Navigation and Editing Functions from/for SR1
 

1/ An important question IMHO is how will the takes be organised within the FS. And what will "Time Code" mean from an AVCHD standpoint ?

2/ This leads to two other questions :

a/which form of navigation will the cam provide to view (jump to..) previous takes ?

b/ will the cam itself provide some editing functions?
Seems that AT LEAST there will be some capability of deleting an entire take, but what about (simple ) cuts .. and pastes.

3/ Any one knowledgable about the (somewhat mysterious) piece of software that Sony seems to provide to support the SR1 from your PC ?

Currently:

1. They're probably organised by date, and the timecode may be drop frame for NTSC and non-drop for PAL. But you can't view the timecode on the SR1.

2a. It's most likely to be the same as all of the Sony DVD cam navigators.

2b. If the current Sony DVD cams can do it, you can bet that the SR1 will have it too.

3. Currently it's the VAIO Picture Motion Browser.

How about a general AVC question. It is fairly well accepted that because of its interframe compression scheme (GOPs), the HDV system can show artifacts during single frame viewing of objects in motion. This doesn't occur in DVCPRO HD because the compression is done one frame at a time. I believe that the AVC and VC-1 codecs both use multi-frame compression. Will both of these codecs also show artifacts when single frames are viewed ?

Almost undoubtedly. Should show a lot fewer due to the more efficient codec, but a lot depends on the particular codec implementation, the content in the frames, etc. It's still a long-GOP low-bandwidth codec like MPEG-2/HDV, and it should theoretically perform more robustly than HDV due to AVC's greater encoding efficiency, but it's almost certain that it will still exhibit some interframe compression artifacting.

Indeed, it does show artifacts from frame to frame.
You can test this yourself to a degree, right now. Take a series of similar frames, ie; a scene, and convert it to 12Mbps AVC in your NLE, then do the same, but switch scenes.
One of the benefits of MPEG overall tho, is that the DCT frames can become "I" frames if you will, on a significant change of frames. MPEG 2 doesn't suffer nearly as badly as AVC does in this scenario, but either way, both formats manage to shift all the data into a single, new frame, even tho that scene change frame is not identified as an "I" frame.
I've spent the past month shooting with a consumer AVC camcorder from Sony and a not-so-consumer oriented prototype from another company, and all the theoretical talk about what AVC is vs HDV is just that at this point; theory.
Just like every other format, it'll change over time.

Hi

Do you have any idea when we might get any info on the "not-so-consumer oriented prototype from another company"

Cheers

Hans

I am not sure to understand what DSE means by "what AVC is vs HDV". Does this means that AT THIS POINT HDV wins hands down in terms of Image Quality ?

At this point (which is with the one single camcorder available) HDV is the better image. You'll see an article with images up here on DVINfo.net as soon as Chris is able to get it on here.

Maybe you are talking about Panasonic. I saw a website image of a 3-chip AVCHD cam they have in the works. I am also involved with the camcorder committee of the Wedding and Event Video Assoc., and at our recent expo, was in a meeting with their engineers. They basically asked for our input and our technical needs, but then alluded to AVCHD as the technology that would be coming out in response. One of the items under discussion was a hardware signal converter, which would not be cheap at least in the beginning.

Attendees from our side spoke about hassles with the use of DVD camcorders in terms of pulling the files off digitally.