But yeah the updates are still pretty week.

If I may speculate, my guess is that Canon introduced this update to keep the XL-series product alive bit longer. If I remeber well it was one of Chris' wisdom that Canon never introduces new products in NAB. If so, this is an exception and may reveal they have made a strategic change. Such as extending the life of XL-series to win some time in developing a new approach, which I suspect will be with CMOS-sensor and EF-lenses. Who knows, maybe it's not that far way that the next generation of cameras will a fusion between a DSLR and a video camera. In fact, Nikon is not that far from it. Furthermore, the Canon Ixus series pocket cameras have already such a video feature. Just put a SD video taken with these new Ixus camera aside with the old XL1/XL1s footages and get surprised.

Ixus in Europe = Elph in the Americas. Agree with the point about VGA movie mode quality of those pocket cameras. Plus the new ones do time-lapse, which is a lot of fun.

The SONY EX-3 will be introduced by SONY soon. It looks like the Canon series as far as being shoulder mounted. Wait till NAB...you heard it here fiirst.

Don't knock the camera yet. For interlaced shooting the Canon cameras are pretty much equal in terms of detail.

The EX1 is also a bear to hold for long periods of time. It's still hard to beat a shoulder mounted camera for long term handheld shooting.

Also as nice as CMOS is the Canon cameras do not have any of the CMOS issues such as wobble and warped and stretched. If you shoot in an environment with a lot of rapidly changing lights such as stage productions or concerts then a CCD will give you much better results. I love the look of CMOS but you really do have to be carefull of what type of stuff you shoot.

The EX1 may have a detail edge for progressive shooting but the 24F mode on the Canon is nothing to laugh at. Once you get past all the pointless tech talk and specs and just work with it it can be a very high quality fluid format.

The SONY EX-3 will be introduced by SONY soon... Wait till NAB...you heard it here fiirst.Sony EX3 discussion already underway at http://www.dvinfo.net/conf/showthread.php?t=119185

OOPS.....never go there that much. I know some of the particulars which I will keep to myself till the introduction.

Sony EX3 discussion already underway at http://www.dvinfo.net/conf/showthread.php?t=119185

Just uploaded thirty-plus photos of the H1S / H1A and menu displays... somewhat rough quality as they're only snapshots taken without any real planning. I had an opportunity to shoot these and wanted to post 'em up right away, since the next several days are gonna be really busy here in Las Vegas...

http://www.dvinfo.net/gallery/browseimages.php?c=55

In my view this is an incremental upgrade, and that's fine, but . . .

My expectations are that flaws are supposed to be addressed in an incremental upgrade and the biggest flaw in ALL XL series has been the stock viewfinder.
Yes, I know, there is an expensive and power sucking B&W option, but Sony
has come out with a stock LCD that works. This major problem should have been addressed and a suitable answer provided for Canon fans by now.

Off topic: hey Jacques, I'm not sure I have a current email address from you. Please contact me, chris at dvinfo dot net. Hope to see you Monday morning at NAB.

Not trying to change the subjet, but what would you guys think if Canon would do something like Sony has done with the HVR-Z7U, and pair it with a memory card recorder like the HVR-MRC1. I would be lining up for one in a second.

At the very lease you can buy the mrc1 for your canon in a few months.

I hope that we (current XL-H1 owners) are also entitled to get this firmware update. I am sure many of the feature of this camera can also be added to the current XL-H1 through a firmware upate. I would appreciate that.

People who will buy the new model will still get a better and improved lens, while loyal customers will get some benefits as well.

So Canon, please let us join the fun.

The cost of tapeless archiving point mentioned a few post prior makes no sense to me. Harddrives are so cheap now that they are actually less expensive to store on than high quality mini DV tapes. And yes, harddrives fail, but tapes break as well. In truth, I've had tapes break, but can't recall *knock on wood* ever having a harddrive fail.

As for the Red costing $40K to $80K, that's also misleading to me. I think a lot of Red users don't pimp out their Red and get great results. They even post on the Red forum, if this statement is doubted.


This is the general consensus of those who fly by the seat of their pants when it comes to tapeless acquisition. Sure, tapes break, it is extremely rare. I have shot more DV tape than anyone on these forums, THOUSANDS of hours and I have had no more than 2 or 3 tapes "break." When you lose a tape, you lose an hour of footage at most, when a HDD goes down, you may lose MONTHS of work and in many cases, an entire project would be lost.

If you havent had a HDD fail, you havent had many. Manufactures claim a failure rate of near 1% but in real world practice over the life of the drive it is more like 8%. I have a friend who owns a data recovery company who says for some drives in certain conditions it can be up to 15%.

The only proper way to back-up your HDDs full of tapelessly acquired footage is a nice RAID system which is frequently backed up to data tape. You are talking $10K pretty easy for a decent amount of storage. It is a myth that dragging files to cheap bargain clearance HDDs is an adequate way to preserve footage. The horror stories, while there, are more scarce only because we are still in the infancy of this type of acquisition.





ash =o)

I've shot thousands of tapes too and have never had a tape I couldn't play back years from the acquisition date. I have, however, seen three different firewire drives die for no apparent reason.

In addition to the insecurity of having original footage stored in drives, there is the time consuming hassle of doing it. If you shoot tapeless (at this time, anyway) you have to, at some point, stop production and load all your footage, back it up, then delete it from the cards so you can reuse them. Depending on how many cards you own, this might take an additional person on the crew with a computer system and backup drives. Or, you can do it yourself at night after the shooting days. There's also the possibility of data being lost during copying. I've heard about a few horror stories in that regard in the past couple of years.

I think eventually we'll have some sort of solid state acquisition that will be inexpensive enough so you can treat the cards like tape--ie., put them on a shelf or in a box until you're ready to edit, and store them as long as you like without having to reformat.

I agree with Bill and Ash.

I have had 3 Seagate drives fail on me last year. That's why I switched to Western Digital which works great so far (no failures, 10 drives). My uncle works at the IT department of a large company and they had the same issues with Seagate. But anyway, never thrust a mechanical harddrive. Why do you think there are so many issues with the Firestore, and before with the harddisk tanks that were used for digital photography (microdrives). Flash memory is so much more reliable then harddisks. But flash memory is really expensive at this moment to store large amounts of data (think HD content). So you back-up your reliable flash card to a non-reliable harddisk. To make this work, you basically need to back up everything to two seperate harddisks. Although this is cheap, the risk is not in those two drives failing on you, but in you losing track of what is on what harddrive and where do you store them.

Nope, I think only when flash memory reaches like $10 for 8GB, it will never be as safe as tape. Although capturing is more convenient, archiving and making sure you lose nothing (offloading to computer, then harddisk, takes a lot of time), so no, I don't think it works perfect yet.

I'll join the club too.

Seems like I remember when everything off of our computers was backed up to tape drives for safety's sake! Now we are looking to replace or back-up our tapes to the same mechanical media or drives we were trying to protect ourselves from failure from before.

In the not too distant future there will be better solutions available at reasonable costs, but for now nothing beats me holding that tiny little MiniDV tape in my hand and storing it in my desk drawers.

I have various format tapes here from a client/friend that I'm going to transfer to DVD for her. Many are over 20 years old. The reason they are being converted to DVD is that they are stored here in Florida where humidity and therefore mold is a problem, they take up a lot of room and have to be stored at a storage facility and the machines they will play on will not be around forever, U-Matic, Hi-8, Beta, VHS. I have not encountered one yet that has failed to play back, even some with mold on them.

For now----I'll stick with that cheap little tape. It will probably be good for another decade at least.

Mike

I have friends that have had Firestore hard drives fail prematurely. One friend had three fail. These had reputable hard drives in them, such as Western Digital.

I feel very strongly that these Firestrore hard drives fail because of heat.

I recommend using SATA drives from a reputable manufacturer and keeping them cool. If appropriate, add a fan to keep them cool. Five dollar fans from Wal-Mart work fine. If you have Firestore drives, add a fan to blow air over the case.

What I worry about, is that some hard drive that have not been run for a while (way over one year) may not spin up when you go to use them). Sometimes with the proper techniques, you can get them to start.

Instead of using Firewire drives, in a small enclosure, or using multiple SATA drives in a hot enclosure, I just stand the drives on their side, run a SATA cable into the computer, and run a small fan.

I buy quality drives with a five year warranty and have not had any fail so far using these techniques. (I realize that I have only been doing this for about two years, so it is really too early to tell.)

Using this technique, it is real easy to keep one or more projects on a drive, and then back it up to another drive, and then put both away for safekeeping.

I use Vegas for editing, so I backup the Project files to another drive on a routine basis. This could save me if I had a premature disk failure, or I make a serious mistake while editing.

I know it is off topic but I will add that my ten years in IT have shown me that hard drive are 10-20x more likely to fail than a tape. And as Ash pointed out, 1 tape= 1 hour vs. many hours on a hard drive. If you were smart enough to have it stored on a redundant drive then great....but if you forgot or there was a glitch.....oops!

I have also had a lot more success restoring a broken tape....you can physically take the cassette apart and move the physical tapr to another case and salvage the undamaged portion.

No doubt that flash media is awesome but there is so much extra work involved and if you flub up at any stage you put your valuable shots at risk.

There is always a trade off. For now I am willing to live with capturing until the they iron out all the wrinkles.

I have also had a lot more success restoring a broken tape....you can physically take the cassette apart and move the physical tapr to another case and salvage the undamaged portion.

Have you ever done this with miniDV tape? I have & it's no fun at all. The springs & braking mechanism are near impossible. Tiny stuff :-\

Have you ever done this with miniDV tape? I have & it's no fun at all. The springs & braking mechanism are near impossible. Tiny stuff :-\


Unfortunately I have (not for 5-6 years thankfully) and you are right. But what an exhilarating feeling when you recover your data! I had a tape that had been eaten by a sony GVD700? Mini DV deck. We were able to get the tape out of the mechanism, cut the bad part out and splice the remaining into a new cassete case. Surprisingly it worked! 45 minute recovered out of an hour....we could have gotten more of it back that was on the beginning of the tape but there was nothing critical there.

Let's not forget a major drawback of tape is alignment. I have probably a hundred old DV tapes (pre-HDV) recorded on my old partners XL1 that do not like to play in a lot of mini-dvd decks. There was something out of alignmnet on his camera and still his tapes a re a bear to get footage off of. Fortunately
I now strictly use an H1 and an HV20 and have had no problems.

Peace all.

Chris, I noticed in some of your photos there seems to be a bracket attached to the back of the camera. Just wondering if you had any shots of that. Hoping that is something I can attach some accessories to.

Hi Josh, that bracket is the same one included with all XL2 and XL H1 camcorder kits... there's a shot of it here: http://www.dvinfo.net/gallery/showimage.php?i=359&c=28

OK I figured as much but I wasnt sure as I did not see a bracket mentioned on the canon site in the Whats in the box section. Was hoping I could some how attach the NNovia Small camera mount to this bracket and hopefully add some weight to the back of the camera.

It is included in the box -- should be no big problem to rig something for carrying a QuickCapture drive, but it would be nice if nNovia provided a solution.

Well the small camera mount is designed to be mounted under the camer into the tripod mount but I dont think it would allow for shoulder operation. I don't have access to any of the XL cameras to try it on either.

The biggest dissapointment is the same old focus ring on the lens and the viewfinder.
Why can´t they give us a proper lens?

Sorry this "upgrade" feels like a bandaid to me.

Sony has just announced their new EX3 model. It has full 1920x1080 1/2" sensors, removable lens, solid state recording...

Yes its $4000 more but thats pretty insignificant for its spec.

I think Canon have dropped the ball.

$13,000. Really not worth the money. For that money I would rather buy a Panasonic HPX-500 or a Sony XDCAM (with the discs) and 2/3" lenses.

And do you really think this is it? RED will blow every other announcement away with the Scarlet today. Furthermore, Canon is always late but they will come with a worthy successor. Expect the next XL to fuse with 35mm lenses or maybe 2/3" lenses and of course it will be tapeless.

I really do not see why I would buy that Sony. It still feels clumsy (because that has not changed), the weight is all in front of your shoulder, so no advancement over the XL-H1 and the price... too expensive. You pay $4,000 for shoulder mount and some small updates.

No, no Sony EX1/EX3 for me.

Maybe Canon's waiting for the Scarlet everyone's so hyped about to announce the real XL-H1 successor? Seems like in current news, Scarlet blows away every other new designs announcements, like Sony's EX3. Maybe Canon wants the hype to die down a bit before it announces a worthy competitor?

Canon always proved to be a patient (albeit slow) cam designer. Look at what it's done with the XH-A1 model : they were last (or near last) to get onto the market, but they hit the spot right on. I don't think I ever heard any complaints about it, and even heard by a lot that it was the DVX100's successor.

I think time will tell if Canon really dropped that ball, who knows, we might be really surprised at what it got up its sleeves! :-)

Gabriel, I could not agree more with you.

And maybe Scarlett is a cooperation between Canon and Red.

canon's XL series has always been the last to market but the "best of its breed" when you compare apples to apples. happened on XL1, XL1s, XL2, XL H1, etc.

i don't doubt it'll happen on whatever future releases it is going to be, when you compare apples to apples.

The Red Scarlet is going to cost $3,000 with a fixed 8x zoom. The Scarlet is a 3k camera that will record to CF chips and will accept many of the Red One accessories. I believe I have found my next small camera to complement the Red One or the new Red Epic 5k. I will keep my XL H1 until the Scarlet is available. Sorry Canon, I guess that my only Canon's will be still camera's from now on.

Is it known whether the new full spec HD-SDI on the XL-H1s is now actual 10-bit? Or still 8-bit stuffed into 10?

No one in this thread has mentioned the life expectancy of solid state devices, which kinda surprises me. All current solid state memory devices have quite limited life expectancy as *every* write operation is destructive to the device. This is why the on-board logic purposely fragments files to spread the data "randomly" over the memory area. Read operations, however, are non-destructive. Since the solid state device will be storing huge amounts of data on a regular basis (much more so than regular USB thumb drive-type devices often used for storing documents), it is much more likely that the same pieces of memory will be written to much more frequently, and therefore are more likely to cause physical failures to the memory modules. Reading and writing to a hard drive is non-destructive, but of course you have mechanical issues with hard drives.

First I've heard of it--could you post links to a white paper or other reputable source on this? And/or quantify "quite limited life expectancy"?

First I've heard of it--could you post links to a white paper or other reputable source on this? And/or quantify "quite limited life expectancy"?

The reports I've read are 100,000 cycles.

The reports I've read are 100,000 cycles.

That's the same figure I've heard. While 100,000 sounds like a lot, when you consider that even with the on board logic randomizing the location of data on the memory chips, with the amount of data being stored on these devices, each memory location is going to get written to pretty frequently!

I heard a report of someone testing a CF card and killing it within one day when it was used as the Windows XP swap file and subjected to "normal use".

Here are some sources:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flash_memory#Memory_wear
"For high reliability data storage, however, it is not advisable to use flash memory that has been through a large number of programming cycles"



Another article said you don't need to worry about it...
http://www.storagesearch.com/ssdmyths-endurance.html

http://www.camcorderinfo.com/content/Canon-Sticking-with-HDV-Unveils-XL-H1S-and-XL-H1A-34876.htm

Interesting comments in the interview they did with Canon ...

Apparantly, they take it as clues that Canon is actually developing thier own HD codec for their next gen solid state camera.

Is it known whether the new full spec HD-SDI on the XL-H1s is now actual 10-bit? Or still 8-bit stuffed into 10?While at the Canon booth yesterday, I asked and was told there is no change. It is still 8-bit with 2-zero bits. Going to 10 bit would require a whole new sensor block.

which is a hint towards future developments? =D

While at the Canon booth yesterday, I asked and was told there is no change. It is still 8-bit with 2-zero bits. Going to 10 bit would require a whole new sensor block.

Canon are going to be eaten alive and rightly so. It happened to them in the Pro DSLR market with Nikon's D3 seeing a flood of once loyal canon pros flocking to the 'other side'. Now I can see the same thing happening in the HD arena.

Well, Paul, you need to remember something about the Canon vs Nikon war : About 2 years ago, when Canon released the first full-frame DSLR on the market, it was Nikon who lost a lot of its faithful users! Back before the D300 and D3 relase, Nikon was lagging behind Canon because it struggled with its sensors' noise and sensivity while Canon's CMOS were better, and I know a lot of Nikon users who "migrated" over to Canon. For now, the D3 might be better on some levels than the 1DMKIII, but who knows how Canon's next DSLRs are gonna be?

I don't think you can really compare the armlock Canon and Nikon are in to what's happening in HD video ; Canon clearly plays safely here instead of innovating like it does in the still photography world. Yeah, many of us are dissapointed, but if they're developping a better workflow for their next XL series models and need more time for their tech to be more cost/effective, I rather like the fact that they didn't rush their dev to get a bugged (or worse, a mock-up) XL-H2 just for show at NAB. They addressed some issues here, like a better servo lens and greater button customization options. It's not the best upgrade ever, and yes, it's dissapointing that the CCD block is the same 2 years-old technology, but the fact that they got a camcorder without HD-SDI outputs at 3000$ less might get people like me to upgrade to HD soon.

Why should a new camera model always mean you should feel the urging need to upgrade? Even if a 2-year camera is "old" by our standards now, the XL-H1 is still making pretty great pictures, so get out there and shoot until Canon gets their real XL-H2 out in a year or two!! :-P

Cheers!

i agree w/Gabriel, innovating so quick is actually dangerous because it makes new Canon buyers leery of buying something that loses so much of its value the moment u get it (like new cars). it's actually good that users of XL1/2 series can still keep upgrading to new XL lenses while new HD XLH1 and its variants can tape the existing lenses (HD or not) and integrate it into their workflow.

and BTW canon DOES have progressive CMOS in their HV consumer series. they can probably plug that right into the XL series... except for the reason Gabriel and i just stated above.

Gabriel and Yi -

While you have good points about canon pulling the next best thing out of their hat with the XL-H2, my problem is that I'm going to be upgrading in the next 2-3 months - and with the XL gear & lenses I have, I cant use them in HD shooting, so that is a moot point in terms of trying to sell loyalty.

I love my XL1s's, however I can't keep waiting - holding out hope for what canon does next. While the XL-H2 may be the most amazing thing, I'm looking to buy now, so canon has just lost my money as whatever I purchase, I'm intending it to have a 3-4 year life span. So even if the XL-H2 comes out next year, it will be too late for me

Given the option of 1/2" sensor in the EX series, that is something that can't be ignored - i'm even considering jumping up to an HVX500 with its 2/3" sensors.

I am still kicking around JVC's 200/250 series, sony Z270 or even the XH series, If the larger sensor blocks aren't to my liking.

Sorry Canon - too little - too late
~Mike

Gabriel and Yi -

While you have good points about canon pulling the next best thing out of their hat with the XL-H2, my problem is that I'm going to be upgrading in the next 2-3 months - and with the XL gear & lenses I have, I cant use them in HD shooting, so that is a moot point in terms of trying to sell loyalty.

I love my XL1s's, however I can't keep waiting - holding out hope for what canon does next. While the XL-H2 may be the most amazing thing, I'm looking to buy now, so canon has just lost my money as whatever I purchase, I'm intending it to have a 3-4 year life span. So even if the XL-H2 comes out next year, it will be too late for me

Given the option of 1/2" sensor in the EX series, that is something that can't be ignored - i'm even considering jumping up to an HVX500 with its 2/3" sensors.

I am still kicking around JVC's 200/250 series, sony Z270 or even the XH series, If the larger sensor blocks aren't to my liking.

Sorry Canon - too little - too late
~Mike

Sorry Mike! But, if you can't shoot good video with the new XLH1A or the XLH1s basically you can't shoot good video. Love my XLH1 and have no need to upgrade at all. Never a problem, never a drop-out, no issues at all. If I want to slap a hard-drive on it I'll do it---actually did as I had a Firestore, but didn't really need it. My 3x lens and my 16x manual lens work just fine and all of the other accessories I had work fine too. I would really like a 6x, but it is not in my budget right now.

I think that Canon will make a big leap in the future, but for now everything is intermediate. Just look at the problem threads that are here for some on the new cameras. This business should not be a simple leap-frog game, it should be real innovation. RED and other are changing the whole game. If you jump into something right now, as far as new stuff, you will probably get very burned.

Patience patience.

Mike too

Canon is in a great position (so is Sony) as they have a photography business. Canon has (only Nikon is better) the best glass in the world and once they can make it work (a 35mm sensor with Canon EF mount) on hopefully the XL-H2 but more likely it takes a little bit longer they have a huge market. Other companies will always have to use someone else's mount. Canon not. I think that within 5 years from now photography and film/video fuse. If you look at the speeds of the high end DSLR camera's, they are at 11fps in like 6k resolution. So they probably can do 3k in 22fps already. That's where the market is going. And Canon is in a relaxed position. I do think that they are lagging behind a bit, and that they should bring prices down otherwise they will lose many customers in the coming years. I just hope the new updates mean that they are taking their time for a true successor.

I just hope the new updates mean that they are taking their time for a true successor.

I do too! My DSLR is a Nikon, my video equipment is Canon. I go with what I like, not a brand.

The future should be very interesting and there is no need to jump on any format or camera now just because it is new.

M

Only imagine Nikon doing a D4x camcorder. That would make me happy. I doubt they will ever do that, but hey, one can dream!

From the mists of Europe...

I was trying to pre-order an XLH1S with the firmware upgrade to switchable NTSC /PAL. I went to Creative Video in the UK, no mucking about and ready to pre-order. They told me a) that it was a simple firmware upgrade and always had been, (so what about the essential camera return to a Canon service center??? "However'" they said "Canon have stopped doing this PAL / NTSC firmware upgrade as basically people were getting it done to facilitate gray export...... Well, three printable thoughts sprang to mind:

1) Who says I want to gray export it? I simply have American and European clients.

2) If Canon can afford to sell it cheaper somewhere else, they can sell it cheaper to us all. Nobody is having an easy time in the business at the moment.

3) If Canon don't want to take my $500 for a simple firmware upgrade, then they've shot themselves in the foot because they've lost a sale. I'm not into buying 2 identical cameras with different firmware. Even worse they will have blown their brains out too because I don't like those tactics and won't trust them enough to buy another of their products. WHO DO THEY THINK THEY ARE ..... SONY?

As a Digital Betacam owner I fear that Sony blew their brains out some time ago. Did you see their marketing slogan "Nobody knows your business better than Sony" . Oh yes? Well I do for a start! The cheek!

Come on Canon, it's too late for that sort of crass nonsense. We know you can do it now ,,,,, so do it!

I think it's fine that this is a minor upgrade, Sony's gear is three generations out of date before it goes to market and who needs that?

Instead of going to Creative Video in the UK, try going to Canon!

It's nice that your very first post on this forum is an attack on Canon. Go to the real source first, have Canon tell you that they won't do the up grade on your non-gray market camera then check back with this us here.

Many thanks----Mike

With the Scarlet being 2/3" and the XDCAM EX line 1/2", I think we can safely say that the Canon XL-H1/XL-A1/XL-H1S are the last 1/3" cameras. I hope they switch to 2/3" (APS-C would be even better).

Just watched an interview with Bob Ott, vice president of Sony Professional. He was promoting the new EX3. One issue during the interview which surprised me was that the SDI out is hobbled with 4:2:0 output and not 422 as one would expect.

Why why why do that??? Totally lame if you ask me.

At least the good old H1 does 422.