XDCAM-USER.com

Sorry about the earlier site outage. I do still have a problem with the forum but hopefully that will be fixed soon.

I was recently given the opportunity to use Sony’s new PDW-F800 on an airshow shoot. We had the camera for 2 days along with a beautiful Zeisss 6-24mm T1.9 Digizoom lens.
The F800 is very similar to the Sony PDW-700, it shares the same body and much of the same electronics including the sensors and laser deck. It does everything the already well respected PDW-700 does plus a few extras. The “F” in the F800 denotes that this camera is from the Sony Cinealta range.

Alister Chapman filming with PDW-F800

That means that it will shoot at 24P, well 23.98 to be exact, out of the box without having to buy any options. On the PDW-700 you can get 24P by getting an optional upgrade kit fitted, which includes a Cinealta sticker! The other key feature of the F800 is it’s ability to overcrank and undercrank, it can in fact shoot at any frame rate from 1 frame per second to 60 frames per second, something that the PDW-700 can’t do and won’t ever do. Picking up the camera for the first time I was reminded of how well balanced the 700/F800 cameras are. They sit very nicely on the shoulder with all the controls where you would expect them to be. Switch the power switch to on and within a couple of seconds you are able to shoot. As the PDW camcorders have a memory cache that can buffer video before writing to the disc, the camera can actually record images before the optical disc drive has spun up to speed making it very responsive. Even when the camcorder is in save mode there is no delay between pressing the record button and pictures being recorded, unlike most tape camcorders where it takes a small amount of time for the tape to start rolling.
Talking of cache record, this is one of the greatest features of the Sony XDCAM HD camcorders. On the PDW-700 and F800 you have upto 30 seconds of memory cache to play with. There is even a rather neat “Disc Exchange Cache” that allows you to swap discs without actually interrupting the saved recording, great for shooting stage shows on conferences. At the airshow I made good use of the picture cache to shoot aircraft engines being started. You never quite know when the pilot is going to press the start button. With a tape camera this meant pointing the camera at the plane and rolling lots of tape waiting for that moment when the engine starts to turn over. With cache record all you have to do is point the camera at the plane and as soon as you see the engine turning over press record, knowing that the previous 10 seconds (or more) are stored in the cache and will be recorded onto the XDCAM Professional Disc.
The Professional Discs come in 2 sizes, 23Gb and 50Gb. The 23Gb discs will record around 45 minutes of top quality 1920×1080 XDCAM HD 4:2:2 footage, currently they can be purchased for around £12 each which is less than HDCAM tapes, in fact they are not much more expensive than pro grade HDV or DVCAM tapes. They are incredibly robust and not affected by water and moisture in the same way that tapes are. You can re use them many thousands of times or simply keep them as you would with tape. However the format is still a file based format bringing with it a whole host of benefits such as faster than real time workflow, lossless copying, proxy files and metadata.
Anyway back to the shoot and the F800. One thing I wanted to play with was the S&Q mode. In this mode you can select the frame rate that the camera shoots at. I chose to shoot some crowd scenes, overcranking the camera and shooting at 60 frames per second. When you shoot above 30 frames per second the vertical resolution gets halved and I wanted to see how this looked. I am pleased to report that the overcranked material looks really good when played back. The motion is very smooth with no jerkyness and the drop in resolution is not all that noticeable. It’s certainly a reasonable price to pay for silky smooth slo-mo. One of the nice things about the F800 is that you can play back the slo-mo clips in camera, something that can’t be done with some of the competitions cameras! This means that if you were shooting for news and feeding a satellite truck you could playback your slo-mo straight from the camera without needing a computer to conform the material first.

Frame Grab from PDW-F800 with Zeiss 6-24mm DigiZoom

So what else can the PDW-F800 do that the 700 can’t? Well it has the ability to invert the image, this allows you to use 35mm lens adapters like the Pro35 much more easily and without needing picture degrading flip prisms. It can add markers such as safe area to HDSDi output No.2, this makes it easier to use an external monitor as a viewfinder. It has 2 filter wheels (the 700 only has one), one for colour correction and the other for ND filters. To be honest I like the single wheel system and then electronic control as on the 700, but having dual wheels does give a bit more flexibility and the option of adding extra diffusion filters or similar behind the lens.
Another one of the F800′s stand out features is the ability to superimpose a bar graph in the viewfinder that tells you how sharp the center of the image is. This acts as a focusing indicator and is very accurate. Simply adjust your focus until the graph peaks and you know you are as sharp as you can be. This worked really well when following fast moving aircraft as you could see the graph starting to drop off before you could actually see the slight loss of focus in the viewfinder. Very nice, wish I had that on my 700.
The PDW-F800 had the latest version of Sony’s XDCAM firmware, version 1.5. This has some nice new features including the ability to write the proxy files from the disc to a USB memory device such as a pen drive, memory stick or even hard drive. Another new feature is ALAC or automatic lens aberration correction. This does however need a lens with the appropriate digital hand shaking between it and the camera so I was unable to test it as none of the lenses we had would talk to the camera. However the Zeiss Digi Zoom didn’t really need it.
The pictures from the Digizoom were beautiful! Almost no CA and really rich. Its a seriously heavy lump of glass and not perhaps ideal for shooting an airshow, but it was a delight to use and the pictures are impressive. I’ve been doing a lot of research into lenses and lens choice recently. One of the things that I have discovered is that resolution is only a very small part of the whole HD lens equation. Of more importance than resolution is contrast, a lens that can provide very high contrast will show more detail than one that has less contrast. This Zeiss was one of the most contrasty lenses I have ever used, giving very rich deep blacks and solid highlights with very clean transitions from one to the other. Comparing the Zeiss with a Canon HJ11 the pictures with from the Zeiss just had a richness that wasn’t quite there with the Canon.

Frame Grab form PDW-F800 with Zeiss Lens

So would I buy a PDW-F800? Well probably not, but that’s just because I don’t normally shoot 24P and for occasional overcrank shots I can use my trusty EX1. But if you shoot drama or wildlife then the PDW-F800 would be a very good choice of camera. The picture quality is superb, the workflow is robust and reliable and the feature set of the camera is incredible.

The PDW-700 cameras are balanced for daylight optically and then corrected electronically for tungsten etc.

Traditionally cameras were balanced for Tungsten and then added colour correction optical filters to get to daylight. This was done as CC filters absorb light and thus make the camera less sensitive. Normally when shooting outdoors in daylight sensitivity is not an issue while shooting indoors under tungsten light you used to need every bit of sensitivity you could get.

The down side to this approach is that tungsten contains very little blue light so to get a natural picture the blue channel was often running at quite a high level of gain which increases noise in the blue channel and thus overall noise. In addition when you rotated in the CC filters to get to daylight the sensitivity of the camera was reduced, so you did not have constant gain.

With the PDW-700 (and also the F350 I believe) the cameras are essentially balanced for daylight, without the use of any CC filters, which helps reduce noise in the blue channel. Then for tungsten shooting you electronically re balance the camera. By doing this the overall sensitivity of the camera is constant whether shooting at 3.2K or 5.6K and you only get additional blue channel noise while shooting under tungsten. If you are worried by blue channel noise you can always correct from daylight down to tungsten with an optical CC filter (80A) and leave the camera set to daylight, although this will reduce the systems overall sensitivity by around 1 and a half stops.

The weather just dosn’t seem to be playing ball with me. I’m scheduled to fly out to Arizona to shoot monsoon thunderstorms on Thursday, but at the moment the weather forecast is for hot and dry, NO storms. Probably going to delay the trip.

Well the Bleriot shoot ended up being a waste of time. The weather was too bad for the plane we were following to fly for most of the day. When the wind dropped in the evening the French wouldn’t let the pilot take off.

Tomorrow I am off to France to work on a documentary about Mikael Carlson who will be flying from France to Dover in an original Bleriot XI aircraft as used 100 years ago for the first channel crossing. Should be an interesting day.

I got sent this link by Jay Gladwell (thanks Jay). It’s a series of really good clips about the way optics and video sensors work and about how resolution and contrast effect the way a picture looks. Well worth spending some time to watch it.

http://media.panavision.com/ScreeningRoom/Screening_Room/Demystifying_Part1_480p.html

Apple very quietly released Final Cut Studio version 7 today. It suddenly appeared on the apple store without any fanfare or fuss. http://www.apple.com/finalcutstudio/finalcutpro/
It dosn’t really appear to be a major release, more of an upgrade. Some of the key points for me are that there are no upgrades to the already aging DVD Studio , although there are new encoding options and export to BluRay disc within compressor. There are new Proxy and LT versions of Apples ProRes codecs designed to produce smaller sized files. There are new clip speed change tools. Live Type seems to have disappeared and been moved into motion.

So all in all not a major update, just a small upgrade.

Last weekend was the Royal International Air Tattoo. The largest military air show in the world. I’ve filmed this event many times and every year we try to do things a little differently to jazz things up. We have been shooting the show in HD for the past 3 years, this year it was entirely XDCAM with the exception of the minicams which were HXR-MC1P HD minicams. We had an EX1, EX3 and 3x PDW-700′s. As well as the usual extra long telephoto lenses we had a couple of gyro stabilized lenses including a schwem gyrozoom. While not an HD lens we found that the performance of the lens wasn’t too bad. There is no other lens that offers the degree of stabilization offered by the schwem so for the applications we were using it for we were happy to accept the slight softness in the corners. The application we had was to use it in one of the “Follow Me” vehicles used to marshall the aircraft around the airbase. The high point of this was doing a tracking shot of the recently restored Vulcan bomber landing at Fairford. To do this we drove along the taxiway parallel to the runway at high speed as the Vulcan came into land. Once it had landed we got some impressive shots as it taxied right behind us. The Vulcan is a huge aircraft and to have this bearing down on you as it taxies with all four engines running (they normally use only 2) is quite a rush! The Schewm is a long lens so the Vulcan completely filled the frame, despite this the gyro stabilisation kept the images rock steady. Over the weekend I shot aircraft startups and GV’s using an EX3, then the follow me stuff with the schwem and PDW-70 as well as flying and display footage using a PDW-700 and 42x Fujinon lens. The most reassuring thing is that as these are all XDCAM cameras we know they will all cut together well in the final edit.

I had an interesting trip last week to shoot some air to air refueling in a VC-10. As part of the build up for the Royal International Air Tatoo I went up to RAF Brize Norton to join a VC-10 tanker aircraft that was going to be flying to Fairford with the recently restored Vulcan Bomber. During the flight I was to get pictures of the Vulcan. However bad weather meant the Vulcan could not fly, so that mission was scrubbed. Not wanting to waste an opportunity it was decided to try to shoot a refueling mission instead. I joined the receiving aircraft on a training mission that was going to be used to allow several pilots to practice “prodding” or taking fuel from another VC-10. I was warned that this could be a rough and bumpy flight as sitting just 100ft behind another large jet was never the best place to be.

I took a seat in the cockpit jump seat as we flew to the training area. However on arrival we found that the aircraft we were supposed to take fuel from had a problem so had to return to base. All was not lost however as there was a Hercules that needed to practice taking on fuel so we became the giver and the Hercules practiced prodding our aircrafts refueling hoses and baskets.

The XDCAM EX1 proved to be the perfect camera for the shoot. The cockpit on the VC10 is not the largest of spaces so the compact size was a big help. I also had to deal with very high contrast as the light streaming in through the flight deck windows was very bright. I also used the Sony 0.7 wide angle adapter to get the whole cockpit in the frame. I really enjoyed flying in the VC-10 although it was quite sobering to go down the back and see the huge fuel tanks filling the fuselage. The aircraft had over 50 tons of fuel on board! I have been invited back to 101 squadron to try and shoot a prodding mission and look forward to flying in close formation with another VC-10.