Sony PXW-X70 announced: Pro XDCAM version of AX100

[Mike Griffiths]

Originally Posted by Christopher Young

Mike I can't test that out as the camera has gone back to the dealer but from memory if you pushed the button in it shut down completely. If you just shut the screen it went into standby hence the quick start on opening the screen. First time up I had to turn the camera on with that button which in the manual is called ON / STANDBY.

Will find out for sure when mine arrives I guess!

Chris Young
CYV Productions
Sydney

Chris,
The handbook says

"To turn off the power
Close the LCD screen, if the viewfinder is extended return it to it's original position
You can also turn off the power by pressing the POWER button""

I don't use the power button often and have not seen any battery drain overnight when simply shutting down the LCD or viwefinder so my guess is that it simply powers up quickly, which is good
Cheers
Mike

[David Dixon]

I've been playing a bit with the downloadable files - a bit frustrating. Catalyst Browse is very sluggish, and some of the clips won't play back or convert. I'm almost ready to get the camera, but as a FCPX user I'll have to shoot AVCHD until there is a plugin I'm afraid.

One thing I did notice that I'd not seen mentioned - Catalyst Browse reports the XAVC clips as 24 bit audio, not 16. That's a nice extra feature I wasn't expecting.

[Tim Akin]

Yeah David, that is my plan, hopefully it won't be to long. I'm on Vegas though and my X70 should be here today.....can't wait!

[Christopher Young]

Compatibility for Vegas and other NLEs rumoured to be December. With Vegas I would imagine it will be a new build version of 13.

Chris Young
CYV Productions
Sydney

[Terence Morris]

One thing I've noticed, playing with the files Chris posted, is how much you can push colour grading. I sometimes like to desaturate, stretch and crush regions of the tonal curve to get various "film noir" looks etc (comes from having a stills background with 14-bit raw to mess with). This is barely possible with 8-bit AVC of course, before banding artifacts appear. I was mildly skeptical of the value of 10-bit XAVC-L in-camera with a bandwidth of only 50Mb/s. Like a weak Martini in a big glass perhaps. But I've been torturing this footage all morning and it holds-up really well. I'm actually very excited about this aspect of the X70. Having considered getting an external recorder there's now much less urgency.

[Paul Anderegg]

The SDI is standard female jack. Menu options allow for 1080, 720, or 480i output regardless of record resolution. DV record only allows 480i SDI output though. The camera also puts out record triggers on SDI and HDMI for Atomos per the manual.

Paul

[Terence Morris]

I'm about to order the X70 and get a couple of suitable memory cards at the same time. I'm slightly confused by the variety of UHS-1 SDXC (is speed class 3 necessary?) card options for this video camera, regarding both claimed speed and economics. Obviously I don't want overkill and may never do the 4K upgrade when available. May we do a quick poll as to what others are using and found to work well. Thanks.

[Paul Anderegg]

I bought a pair of PNY Elite Performance 64GB SDXC cards. Real 90MB/s read and 60MB/s write speeds, very pleased with them for the $30-35 price they command. They are UHS-1. 143 minutes of record time per card at 50Mbps.

Paul

[Lou Bruno]

I have the same cards. Work well.

Originally Posted by Paul Anderegg

I bought a pair of PNY Elite Performance 64GB SDXC cards. Real 90MB/s read and 60MB/s write speeds, very pleased with them for the $30-35 price they command. They are UHS-1. 143 minutes of record time per card at 50Mbps.

Paul

[Mike Griffiths]

Transcend 90/60 UHS-3 work fine too, about £25 from Ebay

[Terence Morris]

Thanks for the replies so far, guys. I will probably go with the Transcend or PNY, both of which seem to be UHS-1 SD class 3 with more than enough bandwidth (but see my last paragraph). In fact the PNY has an Elite Performance 256 GB card for $106 on B&H which is just nuts.

Comment: I must say, the naming scheme of these things is bloody arcane, i.e., UHS-1 (SD class 1) vs. UHS-1 (SD class 3), and the manufacturers don't go out of their way to clarify the issue. You need a magnifying glass to see the little U with a 1 or 3 in it!

This is really just a technical question for my own limited understanding. As best I get it, the video camera requires 50 Mbps - which is about 6 MBps. So even SDXC-UHS-1 (class 1) cards, which appear to have a max. write speed of 45 MBps should in theory do the the job fine? Or is there something about peak vs. average write speed I should know.

[Mike Griffiths]

Catalyst Prepare arrived today, early indications are that it's great but no time to really test. I was told I would get a discount because I bought 'Content Browser' but no sign of that yet

[Mike Griffiths]

I've been using this for a few days now and like it. It accepts old Sony HVR, Panasonic MTS, MOV and of course the new X70 codec. Very easy and fast to use and great for making a rough cut storyboard. I've not tried colour grading yet, but it looks useful.
One oddity so far- I can't seem to delete 'libraries', I set one up as a test and cannot get rid of it!. Not serious but odd. Maybe more oddities to follow.
It's available on a 14 day trial here: Catalyst Prepare: Overview.

[Darren Levine]

question for those who own the camera: how much time has to pass before you start to become irked by 4k remaining as vaporware?

Not to stir the pot, just curious since one main reason i'm staying away for the time being is that they didn't give any idea of when that update will happen, no day, no month, not even a quarter mentioned, just the "future"...

[Paul Anderegg]

I shoot broadcast news with mine, and my station being an ABC affiliate is a 720p station. Shooting at night, you would think the "Clear Image Zoom" feature with 20 million pixels would provide a clean clear image at 1280x720 resolution, I mean it still has enough overpixelization right? Wrong. Once you leave the happy world of every recorded pixel being interpolated from like 20, the gain becomes very obvious. I would not want to see this camera in 4k at night, especially once you start zooming in on things.

It is very nice though to be able to see my X70 footage actually AIR at 60 frames per second.....the only good thing I can say about 720.

Paul