OT: I'm in Love!

Coursedesign wrote on 12/5/2007, 8:11 PM

Went to the DV Expo in Los Angeles today.

1. After much pawing, I fell totally in love with Sony's XDCAM EX. I can't recall seeing such a solid camera below $15,000 ever. It just feels incredible, and there is much to fall in love with. Show price $6,490.00, 1 1/2 - 2 weeks delivery. As big a step up from current cameras as HVX200 (now selling for $4,950) was, imho.

2. Then I fell in love with Sony's PCM-D1 portable audio recorder. It has a titanium body and truly excellent built-in stereo mikes (and can use external mikes too). I listened to acoustic recordings, and they had lots of "air." Absolute, instant love. Great to work with, too, for too many reasons to share here.

I also tried out its younger brother, the PCM-D50. Good sound, but no "air." Of course the MSLP is $599 instead of $1999, but this would be more of a friend than a lovee.

Oh, and the new BVM LCD HD reference monitors are as good as they say too.

The DV Expo? I lasted two hours. Very few exhibitors. Exhibitors were not happy, and most booths seemed to have the most expendable employee on duty. And no great show specials, no great totally new products.

I think there's a good chance the current (few remaining) exhibitors won't sign up next year, so this may be the last DV Expo. Buh-bye.

Back to post

Comments

John_Cline wrote on 12/11/2007, 2:10 AM

Someone could make a small fortune off of developing a device similar to a portable Firestore DV/HDV hard disk recorder, only replace the drives with SD flash cards. The tiny device could have two SD card slots on it. Ideally, you could swap out a full card for an empty one while the program continues recording to the other card. Each slot could have a red and green LED to indicate if the card was in use or if it was safe to remove. Since there's no hard drive, the thing could run for days on a Sony 970 battery.

The Sandisk Ultra II cards can easily do 10+MB/sec, which is more than fast enough to do DV or HDV. A 16GB SDHC card is currently $109 at NewEgg.

Just a thought...

Grazie wrote on 12/11/2007, 2:25 AM

John! Exactly! Great idea . .great idea.

Now, KEN , - you get the backing from some of your venture people and have John's idea branded and manu-ed in .. er . . CHINA?

We DO have the technical, engineering and pure talent on THIS BOARD - we certainly have the ideas and the chutzpah.

John? You gotta an idea on the retail price? I'm in!!!

Grazie

Grazie wrote on 12/11/2007, 2:30 AM

Oh! John, while we are ion this tack, how about ALL the waveform and editing s/w on the same chip too?? I am not jesting.

We are so much in the middle<>passage from electro-mechanical evolution to full-on solid SOLID state that this period will be laughed at in years to come. Years? Did I say years? Any takers on how long this passage is gonna be? Or maybe THAT has been etched out in silicon by the accountants 5 years back?

John! Great idea!!!

Grazie

farss wrote on 12/11/2007, 2:45 AM

Convergent Design have such a device already, the soon to be released XDR recorder.
Four CF slots, records using the Sony XDCAM codec at bitrates upto over 100Mb/sec, does 4:2:2 from HD SDI. Nice companion to the EX1. Cost will be around USD 5K which is pretty reasonable for what it is.
To look at this another way, you get higher quality recording than the most expensive XDCAM camera for around USD 12K for an EX1 + XDR. As always optics and imager quality will become the limiting factor.

Bob.

John_Cline wrote on 12/11/2007, 5:10 AM

That sounds like a great device, but what I was hoping for would be something inexpensive. Something every DV and HDV user could afford. $5k is a bit too much. I was thinking somewhere in the $250 to $350 range. How difficult could it be to come up with something simple, elegant and inexpensive? On the other hand, I guess if it were easy then Bella could have deliver their Catapult by now.

Bill Ravens wrote on 12/11/2007, 5:48 AM

To blazes with the Convergent design product. It's only input is HD-SDI. I had quite a discussion going with the CEO about this. They're aiming at the high end (re:ENG) market. OTOH, the Cineform we all know and love is designing a similar product that works on CF cards, with an HDMI interface. Est cost ~$2k.

farss wrote on 12/11/2007, 6:02 AM

It's around the price of 4 16GB SxS cards!

Inexpensive no, cheap considering what it gives you though.

I figure with the EX1 by the time I add all the extras I'd like I could easily blow another $10K. When you look at it from that perspective it doesn't seem that expensive. Clearly the unit is targetted at people with HDV cameras with HD SDI ports, so I guess that determined the speed of the encoder and probably a large part of the cost along with the HD SDI interface. The latter alone seems to account for about $1K cost of a product. I am still surprised that Sony are letting them use their tech in the product, maybe they're paying a hefty licence fee as well.

Possibly once they get this unit rolling, they'll look at a version that records from HDMI, that would have to be significantly cheaper to reach the target market.

Keep in mind Convergent Design are pretty much just a father and son business. Didn't seem to be rolling in money when I've met them, can't even afford a decent web designer.

Bob.

Bill Ravens wrote on 12/11/2007, 6:25 AM

Guess if I had to choose between a new EX1 and the C-D CF card recorder, I'd go for the EX1, to me it would be a no brainer. The very fact that Sandisk co-developed the SxS card for Sony is a pretty clear sign where solid state storage is headed. And the other makers, Transcend, Lexar, etc will follow along as soon as there's a market. PCI bus cards are already available to update a workstation to read express 34 memory cards, ala SxS. No need to buy the $250 Sony reader.

So, we all have a ton of CF cards lying around the studio. But, I think other cam makers will pick up on the SxS, tapeless concept. Prediction:Within a few years we can expect significant drops in SxS card prices and significant increases in card capacity.

Video cam and video accessory buyers tend to fall into two broad categories.
Category one: low budget availability one person businesses or private owners
Category two: hi end, hi budget users who generally work for someone else

The pricing strategies for a product and the buying philosophies differ greatly between these two groups. I happen to fall into category one. I have a budget that has to consider the useful lifetime of an expenditure.

John_Cline wrote on 12/11/2007, 6:42 AM

I plan to purchase an EX1 as soon as I can get my hands on one and I'll be buying some SxS cards as well. The point of the device I described would be to add solid state capability to the hundreds of thousands of DV and HDV camcorders already out there. An SDHC card is plenty fast enough for the job and a 16GB SHDC card for $109 looks pretty attractive to all the "Category One" folks out there. I'd like to get a little more life out of my PD-150 and my V1u. It isn't going to be long before a flash memory card will cost the same as the data storage capacity of an equivalent number of DV tapes. I just want to see tape go away for good.

Tim L wrote on 12/11/2007, 10:31 AM

This article: http://www.camcorderinfo.com/content/Sony-Delivers-Two-New-HDV-Camcorders-for-the-Pros-Wishlist-33639.htm talks about two new HDV cameras from Sony that include a new, detachable recording unit that records to Compact Flash cards (while the camera itself records to tape like normal).

Sony's Bob Ott comments that the unit might be able to work with other camcorders as well (via Firewire), but so far the device is only announced as being packaged with the new cameras.

Tim L

John_Cline wrote on 12/11/2007, 11:12 AM

That looks very interesting. For my own purposes, I wish it had two CF slots so I could be able to swap cards during recording so that I can get more than 72 minutes of continuous recording time. Nevertheless, it's a step in the right direction.