HD-SDI interface, wide angle & other questions
 

I was lucky enough to get a call from a Houston retailer who will have an EX-1 in my hands on Monday. He offered free shipping (I'm in Austin...3 hrs. drive) but I find I can't drop the $ without driving down and viewing some test footage they shot on a demo model. Am I silly... or would you all take my approach? His heresay out of L.A. is the image from this camera is incredible.

As a purist film shooter turned videographer, I'm still early in the learing curve. As far a workflow goes... will I need to buy another Mac with duo Intel and a faster processor, or hang with my Leopard equipped 5 year old G4 Powerbook? Also... how exactly does the HD-SDI interface work, so that I can deliver 4:2:2 to my end user when specified. Perhaps a couple links that I can read??

Finally.. did any of you with the first cameras over the U.K. shoot with the wide angle adapter. Simon Wyndham's review, as I recall, spoke quite favorably about the performance of this adapter.

I sincerely appreciate all you comments.
p.s. Wassup with my not being able to view the .mov files from the vignette pan series posted.. I used Quicktime Pro and it said I needed a plugin.

Michael Javorka
www.nighthorsemedia.com
Austin

That .mov might have been in the Apple XDCAM 35mbps codec. You'd have to update to FCP 6.0.2 for that.

The HD-SDI seems to be switchable to SDI in software. I was playing with that today at my dealer with their demo camera. Didn't have a pipe to send it down though. SDI allows one to choose Letterbox, Squeezed or 4:3. It's 4:2:2 uncompressed but it may be 8 bit with 2 "dummy" bits to make it 10 bit.

I think you'll want to get a MacBookPro. The speed and the Express port will help. You're still dealing with long GOP unless of course you want to go to ProRes but you'll still want the MacBookPro for that.