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IMPORTANT UPATE REGARDING NOISE AND SENSITIVITY: See section highlighted in red below.

Hi all. Well I have got a Canon XF305E for the afternoon. Wish it was longer, but they are like hens teeth. I’m going to be writing and updating this as I go, so please keep coming back for the latest updates and post a comment if there is anything you want me to specifically look at.

Out of the box, first impressions are that it is big. 20% bigger than an EX1. The body is dominated by the very large lens which also has a sensor of some kind to the left of the lens barrel. I assume this is to do with the autofocus system. I hope so as it would make Matte Box use very difficult.

Overall it feels very well made although there are a few bits that could be better. It’s possible to put a battery in the battery compartment incorrectly so that the camera will work unless you knock it and bump it, then the battery connection is lost. You really need to have the camera down on a flat surface to be sure the battery goes in right. In addition there is a pair of really heath robinson looking springs at the back of the battery compartment. Considering this is about the most expensive camcorder in it’s class you don’t expect cheap and nasty springs like the ones fitted in the battery compartment.

They look like an after thought.

The flap that covers the battery feels cheap and plasticky compared to the rest of the camera body and I would be worried about this breaking off at some point. However if it does break there is a separate battery catch that holds the battery in place.

Looking at the lens my first point of confusion came when I pressed the zoom rocker and nothing happened. I turned the calibrated zoom ring on the lens and the lens zoomed in and out, but the rocker did nothing. So I looked for the zoom servo switch. I didn’t find one but did find the “Zoom – Rocker – Ring” switch. Switched it from ring to rocker, pressed the rocker and the zoom works…….. but….. now the zoom ring does not turn or move, so you can have one or the other but not both. The iris ring has no markings and is of the round and round servo variety so you need to look at the (very nice) LCD screen to see where the iris is set, the same for the zoom when set to rocker.

The focus system is not that dissimilar to an EX with both calibrated manual and non calibrated manual/auto operation. On an EX you slide the focus ring forwards and backwards to switch from full manual to servo control. On the XF305 you have to take your hand off the focus ring to operate a small push button that allows you to rotate the lens body to switch between manual and servo. It’s not quite as convenient as the EX but is easy enough to do. There is a problem with this however. If you set the manual focus ring at say infinity, then switch to the servo/manual/auto focus and use that, when you switch back to full manual the lens will return to the last position you set the focus to. OK, fine, that’s the same as an EX1R, BUT on the XF305 you can’t see the focus scale in the focus window when you are set to servo/auto so you have no idea what the focus is going to do when you switch modes unless you can remember where you last set the manual focus.

Just like an EX1 when you hand hold the camera it’s bulk puts a fair bit of strain on the wrist as it want’s to fall forwards and to the left. There is no adjustable hand grip rotation and the record start stop button is a little low down for my thumb. The hand grip is also quite small and angular. I think the EX1R is a lot more comfortable to hold.

If your using the XF305 on a tripod there is only a single 1/4″ threaded hole in a small plate on the bottom of the camera, much like the original EX1, so don’t overload it or you may end up breaking the plate. Perhaps Curtis at Juiced Designs will do a strengthening plate for the XF305. Do camera designers not read forums and look at what happens to cameras when used in the field?

Behind the hand grip there is an array of BNC connectors for SDi, video out, Genlock and timcode. Full marks for using proper BNC connectors here. Behind these are a whole bunch of floppy cheap plastic covers over HDMI, USB, headphone, AV, remote and mini component connectors.

So here’s the footage: http://www.xdcam-user.com/samples/xf305-ex1r.zip it’s a 300 Mb zip file containing a Sony BPAV folder with 3 clips and the matching Clips folder from the XF305 with 3 MXF clips shot at the same time. They are the raw clips straight from the cameras.

If you decide to download the clips I would appreciate a small donation to cover the hosting and bandwidth costs. It’s not a requirement, but would help keep the site running and make me more likely to put up big files in the future. If you click on any of the frame grabs below you will be able to view a full resolution frame grab.

In use the large LCD screen is clear and easy to see. It flips out from under the handle on both sides of the camera which is really neat.

The multi-coloured graphics all over the screen do make it a little cluttered but these can be easily turned off. The XF305 can also display waveform monitor and vectorscope plus a 3 zone waveform monitor all of which are very useful tools to have (LCD screen only, not rear VF). While looking at the LCD I realised that just like the EX1 the microphone and in this case the LCD as well, stick out beyond the end of the lens. Why do camera manufacturers do this? It makes fitting and using a Matte Box so difficult. Doh! Having the LCD screen so far forwards could present problems for Matte Box users.

XF305 Default settings

Where the EX1 and EX3 have picture profiles the XF305 like most pro Canon cameras has a number of “Custom Picture” memories. There are 6 preset memories for you to dial in your own looks plus “Video C”, “Cine V” and “Cine F” setups. The Cine V setup was really soft and Cine F just had a quite flat look, however I didnt really have time to explore these fully. I did try Alan Roberts recommended settings and these are very nice and I would recommend them as a good starting point for really making the XF305 sing. Within the CP settings you can choose from 4 standard gamma curves and 2 cine style gamma curves. The Matrix is fully adjustable so it should be easy to roll your own custom looks. Another setting tucked away in the CP menu is the noise reduction. The XF305 has some very clever noise reduction that is clearly doing a good job of controlling the noise that is normally be associated with a small sensor camera. You can choose between Automatic nose reduction and 8 steps of reduction. If set to 8 however the noise reduction is very hard and the resolution drops way down.

EX1R Default settings

The pictures from the XF305 are very good. At 0db they are quite similar overall to those from an EX1. They do have a different colorimetry to Sony’s camera’s (which I always find a little yellow) and are pleasing to look at. Clearly the lens is very good, CA is well controlled but there is some quite obvious barrel distortion between fully wide and 6mm, but it’s no worse than an EX1R and really to be expected from a camera at this price point.

Barrel Distortion and Corner Softening

I also found some noticeable softening in the corners fully wide which appears to be worse on the left side of the image than the right.

When I was looking at the lens distortion I was zooming in and out using the zoom rocker, then I went to turn the zoom ring just to tweak the zoom and of course nothing happened. This zoom rocker or zoom ring, but not both way of operation really sucks.. am I missing something here? While on the subject of the zoom rocker I was asked about how it was with slow creeping zooms. Well it’s very good. I did find that you have to press the rocker a long way past the center point before anything happens, but once the zoom starts to operate you can get a slow creeping zoom. But to then go from the creeping zoom smoothly to a faster zoom is tricky as a tiny bit more pressure on the rocker leads to a rapid increase in zoom speed. It seems that there is a very large dead area where the zoom rocker does nothing and then all the action takes place in the last few millimeters of its travel. It almost feels like the zoom speed is in steps, not entirely variable. I’m sure it’s not and with practice perhaps I could master it, but it’s a little touchy. The EX1R isn’t perfect either. The zoom rocker can be a bit twitchy when trying to do a creeping zoom, but in this case I prefer the EX1R zoom over the Canon. If you do choose to use the zoom ring to control the zoom there is some serious lag between turning the zoom ring and the zoom happening. For slow zooms this may not be an issue, but crash zooms are very difficult to execute. The iris ring also as some lag which makes fine tweaking of exposure a little harder than it should be. The last couple of years I have become so used to the EX1 and EX3 lens with its great feel and proper zoom and iris rings that this is a real let down. Overall I think that optically the Canon lens as a small edge over the EX lens, there is less CA and a greater zoom range. But ergonomically I much prefer the EX1R lens.

XF305 Alan Roberts CP

Latitude is very similar at 0db between both cameras, I couldn’t really see much of a difference either way. UPDATE There are some differences in image sharpness and noise however. Please see this clip (Vimeo or  YouTube) for some examples, generally Vimeo is better quality.

If anything the Canon 305 at first glance appears a little sharper than the EX1R, but looking closer and examining the footage as well as resolution chart results shows very similar resolution from both cameras. However the XF305 pictures contain a lot of quite visible, very fine noise that’s constantly buzzing around at all brightness levels. This very fine noise is easily mistaken for extra picture detail, which it is not.

It’s really interesting to look at side by side comparisons of the EX and XF footage. With the same clip, trees and foliage from the XF appear to be more detailed, but step through the footage frame by frame and you see the XF foliage is actually full of this fine noise compared to the EX foliage, this makes it appear sharper as it adds a fake “texture” to the foliage. But I can’t actually see any extra real detail in the XF foliage. Taking the same clip and looking at the parked car, again the XF shows a lot of noise, but in this case you can clearly see the car is a little softer in the XF footage than the EX. These differences are not so much down to resolution differences, but down to noise and noise reduction working in slightly different ways in the two cameras plus differences in the detail settings.

XF305 and EX1R at +12db

Turn up the gain on both cameras to +12db and the difference is even more striking. Click on the image to the left to view it full frame or look at the clip I have prepared (Vimeo or  YouTube). I find the fine, busy, noise from the XF305 a lot more objectionable than the more blocky noise that the EX1R generates. The XF305 also shows some black speckles similar to those found on the Panasonic HPX301.  Given that the XF305 is using small 1/3″ sensors this kind of performance is not really unexpected. The XF305 probably has the best front end of any 1/3″ camera currently on the market, but controlling noise on small sensors is harder to do than with large sensors and IMHO it still doesn’t perform as well as the EX’s with their  larger sensors.

In addition the EX1R’s larger sensor helps it capture more light making it 1.5 stops more sensitive than the XF305. So in low light you will tend to use more gain with the 305 than with an EX. It has been pointed out that the XF305 lens is about half a stop faster than the EX lens which does help the 305 little, but if low light performance is important to you do choose wisely. You can increase the noise reduction on the XF305 to combat the noise but this also softens the picture, especially when used at the higher settings.  If you download the raw footage you can zoom in and see the differences for yourself.

The differences are small, but they are there. The Canon is noisier looking while the Sony appears a little softer, but I’m not convinced that it is, I thinks it the XF’s noise giving the impression of a sharper image by adding texture to many surfaces. I personally would take the cleaner image as you can more with this in post production.

I also shot some clips with the XF305 and a NanoFlash as well as the EX1R and a NanoFlash. At 50Mb/s it was very hard to tell any difference between the XF305 and 305/NanoFlash recording, which is what you would expect. If anything the NanoFlash footage may be just a tiny bit less blocky. Comparing the XF305 at 50Mb/s and EX1R/NanoFlash at 50Mb/s the EX footage was quite a bit cleaner with less mosquito noise and macro blocking. If you click on the side by side image on the right you can view it full screen. Look at how much cleaner the EX footage is, but also look carefully at the brickwork. I can tell you that in the moving video clip the bushes in the XF305 clip are full of fine noise, on the frame grab this looks like fine detail, but it’s not.

The EX footage recorded on to the NanoFlash at 50Mb/s is cleaner with less macro blocking and mosquito noise, this is probably due to the very fine noise from the 305 stressing the codec harder than the low frequency noise from the EX. At 100Mb/s the EX1R looked really good indeed.  The test footage was shot at 25P and even though the XF305 is recording at 50Mb/s 4:2:2 against the EX1R’s 35Mb/s 4:2:0 the visible difference in the rushes is negligible.

The rear viewfinder on the XF305 is a bit better than the rear finder on the EX1R. It’s bigger and I found it very nice to use, however I could not get the waveform monitors etc to appear in the rear finder, only the LCD screen. The menus are logically laid out, I didn’t find them as straight forward to use as the EX menu’s but then I have been using EX’s for some years now so it could just be a case of them being different to what I’m used to.

CONCLUSIONS

So what do I think? Well the XF305 is a very good camcorder. It produces very pleasing images recorded at 50Mb/s 4:2:2. Is it better than an EX1R? Well I don’t think that overall it is. Is the EX1R better then? On it’s own, no, but with a NanoFlash, yes. There are bits of both cameras that I like and dislike. The EX1R is nicer to hold and more compact, it has a better zoom rocker and record switch. The XF305 has a better zoom range and less CA (Chromatic aberration) but I would not enjoy the way you have to choose between the zoom rocker OR zoom ring and can’t have both. The 305′s zoom and iris rings are a little sluggish to respond and the iris has no calibrated markings so you have to rely on the viewfinder or LCD. The 305′s LCD is really very good and I like the way you can flip it out either side. The EX1R’s rear finder, while perfectly useable is not as good as the one on the XF305. The picture quality from both cameras is very good. Different…. but good. The 305 has a slight edge on it’s out of the box look but it is visibly more noisy than the EX1R and it’s easy to confuse the very busy fine noise that appears across the whole image as fine detail. The EX can be dialled in to give great pictures too. As a side note with the EX going in to the Picture Profiles and increasing frequency to +40 helps sharpen up the foliage in the EX pictures. Both cameras have some noise in the images, at 0db I think the EX has the visual edge and looks cleaner, at higher gain levels above +6db the XF305 noise becomes more and more objectionable compared to the EX1R. At 0db the XF305′s fine noise is stressing the codec a little. An EX1R recording to a NanoFlash at 50Mb/s produces a much cleaner image with less mosquito noise and macro blocking.

If your thinking of buying either it’s a tough choice. The XF305 has genlock and timecode in, which the EX1R does not have. For that you need to get an EX3 which is more expensive, but then you can also change the lens. I certainly don’t see any reason to swap my EX’s for 305′s and the similarly priced  EX1/NanoFlash combo is an extremely powerful tool offering the benefits of dual record, HD and SD recording as well as higher bit rates. In addition NanoFlash 50Mb/s files are compatible with the XDCAM HD optical disc system, which the Canon files are not. The XF305 has smaller sensors than the EX1 so controlling depth of field will be a little harder, also you will get image softening due to diffraction effects about a stop sooner with the 305 but this may or may not be important to you.

In Summary:

Optics: Canon

Ergonomics: Sony

Pictures: Sony (cleaner, less noise)

Workflow: Sony (Because it’s faster (with SxS) more mature and you have backwards compatibility with Optical Disc XDCAM HD)

Canon XF305 and Sony EX1R side by side tests from Ingenious TV on Vimeo.

I’ve spend a couple of days putting a PMW-320 through it’s paces. The 320 is the latest addition to the XDCAM EX line up. It’s very much like the PMW-350 which I reviewed in depth last year, the principle difference is the sensor size. The PMW-350 is 2/3″ while the PMW-320 is 1/2″. The camera can be purchased with or without a lens, the supplied lens is a Fujinon 16×5.8mm HD lens that has both autofocus and manual focus. The lens mount is Sony’s standard 1/2″ hot shoe bayonet, so owners of DSR300′ or PDW-350′s etc can use  their lenses directly on the PMW-320. As with the 350 the lens that comes with the 320 is pretty good. Nice and sharp and with a good feel to it considering the cost. It does however suffer from flare under harsh lighting and this can soften the picture a little. A good lens shade or matte box with flags would really help this lens.

Externally the 320 and 350 are almost identical. The give aways are the rubber strip under the handle, EXMOR badge on the side and lens mount ring are dark blue on the 320, black on the 350. Off the shelf the stock PMW-320 actually has more features than the 350. SD is included as standard and it can output to both HDSDi and HDMI at the same time. Buttons and switches are the same on both camera as is the excellent high resolution colour viewfinder. On switching on and looking through the menus they appear to be the same as the 350, no there surprise really, so just like the 350 instead of the picture profiles and Cinegammas found on the EX1R and EX3 we have Scene Files and Hypergammas more like a PDW-700 or other high end Sony cameras. Talking of the EX1R and EX3, there has been a little confusion over the sensors used in the 320. At first I got the impression that the 320 used new sensors, but I was told at NAB that was not the case and the 320 has the same sensors as the EX1R/EX3. So I was somewhat surprised when I started looking at the images from the 320 to see less noise and a different looking picture.

On the PMW-320 there is a wider range of camera adjustments compared to an EX1R. For example as well as detail settings there is also a section for adjusting the Aperture correction which can also sharpen and soften the look of the camera by boosting high frequencies. Out of the box I didn’t think the 320 was quite as sharp as my EX3. But after a few minutes on the bench and with a few tweaks to the detail and aperture settings the camera was looking very good indeed (detail -8, aperture +20). While not a quiet as the PMW-350 the 320 does appear to have less noise than an EX1 or EX3. It’s not a big difference, but every little helps. My guess there is additional signal processing going on to reduce the noise.

The use of scene files for the PMW-320 and Picture Profiles on the EX1 does make it harder to match the cameras if your using non-standard settings. It can be done, but it takes a little more work.

The power consumption of the 320 is, once again remarkably low. I was powering it with a 95Wh battery and it lasted most of the day. There are no fans to make noise and it’s very light yet well balanced. The big question on my mind when I heard about it was, why buy a 320 when you can get an EX3 for a lot less or a PMW-350 which has amazing image quality for another £2k to £3k. Well obviously the form factor is very different from an EX3. The 320 is a full shoulder mount camera, complete with slot for a radio mic that runs on V-Lock batteries. The EX3 is a semi-shoulder handy-cam running on small batteries. Both will take 1/2″ interchangeable lenses, so no great difference there. But as well as the form factor, which can be very important, the PMW-320 also adds SD recording and HDMI output. There is also the small improvement in image quality to consider. I like the 320, not as much as I like the PMW-350, but it is a fair bit cheaper so could prove to be very attractive for those on a tight budget that want the shoulder mount form factor as well as those that may already have nice 1/2″ lenses on their PDW-350′s or 355′s.

Click on the images below to see the full frame images. The small noise improvement is difficult to see in a frame grab. It’s more noticeable in a video clip.

I’ve been loaned a PMW-320 to put it through it’s paces. I have not finished my tests yet but one thing that I have noticed is that there is less noise in the pictures from the PMW-320 than from my EX3. I’ve been told that the 320 uses the same sensors as the EX3 and was told that the image quality should be the same. But right now what I am seeing is a cleaner image. This is good news and makes the 320 an interesting proposition. It’s not as clean as the rather remarkable PMW-350, but it appears to me to be an improvement over the EX1/EX3. This is most likely through the use of more advanced noise reduction circuits. The noise levels on the EX1/EX3 have never been a problem for me, but the cleaner the image the more you can do in post production so lower noise is always welcome. I’ll be posting some frame grabs later and a more in depth review.

As you may have seen from my earlier post I became the owner of the new Canon T2i (or 550D as it’s known in the UK) at the weekend. Clearly before using any camera in anger it’s important to see what it can and can’t do. I will say that I am not a Canon DSLR expert. I have been following the fuss and much admire some of the work done with these cameras by Phil Bloom, but frankly after playing with the Canon over the weekend I have to say I’m disappointed. Yes you can achieve shallow depth of field very easily and you do get a filmic look to the pictures, but look at the footage on a big monitor and it just looks soft. At first I wondered if this was the lens I was using, so I tried a couple of others including a nice Tamron 28mm prime. I tried different apertures, shutter speeds etc, but every clip I’ve taken looks soft. In isolation, on scenes with low detail this isn’t immediately apparent, but anything with lots of fine detail looks soft. Some of this is aliasing, look at the roof of the house in the T2i image, it appears to have diagonal roof tiles, this is a pretty typical aliasing artifact. I shot some closer shots of the buildings and the brickwork aliased like crazy.

Looking at the flowers picture you can see that the EX1 has picked up more of the subtle texture, or at least it has recorded more of the texture. I’m sure some of the Canon’s softness is due to compression artifacts. The other thing that I found is that it is tending to crush blacks a bit. I have played around with the picture styles and you can reduce this a bit, but there is very little detail in deep blacks, which would IMHO make grading tricky. The one good thing I did find was that it is very noise free at 200 and 400 asa, it’s also useable up to 800 asa or at a push 1600asa, so it would make a good camera for very low key scenes, provided you use a good fast lens. Looking at the Canon pictures there was something pleasing about the deep, almost crushed blacks. I think this helps contribute to the Canon DSLR “look” so I quickly threw together a new picture profile for the EX1/3 and PMW-350, but I’m afraid that the details of that will be the subject of another post, as I have work that I must do first! The EX images in the frame grabs were shot with this picture profile. As we all know the ergonomics of the video DSLR’s is pretty poor for video. It’s tricky to hold and you have to use an add on Loupe to make the LCD useable as a viewfinder. You can’t zoom mid shot and without peaking or zebras adjusting exposure and focus accurately is difficult. I was hoping to be able to use the 550D as a B camera for those situations where I need a small, discreet camera, but having seen the pictures, so far, for me it will be reserved for holidays and shooting where you not supposed to video and for shoots where supper shallow DoF is essential. I have to say I’m really disappointed, I wanted this camera to be so much better, I knew it would suffer from aliasing, but I wasn’t expecting the soft pictures, I guess some will say that the softness adds to the filmic look, but I’d much rather do that with some nice pro-mists or filtration in post production rather than starting out with soft pictures. Perhaps I’ve done something wrong? If I have please add a comment!

You can download the full frame grabs by CLICKING HERE.

UPDATE: I was so convinced that I must be doing something wrong that I shot some more clips, this time with less harsh lighting. No, change however, the T2i is still soft and the new clips show just how big a problem aliasing is. You have to consider that the coloured moire patterns are recorded like that, no amount of grading will get rid of it. A small amount of diffusion on the camera should help, but then your going to have to work out how much to soften and diffuse each shot to make sure your not making the pictures even softer than they already are.

The frame grabs are all 1:1 pixel for pixel, no trickery has been used! You can download some further examples by clicking here. Even if you were shooting stuff for the web this level of aliasing could cause big problems as it’s really obvious. For this shot I had the Canons sharpness setting turned all the way down. I have also turned down the contrast setting as this gives better dynamic range with less crushed blacks. My workflow is to import the H264 files from the camera and then convert them to ProResHQ. This helps a little with sharpness over working with the native H264, but for me this last test was the nail in the coffin for DSLR’s as footage like this would simply be unusable. If you watch the YouTube clip please make sure you watch it full screen or at least at the 480P setting. The small embedded size doesn’t show the aliasing as much as the bigger versions.

FURTHER UPDATE:

OK, so it’s defiantly not just me doing something wrong. When in focus the T2i/550D aliases (as do all the current Canon DSLR’s). This is a grab from Philip Blooms latest Canon short. For once this is a daylight piece and as I expected it exhibits a lot of aliasing. The grab is actually taken from the thumbnail on his exposure room page. I’m really pleased to see this as it shows that aliasing is a problem for the experts too. You start to appreciate why so many of the Canon shorts are shot at night, with millimeter deep DoF… it’s to stay clear of having stuff in focus that will alias. there are filters from Caprock that are supposed to help, but you need a different filter for each focal length and aperture that you use, they also soften the picture somewhat.

If you want my opinion, then it has to be that the Canon’s are close, but still a mile away. The aliasing issue is a biggie. Sort it out and the skew, jello and overheating can be worked around, but if you have to worry about simply having a piece of wood in focus and whether it’s going to exhibit rainbows of colour or whether cobble stones will twitter and change colour (At 00.35 and this is from Canon) then it will limit what you can do. There is quite a lot of aliasing in Phil’s new daytime clip, basically anytime anything is steady, has texture and is in focus, it aliases. I’ve been shot down in flames on other forums for saying that this is a problem, but if even the experts can’t deal with it then what hope does everyone else have? I would love to have the option of shooting with the shallow DoF that the Canon’s offer, but not at the expense of having to avoid any kind of texture. Perhaps Red and Scarlet will be better, perhaps Canon will sort it out, or perhaps not, as the cameras are clearly selling like hot cakes, even with the issues. If they do fix it then the camera will almost certainly be for video only.

I’m not going to write much here as if you look under the reviews tab at the top of the page you will see full reviews of both cameras. What I will say is I like them both. The PMW-350 is an excellent camera and I Think a 350 plus NanoFlash will make a very powerful combination.

I’ve added some frame grabs from the EX1R in the forum here.

And a PMW-350 frame grabs here. As soon as I get decent internet access I’ll post some more, Im in Ireland today running an EXperience event for Sony.

So here is part 2 of my NanoFlash review as promised. This time I am going to talk about the picture quality and what recording at a higher bit rate offers. I have been using my NanoFlash with both a PDW-700 XDCAM HD camcorder (recording 50Mb/s 4:2:2) and an XDCAM EX1 recording at 35Mb/s 4:2:0. I have recorded from both at 100Mb/s long GoP and from the EX1 at 50Mb/s. I did a brief test with the I frame codec, but have not really gone into any great depths with that because I think the Long GoP (essentially XDCAM but at higher bit rate) is for this type of device the ideal type of codec offering stunning picture quality with reasonable sized files.

So, what do I think. Well the biggest surprise was the fact that I could see the difference between the 4:2:2 50Mb/s from the PDW-700 and the 100Mb/s from the NanoFlash on a 42″ 1920×1080 monitor, before I did anything to the material. The NanoFlash pictures were just a teeny tiny bit “cleaner” with less jitter on pans across areas of high detail. Now I will say that these were shots I chose as I knew they would stress the codec, lots of very fine detail and a medium-slow pan. It’s not a big difference, but there is certainly less mosquito noise in the 100Mb/s pictures. The difference between the EX 35 Mb/s footage and the 100 Mb/s footage is greater still, which was no surprise really, but again it’s not a massive difference, it still amazes me just how good an EX1 or EX3 looks, even at 35Mb/s.

So on to some further tests. Now I will state here that I would be perfectly happy to see my XDCAM EX, 35Mb/s footage being broadcast, and indeed I have supplied many hours of stock footage from my EX’s for broadcast and everyone has been perfectly happy with the quality. BUT the BBC in particular are keen to get all footage shot at, at least 50Mb/s which is one of the main reasons for my NanoFlash purchase. The argument being not so much that there is a big difference at the first generation, but that 50Mb/s and above holds up better in post production and after transmission. So for my tests I decided to take a pair of clips, 35Mb/s from the EX1 and 100Mb/s from the Nanoflash and then do a heavy grade (gamma correction plus color correction) and then render that out to Apple ProResHQ. The frame grab below shows the whole scene, which was a slow pan across some Arizona scrub land with lots of very fine detail including bushes, cactus and gravel with a blue sky that gradually darkens slightly from left to right.

When playing the graded and rendered clips back I could see quite a bit more mosquito noise in the 35Mb/s EX clip than the NanoFlash clip, although again I would say that given the rather extreme grade the EX footage still look pretty good. looking more closely at the sky I could see a very noticable difference between the two clips. the 100 Mb/s NanoFlash footage was much cleaner and exhibited less blocking as can be see in these two pixel for pixel grabs from the top right of the full size video frames.

So clearly there are some clear advantages to using 100Mb/s for projects that are going to require grading or other post production work. Next I took a look at some of the more detailed parts of the image. The extra color bandwidth of the nanoFlash’s 4:2:2 over the EX1′s 4:2:0 was apparent with areas of fine color detail looking less muddy and overall the NanoFlash images appeared sharper. I believe this is down to the reduction in mosquito noise at 100Mb/s as opposed to any actual change in the resolution of the recorded images.

Conclusions:

Well while there is a small difference in the first generation footage from the EX and the NanoFlash, it is not huge and unless you view the material on a large screen it will not be very apparent. For simpler projects, news and many many applications the raw EX footage will be just fine and I will often shoot that way. However the footage from the NanoFlash is cleaner, has a little better color resolution  and is more robust. So for projects that will be graded or go through challenging post production stages as well as chroma key work the NanoFlash will make a big difference. Considering the low cost of both the NanoFlash and it’s readily available compact flash media it really does make a lot of sense to have one in your production kit. I will be using mine with both my EX cameras and my PDW-700. Given that the PDW-700 at 50Mb/s is already regarded as the superior of HDCAM, then the 700 with a NanoFlash is edging towards the realms of HDCAM SR. I now own the tools to produce HD images at a quality level that I never dreamt I would be able to afford myself. Even the EX1 and NanoFlash looks stunning. Well done Convergent Design, I’m sure this product is a winner.

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.

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.

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.

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.