The term "prosumer" is a fairly loose one.

As a noun, "prosumer" loosely means a person using products, designed primarily for non-professional purposes ("consumer products"), indeed for professional purposes.

I don't know that it is real accurate to label cameras with pretty robust manual controls, HD-SDI output, etc., or even cameras like the XH-A1 or Z1 (for example) as a products designed primarily for non-professional purposes. These are certainly low-end cameras, in the context of professional settings, but they clearly are designed with professional purposes in mind, and indeed are widely used for putting bread on lots of tables.

As an adjective (in describing cameras), the term "prosumer" would seem most commonly to be used for describing a camera as being at the low end of the range for cameras that are defacto designed for professional use (but do find significant use among serious amateurs as well).

Well, frankly I've always despised that non-word "prosumer."

"Confessional" has so much more appeal, on a variety of levels.

Having watched the movies over on Rick Young's site, i'm beginning to get quite excited about this camera:

MacVideo - News - Latest

Rick is a great guy -- just had a drink with him last Thursday night at Hotel Serrano's bar in San Francisco (hi, Rick!)

And his site has an article on the new EOS FCP plug-in that is a real plus for workflow.

I dislike the term "prosumer" as well - especially the way it gets used to diminish some nice tools, simply because they are not high end tools, sort of akin to looking down on a Chevy merely because it's not a Cadillac.

To my mind, cameras like the XH-A1/G1 and XL-H1 are bona fide "professional" cameras - primarily functionally designed to be used for professional purposes, and indeed they generally are used as such. Those cameras aren't VariCams, but that sure as heck doesn't make them toys.

In turn, to my mind, the term "prosumer" would be far more appropriate to use in describing a camera more along the lines of an HD1000U or an HMC70. It's (more than) a bit of a stretch to claim that they were functionally designed to be used for professional purposes. It's not the engineers designing those cameras that have professional use in mind, so much as the marketing departments of the companies manufacturing them. The marketing departments of those companies have succeeded in selling those cameras to folks that indeed do use them for professional purposes, but the engineers basically just took the guts of what are very much consumer cameras and wrapped them in big shells with a few flourishes (like XLR connectors) - hence a consumer product being used for professional purposes, sort of like attaching a ball to the back of a little Hyundai and hitching a trailer to it for delivering washing machines or something.

Rick young from macvideo.tv has an interview with the canon rep from the supermeet.

MacVideo - The ultimate resource for video on the Mac

Ratu

That Canon rep has a name -- he is Joseph Bogacz of Canon USA.

Yes, sorry about that.
Ratu

XHG-1 Chips
 

If these chips are anything like the XHG-1, then this is gonna be nice... Been nicer with 1/2 but lets see the price before we jump...

I'm shooting the XHG-1 with FFV's 100 megabit J2K, 4:2:2 through HD-SDI and I have to say this little camera and J2K codec is REAL nice...

Raise your hands in the air and say.... NO JAGGIES!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

NUF Said!

I mean WITH editing, but not with grading.

In other words, you can arrange your clips, combine them on the timeline, make cuts and splices and insertions, smart render with very little time and no quality loss, but if you make color corrections it will have to re-encode.

This can go straight to Blu-ray because XDCAM-EX 35mbps HQ 4:2:0 mpeg-2 is about ideal for the format.

50 mbps 4:2:2 is superior, but has to be resampled costing time, because the Blu-ray format doesn't support 50 mbps bitrate. By the time you've resampled it, it's gone through a generational loss (and gone to 4:2:0) that may not in the end be much better than native 35 mbps 4:2:0 would have been.

There's time savings with smart rendering, but MPEG-2 isn't real tough to encode with a modern CPU anymore. As far as time savings, with smart rendering HDV or XDCAM-EX, the faster CPUs get, the less real-world benefit there is (image quality degradation issues, from from an extra generation of compression, aside).

Robert,

Fast modern CPUs will also do the job of smart rendering faster, so the real world benefit of smart rendering will remain 250-300% over re-encoding to mpeg-2 no matter what processor you use.

As an aside, if I am going to go to the bother of a re-encode in the first place, I will go the full step to AVC h.264 which is orders of magnitude slower than simply re-encoding to mpeg-2.

It's the convenience that native 35 mbps 4:2:0 from the camera can be about as good as a first generation down sample of 50 mbps 4:2:2 to something that goes on Blu-ray, while saving time. That still holds (for mpeg-2). The AVC h.264 would look better but take lots of time.

Hey Tom,

I was basing my observations on my workflow. I use Edius and my workflow is the same no matter what footage is present. I get a 2:1 (2x realtime) encoding output to Mpeg-2 for Blu-ray and Edus does not need to render not matter how much color correction or pretty much most anything else you can do to the footage. This is with an Intel i7 920 processor.

I have not used any other NLE's outside of Premiere a little.

So from my point of view, I want the 4:2:2 with as high a bitrate as I want to use up card space with...

That's fine Tim but I think you are wrong if you are saying your footage is not being re-encoded when you do color grading. And for mpeg-2, it's also being downsampled to a lower bit rate for compliancy with Blu-ray which also should include going to 4:2:0 chroma. If it didn't, then there would be even more compression of the luminance samples in order to preserve the 4:2:2 chroma resolution for a given file size.

Hey Tom,

I am saying that putting 4:2:2 high bitrate footage into my system or 4:2:0 lower bitrate footage will yield the same output time weather I put on correction filters, sharpening etc... or not. Drop the clips on the timeline from the CF card, edit & encode.

Staying with as high of a an aquisition format/bitrate as possible does not translate to any more encoding time in post while allowing more lattitude.

If I use AVC footage I transcode to Canopus HQ which adds an entire step before editing.

Just trying to point out that my use of the Nano flash has shown me that high bitrate Mpeg-2 is not a strain on system resources.

Tim,
I did not say anything about a strain on system resources. I did in fact mention that many people make parallel investments in computer technology to speed the process while missing the benefit of smart rendering. You actually fall into that, because your workflow describes that smart rendering, i.e. no-recompression lossless rendering is not taking place. Your i7 processor should do smart rendering in less than realtime. I use Nanoflash too BTW, It's not relevant to the point, that for speed, native XDCAM-EX or HDV ports straight to Blu-ray without conversion. No matter what processor you use, the savings in time will be 250-300 % faster than a re-encode as you are doing now. So basically what you can state, is that you can afford the rendering time with your NLE, i7 processor and workload. That's great! (But it still takes longer than staying native, by 250-300%.) If you have 6 hours of video, that could be significant, or perhaps not.

No disrespect intended, but if someone is running a video production business so tight that color grading (and essentially anything but digitally cutting and splicing raw footage) is skipped in post, in order to be able to gain a little speed via smart rendering, that's essentially what most folks would probably consider akin to a Jiffy-Lube style in-and-out-the-door-quick video production mill, and I've got to think that the difference in quality between HDV acquisition (much less XDCAM EX) and acquisition using 50Mbps MPEG-2 at 4:2:2 just wouldn't be a source of any concern whatsoever anyway. I mean really, it sounds a lot like a production house that might re-use tapes, shooting with b-stock HD1000Us purchased used at auction, perhaps until they literally fall apart, simply because there's nothing else cheaper that shoots HDV and doesn't obviously look like a consumer camera while holding it. Why would 50Mbps MPEG-2 and 4:2:2 color enter into consideration, even remotely for a moment, in the first place? (I've got nothing against folks running a bare-bones video mill, nor have I've got any objections to folks operating a Jiffy-Lube either, and I know it can be awfully tough for wedding shooters to turn a profit that yields a living wage.)

No disrespect back, but this is indeed critical to wedding videographers, however not the ones you're talking about. Instead, it's the lucrative higher-end wedding videographers who specialize in same-day edits and they are the perfect example of why this is in fact a very important time-saving issue. The difference in quality plus the difference in time is perfect for that particular market.

Perhaps I was mistaken, but I didn't get the impression that the intent of presenting smart-rendering as a time saver had anything to do with the benefit of faster turn-around doing SDEs. I was under the impression that it was being presented more or less for general labor/cost effectiveness purposes in more traditional post production.

That's an interesting point though, and made me stop and think. Are SDEs actually being burned to Blu-Ray disk, for playback nowadays? I was under the impression that typically they were played back from a laptop computer, which shouldn't really preclude the use of smart rendering with 50Mbps MPEG 2.

So let me get this straight,

If I put footage from the EX-1 using SxS and the Nano in dual record, the SxS footage will encode to Blu-ray a lot quicker than the Nano footage?

I will test this to see the difference.

You are saying it will be 2.5 to 3 times faster than the 4:2:2 footage.

Sorry, I misposted earlier, an hour of 4:2:2 footage encodes to Blu-ray in an hour, a 1:1 ratio.

I have not compared the two and I apologize for not getting your point.

What Tom is talking about (if I understand correctly) is the time savings of not encoding (compressing), by smart rendering, which in essence is copying the video streams as they were encoded by the camera, rather than re-compressing.

The short answer is XDCAM EX mpeg2 is blu-ray compliant, it will play straight back in any blu-ray player. So with the correct software you can butt edit and write to blu-ray with no re-encoding at any point.

But where you add titles, effects, color correction, etc. and at trasnitions, you will need to render, correct? And that rendering isn't going to be much faster than 4:2:2 rendering? Right?

Pretty much spot on.

Not every job is a full CC post production process either. Sometimes you may shoot a highend piece for a client and they want a rough edit to view. In fact sometimes you could go through many rough edit revisions depending on how complex of a project it is. In these situations smart rendering can really help out a lot. Editing is a fluid process and it doesn't always follow a shoot, ingest, edit, CC and deliver path. Time is money and some solid production companies still need a pretty quick workflow, especially if a client is sitting there waiting for the final to finish. We cannot tell our clients to go to lunch and come back in 3 hours to pick up their video. Sometimes they need the rough draft right away to take back for their CEO to look at.

Thanks for clarifying.

That is what I thought the concept was in an earlier post about basically not editing the footage just placing it on a blu-ray. I still will test the two file types side by side during output to see if there is a large speed difference.

I do not know how one gets footage out of Edius without encoding. The encoder is aware of the 4:2:0 footage and might just pass it through.

Over on his excellent mac video site Rick Young is speculating that this camera may well have a fast lens overcoming - to some extent at least - the low light shortcomings of a 1/3 chip camera, and suggests that the slots at the back of the camera are too big for HDSC cards suggesting Compact Flash or -God forbid - a proprietary format.

Many have talked about whether this is an EX1 Killer. Seems doubtful due to the smaller chips, however with all the other goodies (422, 50 mps) Canon are putting into this camera, they may well come up with something that produces a superb new camera. I'm particularly interested to see what glass comes with it.

Having recently returned to a project shot on both the Z1 and XHA1, i was astonished to see just how much nicer the Canon footage is against the Sony. If Canon have jazzed up the lens - more width please - and come up with a top notch 1/3 sensor, i for one will be very happy to own one of these cameras over the Sony.

Not to mention HD-SDI, GenLock and TimeCode In & Out (not officially stated, but the port covers for
these jacks are located on the mock-up in the exact same space as they are on the Canon XH G1S).

If this cam has an imaging block capable of cleanly resolving as much detail as the EX1 (which is not beyond reason, by any stretch of the imagination, especially if Canon surprises us and goes with CMOS*), records to widely available low cost memory (by design), and a version of it is priced similarly to the A1, I would think it would cut into EX1 sales quite considerably.

Not everyone needs better low light performance than 1/3" imaging chips can deliver. The glass is pretty much a sure bet to be pretty dang decent, and with 50Mbps MPEG-2 at 4:2:2, if the imaging block does indeed resolve 1000 lines of detail cleanly, recorded images really should be a little bit better under a lot of very typical shooting conditions.

*Look at what the HMC40 and the HPX300 imaging blocks are capable of, using 1/4" and 1/3" CMOS imaging chips. Getting 1000 lines of detail pretty cleanly from 1/3" CMOS imaging chips is very doable.

"Not to mention HD-SDI, GenLock and TimeCode In & Out"

Yep.

And to think i took a half glass empty approach to this camera only a couple of weeks ago.

More fool me. Now my credit card is beginning to burn a hole in my pocket.

Rick seemed to think the camera was physically bigger than its predecessor, though i'm not sure how he figured that out based on the evidence we have at present. I know i'd like to see a faster, wider lens, and am not too bothered about it being a little shorter. Then there's the sensor?
Very exciting. Canon have taken their time with this camera, but in spite of my initial skepticism, i'm beginning to think it was worth the wait after all.

I edit footage from these two most of the time. The Canon is clearly the better image, except in really low light (after dark, using available street lights) when the Sony has the edge. That's not too surprising, since the Canon is a newer design. I'd like to see output from the Z5/Z7 alongside the XH-A1. I'm told they are pretty close. My expectation is that the new Canon will have a similar improvement over the Z5 as the XH-A1 had over the Z1. However, I'm also expecting the new Canon to be signifcantly heavier and/or more expensive than the XH-A1, which will make me consider alternatives when my XH-A1 needs replacing. Let's hope I'm right about the first point and wrong about the second!

Going back to the discussion of re-rendering just those sections that have had transitions/captions/CC - The thing that really appeals to me about Blu-ray as both an archive and a delivery medium is that my HDV footage can go mostly unrendered from tape to timeline to output, provided I choose the right bits of software. I'm still expeimenting with Blu-ray, but I think my choice of Avid Liquid 7.2 and TMPGenc Authoring Works 4 gives me that possibility. However, with a 50M 4:2:2 source codec, one is back to the situation in the DV/DVD days - the finished (or otherwise!) timeline must be down-converted to the output format prior to authoring the disc. In which case, one might as well go for AVCHD (at perhaps 16M?) to make the most of the disc's storeage. The 35M XDCAM EX codec is, I suspect, somewhere between the two. Most of my customers still want DVD, of course, so there is an inevitable down-conversion batch-job, but with AW4, at least, that comes right at the end of the process.

Personally, I'm not too worried about having more width in the lens - I see a bit too much of the old bending of verticals with the XH-A1 (Z1 does that too, a little). I'd much rather they kept the long end really long. I like the way the XH-A1 lets me stand on a hill top and get a good clear image of an approaching steam loco from at least a mile away!

With no mention of Sony NLE collaboration on this codec, will we have to wait much longer (for instance, until Vegas Pro 10 comes out) to use the new Canon 4:2:2 codec or is the current XDCAM HD422 decoder enough? (which I'm hopeful for, but have by doubts for at the same time)

Huh?

Transcode the footage and go to work. Why would you need to wait for anything?

"I'm also expecting the new Canon to be signifcantly heavier and/or more expensive than the XH-A1,"

Not sure why that would be the case Mark. Unless they give us a significantly larger lens. Panasonic reduced the weight when they went to solid state over tape.

No reason why it should cost more either. Particularly since customers will have to pay for new media as well and they'll wish to keep it in line with the competition. Unless of course they see the EX1 as the competition, but given the sensor will be 1/3, i imagine they'll want to keep the price attractive.

The reason why it would be more expensive than the XH A1S is due to the high
probability that it will include HD-SDI, GenLock and TimeCode In / Out, putting
it more on par with the cost of the XH G1S instead.

However, I suspect that Canon most likely will offer a version of this camera
*without* those jacks, and its price most likely will be in line with the XH A1S.

I hope Chris. I hope that they have a model around the $4000. I can't wait to be on the NAB and see if I'm one of the first lucky guys to hold that baby on my hands!

Do you think that they will release the XL H1S equivalent of this new camera at NAB as well? As in, will they release all of the models at NAB at the same time?

I am interested in whatever replaces the XL (or whatever the highest end shoulder configuration version they come out with).

But no matter how good the lens may be at it's optimum aperture, you can't ignore the effects of diffraction or of depth of field. Hence it will always have a more limited iris range than a bigger chipped camera, and dof control will always be worse. That's quite apart from low light issues etc, and smaller photosites are also likely to make for worse dynamic range.

I would guess on an XH-G2 w/SDI and an XH-A2 without (but probably have HDMI).