You have 2.5 hours to:

Shoot for an hour
Edit the footage into a 8 min piece synchronized to a live orchestra
and play it back in front of 2500 people

rinse and repeat . . . 5 times.

This was my EX1's first job. A christmas concert that we had the audience members as they were arriving say lines from "Twas the night before Christmas" then edit it down to play as the second to the last piece of the concert.

With only a few "live performance gliches" it went really well. Real time capture is, for me, a fading memory. With only the scars to show for it.

Just a little pressure!

That kind of gig is the cause of great stomach acids attacking the rest of the system!

I hope they paid you enough to cover the event with such a high risk, cutting edge approach.

It has been a learning experiance.

I have never been paid what I am worth ;) But we made out ok on this gig.

Talking about high risk. We had so little time to do the edit and because of the live music we had to run the finished piece from the timeline so we could jump ahead to the next cut if the music got ahead of us. We built in extra time in the B-roll so it would just look like a cut.

I can say, the EX1 was a champ. We ran HDSDI out to a Black Magic HDLink and into a 24in Dell. So as the pepole were being taped the others in the lobby could watch what was going on.

Then downloading to the Mac Book Pro was blazing fast. Sometimes 6 times real speed. There really is no contest in using the USB connection. The expresscard slot wins hands down.

Real time capture is, for me, a fading memory. With only the scars to show for it.

Hehe, that's why I fell in love with XDCAM HD at our Texas Shootout last year. I could immediately see the efficiency of this method. So, although it has been disc based, I too know how elating it is to ingest HD at faster than real time.

Welcome to the new millennium! (grin)

-gb-

As long as continuous shooting (with media circulating between recording and off-loading) is not required, I guess the same can be achieved with my current workflow, i.e. shooting simultaneously to miniDV tape and the DR60 disk...

The EX1 workflow is great, but let's not forget that most video cameras can be used with a hard drive (DTE) recorder which offers similar functionality. The advantage of memory cards is saving weight compared to lugging one of those DTEs around, plus not having to worry about another set of batteries.

Out of curiosity, how many times did you swap cards in the EX1 during this shoot, and did you have any concerns about rotating them? There's an odd note in the owner's manual about what happens if you remove a card and then reinsert it during continuous recording, so I'm wondering if anyone's seen any issues from that.

We didn't have to trade cards while shooting. I have a 16 gb and a 8 gb card and I came close but never filled them up. I didn't have any issues with taking cards out and putting them back in. But we weren't continuously recording. Just recording different audience members saying lines from the story.

Chris,

After off-loading, do you delete all the clips on a card still mounted on the PC, or remove the whole directory structure on it, or format it?

What I'd like to know is how a card should be prepared so that when inserted back to the free slot of EX1, once the other card fills up, the camera could start recording to the off-loaded card without any glitch.

Dumped the entire card to its individual folder on the hard drive (unique name). Then brought up the folder (on the hard drive) in Transfer software, to verify everything was there, then trashed the files on the card.

The EX1 workflow is great, but let's not forget that most video cameras can be used with a hard drive (DTE) recorder which offers similar functionality.

What interfaces would you use on the current crop of sub-$10K HD cameras to get full-HD out to the hard disk in real time? For the EX1 the only digital interface that provides that is the SDI interface, the iLink/1394 interface is limited to HDV resolution (unless I've completely misunderstood the EX1 docs).

mike

What interfaces would you use on the current crop of sub-$10K HD cameras to get full-HD out to the hard disk in real time?

My point was that most SD and HD cameras have some form of tapeless recording option available, so you don't have to have a camera like the EX1 to enjoy that benefit. The EX1 solution is just more convenient than most, plus as you implied also higher quality.

Respectfully :)

Which is really the point isn't it? More convenient and higher quality.