DV qualities of the XDCAM EX
 

I asked a similar question over on the Panasonic P2HD forum when I was thinking of going with the HVX200, that was until storage media costs told me to wait a bit.

With the XDCAM Ex I'd want it for DV shooting so will be interesting to see how that format is catered for next thursday at the launch.

I want to futureproof when I ungrade my desktop next year by getting this camera (or 2).

I believe this camera will only shoot in HD.

I guess we'll all find out this week.

Cheers Vaughan

Even though it may only shoot HD, I believe Cineform will support this camera, so converting to SD would be an easy process.

Also, if there is firewire, it may have some sort of downconvert like the Z1U and other Sony HDV cameras.

Just a guess though, but I'm pretty sure Cineform will be supporting this camera.

Thanks for the quick response lads.

As time is money as they say all of us strive to cut the minutes on various conversions from camera to disc etc.

Which version of Cineform would be needed in these circumstances.

I know this is all a bit premature before thursday.

Surely it will have a DVCAM/DV mode? The data rate to the cards would be exactly the same. Sometimes/manytimes we just don't need HD and who wants any extra post production work?

C'mon, downconverting on the fly is no extra work, really. I wouldn't be surprised if there was no DV/DVCAM mode on the EX, but certainly expect the HD->SD conversion capabilities; what's the firewire for, after all? The mainstream (i.e. HD) workflow is file based, anyway...

I'm not sure wether I'm going to ask a stupid question - but if we were to downconvert on the fly wouldn't that mean that we need to capture footage in real time (like HDV)? Wouldn't we loose the beauty of tapeless acquisition and file transferring? Please correct me if I'm wrong.

I mentioned downconverting on the fly while capturing in "the old way", yes - but assuming the EX cannot operate in SD, thus cannot write SD files to the card - the "beauty of tapeless acquisition" wouldn't apply then.

Yes that is my point, why would I want to shoot to Flash media only to have to capture in real time via firewire. It should be like the Z1 and support both PAL and NTSC SD. it really should have some form of 20Mbps MPG2 SD 4:2:2 mode but I won't hold my breath for that...

The 330 etc can shoot in DV mode so I can only hope we are fussing about nothing.

Why not simply import the HD footage into an SD project?

Its a no brainer guys.

In just two days time we shall know all lads.......am surprised nobody has put up a virtual countdown for the launch on here and elsewhere......really exciting time!

Yes, I've been waiting since NAB 07 for this announcement. It's a VERY exciting time.

Forgot to mention the scaling to colour sampling change, that by scaling down to SD from HD, you end up with close to 4:2:2 colour. That and the fact you've got room to re-frame and zoom... a double bonus in my book.

The brochure quotes SD capacities
 

In the EX1 brochure, there's mention (under 'a wide array of interfaces') of SD-SDI, SD Component, S-Video and composite. So there's got to be some down-convert circuitry in there somewhere to get SD from an HD camera.

But like the HVX, there's no 'ingest' stage to do the on-the-fly conversion so I guess you get what you shoot, and it's down to the NLE to downconvert. So I guess there should be a SD shoot option...

However, I couldn't find mention of the 18 Mbps XDCAM mode which would be useful for those of us who film long presentations and conference content.

In theory thats fine, in practice that is usually a lot of wasted time rendering and unless you pre-render everything to SD you will also get a lot less RT performance from having to work with a HD source file even on a SD timeline.

In summary, when you only ever need SD for a project (and the clients arn't paying enough for the extra workload above) why would you want to shoot in HD?