XDCAM-USER.com

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 and F800′s are sold body only, so you have to choose which viewfinder you want. there are 3 choices. A cheap HDVF 200 mono CRT finder that is 480+ lines resolution, the mid range (top of the CRT range) HDVF-20A which is 500+ lines resolution and then there is the expensive colour HDVF-C35W.
I got the HDVF-20A. The viewfinder is a critical part of the package and I wanted a good viewfinder. For the past year my main camera has been my trusty EX3 which I love. This has a really good colour viewfinder with an excellent colour peaking function and image magnification. When I use my EX3 it is rare for me to not get my pictures pin sharp and spot on in focus. Plus I can frame my image taking into account both black and white contrast range and colour contrast. With the EX3 judging exposure is easy, you can see when your overexposing as you can see colours washing out. If I don’t want (or can’t) take a colour monitor on location then I really can light an interview or check colour balance without just using the EX3′s finder.
Now with the PDW-700 I am struggling. Going back to a mono CRT has been a bit of a shock, to be honest I am struggling with it. It’s not that there is anything wrong with the HDVF-20A but I have become used to working with a colour VF. I’m not sure I can live with the CRT VF for very long. I guess I am going to have to start saving my pennies as I think going back to a mono CRT is a retrograde step. I just wish the C35W was a little cheaper. Perhaps Sony could bring out a VF for the 700/F800 based on the rather good EX3 finder.
If I was making the purchase again I would opt for the more expensive C35W. I no longer see a colour VF as a luxury but more of an essential item. When you work with cameras day in – day out you want the tools that make your life as easy as possible and a good colour VF is one of them. On it’s own the C35W may seem expensive at £5.5k compared to the £3.5k of the 20A, but in terms of the total packing it’s another 10% to the cost but in retrospect I think it would have been worth it.

Welcome to XDCAM-USER.com. I hope you find this site useful. If you are a user of any of Sony’s XDCAM products I hope you will join in the discussions and chat in the forum. There are also pages of reference information and instructional video clips and sample footage.