Looks and sounds very good, best watched in 720p. Pretty good for the money too.
We're hanging out for the "pro" version which will hopefully have XLR inputs and full raster HD SDI. Even HDMI would keep our clients happy.
BTW, Sony have admitted they have a pig nose 3D camera coming 'sometime soon'.
Truthfully... 24p is an old has-been that needs to die. 30p isn't really supported by anything out in the real world, and 60p is still too far out in left field to be taken seriously.
Regardless to what this cam shoots for a format though... the video presented is quite stunning.
The footage looks amazing, even though the image is first captured as 30p progressive video, then encoded as 60i interlaced (which makes for less efficient compression), then deinterlaced for display in 30p on computer screens, LCD TVs, LED TVs, Plasma TVs, iPads, iPhones, Android phones, etc.
(It can still do 60i playback on a CRT TV at the Museum of Television and Radio, although normal CRTs can't handle 1080 lines with full resolution.)
Really amazing that they chose interlaced even today. You'd think they would have forcibly laid the last TV engineer to rest by now, with a silver stake through his heart and a 50 lb. bag of garlic on top, just to be safe from more interlacing.
24p is an old has-been that needs to die.
So you don't think it's an aesthetic choice?
30p isn't really supported by anything out in the real world
Umm, except computer screens, video projectors, LCD TVs, LED TVs, Plasma TVs, iPads, iPhones, Android phones, etc.
If so hardly much of an issue, just tell your NLE to do a field merge and the problem is solved. At least in Vegas this is a doodle, everything will be processed as 30p and the you render out pristine 30p.
My only concern is that if the camera has been designed to record interlaced video correctly then the vertical resolution is going to be limited to around 800 lines.
1080-30p and above is not supported by the Blu-Ray spec.
HD 1080-anything is marginally playable on many computers, and requires a ridiculously high connection speed to stream without interruptions.
OK, we can shoot it. Now what?
Deliverability first.
... but no RAW
So what's the point about spending 2000 bucks so far ?
I won't even get into that ''stunning sound quality'' cause I know people will shoot with that cam and still be asking how they can get rid of that wind noise or how they can boost that 150 feet away guy's voice ...
Again, a jack of all trades, master of none ''very well marketted'' item to me.
At the end of the day if something is delived as interlaced or progessive is largely irrelevant. 30PsF60 will look the same as 30p anyway.
I cannot speak for 1080p30 on BD however although not formally covered in the specs and as revealed here some time ago 25p works just fine on BD disks, I have no reason to imagine 30p would also not work.
For those who say modern displays are always progressive that's wrong too. Decent LCD monitors can correctly display interlaced video.
Interlaced dates from the 20s.
Everything that will ''adapt'' to that is just a backwards compatible thing.
And to me, it' HAS to be more of a broadcaster's problem than mine.
The faster we'll get rid of this, the better it will be.
Just getting rid of that ''which field order should I use?'' topics would be one of the benefits.
"The faster we'll get rid of this, the better it will be."
Well sooner or later we WILL get rid of it, we're just not there yet. As stated 24p is old and does not offer any kind of "smoothness" and 30 p is nothing but a stop-gap because we can't completely handle 60p as of yet in any kind of universal fashion.
"Okay... frame rate or resolution... make up your mind which one you want to discuss here.... "
Sorry but I thought we were discussing a camera.
So far from what I know about the camera it acquires 30 frames per second, splits those frames into fields and records that as 60 fields per second. You can put that directly to air as 60i but it will still look the same as 30p.
Editing such footage on a 60i is not entirely wise as you can end up with an oddball mess with truly interlaced dissolves and FXs. This can cause heartburn for de-interlacers and scalers. Generally better to do a field merge and edit on a 30p timeline. From that you can split into fields and output 60i or not split into fields and ouput 30p. If you wanted 720p30 then all that's involved is scaling the frames.
As I said before though all of this is just basic video science and is quite irrelevant to any sane discussion about a camera. What matters is how the sensor is scanned in this context.