Dear Dean,

Mike is out sick today, so I will attempt to answer your questions.

No, we will not be able to deliver the nanoFlash in December. We apologize for the inconvenience and delay.

We have added three significant features to the nanoFlash.

There are multiple circuit boards in the nanoFlash. The design of one remaining board is not yet complete. This board was changed to add the new features.

Another change that we made was to significantly increase the size of the display on the nanoFlash.

Now it is the same size of the Flash XDR, so that the display will be much easier to read, convey more information, and we will be able use most of the same firmware in both units.

Thanks Dan ...
 

I await more news and figured that the nano/flash would not be finished this year. I hope a realistic date for delivery will be forthcoming early next year.

Dear Dean,

We appreciate your patience.

As you know, we have not meet all of our self-imposed deadlines and schedules.

At this time the nanoFlash is progressing nicely. Over the next two weeks, we expect to finish the circuit board layout. The electronic schematics are almost done.

We just added another feature today to accommodate the various ways the nanoFlash will be used.

Overall, we want to meet any deadline or promise that we make. For this reason, we do not want to provide an exact date, until we are absolutely certain we can meet that date. By this I mean that we will be providing a rollout date when we are within approximately 30 days of delivering the nanoFlash.

With the extra features that we are providing, we feel that you will be very pleased.

Again ...
 

Thanks guys ~ await with baited breath!

Dear Dean,

We have been listening to feature requests for the nanoFlash.

You may be able to guess some of the new features, but others will be a complete surprise.

We truely believe that you will be pleased.

I will be traveling for the next two days, so I may be out of touch for a while.

Dear Dan,

I believe I've had read somewhere that the NanoFlash would be able to record in SD. This is rather crucial in the case of the EX1 / 3 since they are not capable of recording in SD and unfortunately there are still clients out there not willing to pay for HD.

I'm particular interested to know about the quality of the SD footage. I'm asking this as I still haven't seen a decent HD-SD downconversion whether via the camera itself or via software. The HD-SD downconversion ends up with a very soft picture - much worse than if it had to be filmed by a SD camera.

And if the Nanoflash is able to record SD, will it do the downconversion itself (ie a video signal is fed from the HD SDI output of the EX3 to the Nano and the signal is down converted to SD) or does one have to feed the Nano with an already downconverted signal from the camera itself?

Dear Brian,

Our intentions were to add support to both the Flash XDR and nanoFlash to accept an SD-SDI input signal, as opposed to the standard HD-SDI signal.

We had not planned on downconverting an HD-SDI signal to SD for recording, as far as I know.

I will bring this up with our engineers, but I think that it is a tough problem. Especially, if in your experience, nothing that you tried so far lives up to your standards.

We do have one advantage in that we have a lot of computing horsepower to throw at the problem, but the development time and expense may be a problem.

If we do add downconversion, it will be available on both the Flash XDR and the nanoFlash.

Hi Brian, Dan-
I can assure you we have no plans whatsoever to add a up, down, or cross converter to the nano or Flash XDR. This conversion requires too much circuitry (and power) for professional results.

As Dan mentioned, we now support HD-SDI and in the near future (Q1 09) we will add SD-SDI support. I am very confident that the quality of the recorded video will be spectacular, but ultimately dependent on the quality of the SD-SDI input. We plan to support the 20, 30 and 50Mbps IMX format.

Hi Mike & Dan,

Thanks for the info - so basically it all depends on how well does the EX3 does the downconversion internally. So this means that I can record full HD on the SxS card within the camera but at the same time configure the camera's menu so that a downconversion is outputted from the SDI of the camera into the Nano's SD-SDI input (after Q1 09). By this way I would have identical footage - HD quality on the SxS cards and SD footage on the compact flash. Am I right on this?

Dear Brian,

I will need to read the Sony EX3 manual to determine that, if during the downconversion process, it changes the HD-SDI signal to the SD-SDI standard. If it does, then yes.

I also have concerns about the word "Identical".

The Sony EX1 and EX3 record 4:2:0 internally, but provides 4:2:2 quality out the HD-SDI port.

The 4:2:2 images are substantially better in quality. To quote others: "The difference is huge!"

Thus recording internally to the SxS cards and recording to the Flash XDR will never be truly "Identical" in one sense, but the footage will be of the same identical scenes.

If, during all of your downconversion tests, you have been using the files created on the SxS cards, for the source (which are always 4:2:0), then you have been missing out on all of the quality that your EX3 (or EX1) can deliver.

When using the Flash XDR, we always use the HD-SDI input as the source, which provides the highest quality images that you camera can deliver. This applies to almost all cameras and is the real beauty of HD-SDI.

Dear Dan,

Yes, according to page 119 on the instruction manual, the EX3 can be set to output a downconverted SD signal from the SDI output.

Yes you're right - I forgot all about the 4:2:2 output as opposed to the 4:2:0 recording mode. So theoretically I should be able to have a very good quality SD footage!

Can you kindly remind me what SD format shall the Nano record please? Or is it still under consideration? I hope that it would be a format that is already widely supported by exisitng NLE (especially Premiere in conjuction with Matrox Axio - as this is the sytem that I'm currently using).

Dear Brian,

On Page 129 of the Sony EX3 Manual (English Version), it discusses the SDI output of the camera.

The EX3 comes factory set to provide HD-SDI output.

You can select SD-SDI output by using the "YPbPr/SDI Out Select" of the "Video Set" menu, you can select SD-SDI.

Be sure to read this section carefully, as it also describes how to remove all of the camera data details (Camera setting (Viewfinder data), etc) from the HD-SDI signal. This is important if you record the HD/SD-SDI signal.

Also, if your Firewire (i.Link) connector is active, the HD-SDI/SD-SDI output is turned off.

I monitor my EX1 output with a Panasonic BT-LH1760 connected to the SDI port. The image is absolutely breathtaking. Now, all I need is a nano-flash...hint, hint.

Dear Bill,

We're working on it!

Mike Schell has much more time to devote to the nanoFlash now that I am on-board.

Hi Brian-
We plan to support 480i and 576i on the nanoFlash, which is the predominate SD-SDI standards. The video/audio is compressed using the same MPEG2 CODEC, at selectable bitrates of 20, 30 and 50 Mbps. We plan to support the IMX format, which should be compatible with Matrox Axio, but we will do lots of compatibility testing with all the major NLEs.