k for each system here..
XDCam only needs a basic Dual core CPU (hell even my single core HT CPU works a treat on 3 streams..)
So cost vs acquisition format, vs format workability.archivability vs NLE integration, vs delivery optins, vs time saved is the equation one must consider..
IMO, its a no brainer..

No, sony were smart.. build up the hype, and the interest, and stop people from buying anythign else until this is released.. byu the time this unit is released, BD authoring and HD will have penetrated the market even more than it already has..
No though at THIS time, we can see firsthand how it can work in the real world and offer a real world editing solution.
Long form short form.. it doesnt matter with this, with P2, your stuck. No P2 IS a good format, BUT your restricted to file sizes and you cant do with P2 what you can do with XDCam/BD discs and u cant edit as efficiently off P2 as you can off a PCIe card. (keyword is efficiently)
Like is said, this announcement has stopped people from buying cameras..

Put it this way, if the HVX wasnt so popular, this EX cam wouldnt exist, we can thank Pana for testing the waters here, but in the end, we needed a camera in this price range with this type of CCD/CMOS, with this recording format (or higher) with en editign solution which wont bust anyones balls

I guarantee you that this will penetrate the event market as soon as it hits the shelves..

we needed it and sony delivered.. now its just a waiting game

Oh yeah, that pre-announce marketing strategy has really hurt the interest in the RED camera. I would have liked to have seen the working RED camera at NAB, but I didn't want to literally spend over an hour waiting in line to do it. From what I heard from people that actually did wait the hour to get in, RED is going to deliver on every promise they made over a year ago when it was just a dream. Patience is going to pay off for the RED's customers.
IMO, Red's marketing is pretty good as they've gotten A LOT of people talking about their camera (and people lining up for their booth). At the same time, it doesn't look like they've spent much money on advertising... I don't see any ads in trade publications. They also did a good job by giving away lanyards to reservation holders at NAB- I saw a lot of people wearing those lanyards, giving Red free/cheap advertising.

I don't see the RED marketing as anywhere near the same thing. When you are selling cars, the next sports car is the EX, the RED is more like the Space Shuttle. Not the same thing, at all.

"Not the same thing, at all."

Uh... they're both cameras, both have been announced and neither is available for sale.

If it quacks like a duck...

The only campaign I've seen run that compares to the RED was the HVX and it runs a very distant second. Personally I'll take the way Sony does things over either of those. That's no comment on the cameras themselves, just on how the hype and the potential client's expectations are managed.
I find it a disturbing commentary on the current state of our society when a camera achieves the status of a religious artifact.

Bob.

Personally, I like Red's marketing because it means that you aren't paying much for marketing. The kind of marketing I dislike is campaigns that are void of useful information... like Sony's "like.no.other" campaign. It doesn't really tell me anything useful. The same goes for false/misleading information... though I don't think that Red has done that (perhaps except for subjective claims about being "better" than film).




Could you not replace "camera" with NLE? ;) I think a lot of folks on this board (myself included) have a certain level of religious zeal for our favorite NLE. ;) Though I think it's more passion than spirituality... people are passionate about certain things (and their beliefs that ___ is the best camera/NLE/whatever); but it's not like the gear is replacing spirituality or religion in anyone's life.

Bob, I think the iPhone crowd fits that crowd, also. Or anything Apple.

>>however better than this, we have the fact that PCI3 buc is MUCH faster than PCI, and P2 is markedly slower..<<

That's arguing numbers that don't mean anything though. The P2 card runs at 640 megabits per second. The SxS cards have a "target" rate of 800 megabits per second. You're not going to get "markedly" faster performance from the ExpressCard bus because the underlying memory technology isn't fast enough to take advantage of it.

Where SxS has the opportunity to provide higher throughput is in that it uses smaller data rates for its footage. The actual bus speed of the cards themselves is very comparable.

>>Editing directly from P2 is vastly different to editing directly from XDCam/BD disc.. trust me<<

I agree. With P2 I can edit six streams of 1080 HD simultaneously. Editing from a disc you could only get one. The SxS offers the potential of even more streams because of the lower bandwidth of each stream, as long as your processors can cope with the workload of uncompressing the MPEG-2 data.


>>THIS IS WHAT SOLID STATE editing is all about.. INSTANT editing with no friggin transcoding.. <<

Agreed. That's what Vegas can do with P2 right now if you use Raylight (and Premiere Pro can do as well with Raylight or with Axio), that's what Avid and EDIUS can do too -- edit straight off the card, immediately. Put the card in, drag the files to the timeline. This is the way it should be done. It's only FCP that requires changing the file format, and it's a ridiculous limitation. There's some talk that maybe in FCP6 they'll actually pull their head out of the sand and support it the way they're supposed to.

Any other workflow is just silly. Editing straight from the solid-state media is the way things were meant to be.

>>i cant say the same for P2 MXF as it either requires transcoding or runs like a bag of crap on even the highest end machine..<<

This is completely the opposite of my experience. I can edit four streams of 1080 simultaneously, from the card, in real time with no dropped frames, on my Sony Vaio laptop (hardly a top-end machine, it's a 2GHz Core 2 Duo.) No transcoding, no waiting, immediate performance.

There's nothing about the MXF wrapper that slows anything down. The DVCPRO-HD codec is extremely fast to edit. A quad G5 Mac can handle up to 11 streams of 1080 HD simultaneously (but, admittedly, they require changing the wrapper). I would expect you could get 11 streams out of EDIUS on a comparable system (meaning, CPU only, no hardware boards or whatever).

This is not in any way meant as a "P2 is better than SxS" post, this is only to clarify some of the things you've said that are directly opposite of the real-world experience I and many others are having every day. I agree with you about the silliness of transcoding and unwrapping/rewrapping; I see people on FCP struggling with that and I just shake my head. I pull out my laptop, fire up Vegas 6, and plug in a card and drag files straight to the timeline and edit. It's that type of workflow that's going to change everything.