Design flaw in the sony avchd HRX-MC50?
 

Hello everyone,
I bought a SONY HXR-MC50E camera 9 months ago, and have discovered what seems to me to be a major design flaw - given that the camera is so lightweight and inexpensive it is clearly targeting the low budget documentary maker - usually a guy (or gal) working alone in the field.

there is an automatic setting which breaks up your footage after 10 minutes, and creates a new file to avoid overly large files. After rereading the manual several times, I can find no way to override this. However, when the files are put back to back, there is a gap, about one second with no visual or audio - if the gap happens to fall mid sentence in an interview, there is no recovery. can be disastrous if the interviewee has just said something important. as I work alone often, I can't monitor the camera and stop and restart at 9 mins 50 seconds each time!

but, more worryingly when I leave the camera running on a tripod while i'm conducting an interview, the footage i get after the 10min 'jump' is unstable. sometimes its fine, but about half the time, what I get is shaking/vibrating visual footage. UNUSABLE. and I have yet to find any way to fix it. the audio is fine but the visual is bizarre.

has anyone else experienced this? did you find a solution?
look forward to hearing from you. and apologies to the administrator if this is posted in the wrong heading - I couldn't find a general sony camera section, or one for this particular camera... cheers.

Re: Design flaw in the sony avchd HRX-MC50?
 

Wendy,

You've posted to NTRF, I'm afraid :)

Nevertheless, it might help if you know that most non-tape-based cameras (and I assume this applies to yours) always record takes divided into files of a size not exceeding ca 4GB. This is the FAT32 limit, and it's used for two reasons:

- compatibility with editing platforms that do not support NTFS's larger file size
- protecting user's material: should anything go wrong with a file, it'll be limited to just a single "chunk" of the take, and NOT the entire recording.

Whether the <=4GB size limit translates to 10 minutes or less or more, depends of course on the bit rate the camera's encoder is using.

HTH,

Piotr

Re: Design flaw in the sony avchd HRX-MC50?
 

@Piotr,
i did realise that this was not quite the right page, the camera is avchd, but i couldn't find a page for my specific cam. any suggestions within dvinfo?

as for the 4 gb limit for files for fat32, that is exactly the automatic feature i mean, but with some cameras you can overide this, or at least, they do not interrupt the footage...
cheers,w