EX in the fields: review from Norway and India
 

Hello all,

We received our EX about 2 weeks ago and immediatelly headed for a nice one week shoot in Norway. The EX held up very nice in -10 degrees Celsius.

I wrote a short review with my first impressions and some frame grabs on our website:
http://www.dendv.nl/ex-review1.php

More frame grabs and clips are to follow...

Next week's destination is India. I will definately keep you posted how our new little gem is holding up in a complete different climate over there!

Hope you enjoy reading the report, plz let me know!

Regards,
Erwin

Nice review!!

Very well done, great shots as well.

It is good to hear that the camera will handle the cold weather. I will be taking mine to Mongolia in the middle of February. I asked some Sony sales guys how the camera would hold up in the cold temps there and they shrugged and said "You tell us when you get back!!". I feel a little better about this trip after reading your report.

Keep up the good work and stay safe in India.

Daniel Weber

Thanks for the review. I'm looking forward to your India frame grabs.

Thanks for your thoughts, Erwin, especially concerning the potential of audio distortion. Hope you figured this out while/before you were recording and not after. Please continue to comment on settings and such.

Thanks,
Bill

thanks for taking the time to do a write up.

Hi Erwin...........
 

I am sooooo jealous!

The cam AND India as well.

Great review BTW, looking forward to the shots from India.

Well done.


CS

Erwin, Thanks for the review.

I am interested to learn how the EX1 performed with the driving shots on a mountain road with the car suction mount. Perhaps a good test with the potential for vibration to cause the rolling shutter effect? This is the one setup that concerns me, especially as I will be on outback corrugated dirt roads. Any feedback or clips, are much appreciated.

CHristopher,

Where abouts in Australia are you located? Just asking because I thought you were in Melbourne - but obviously if you are looking at a lot of corrugated roads you would need to be a lot out of town!

Graeme, I am located up on the Gold Coast, and the specific corrugated roads I refer, are along the coast of North Queensland. Intended ultra low budget Feature, a good chunk of shots at the start require shots with car suction mount to driver or passenger door, etc.

Test: shoot 720p50, instead of 1080p25, and playing out those 720p50 shots at 2x speed, dropping every second frame, would that decrease the chance of rolling shutter, if it was an issue in this instance at p25? The theory in my head: is the CMOS scan time twice the speed at p50 than p25?

Back to Erwin's coverage.

Christopher,

Aha - the far north. I love it. Travel to Cairns and beyond quite regularly in the dry! Have done the Bloomfield track 2 times in the last 4 years and then north on the Cape road.

Back on the video track - Christopher, I think that people make a much bigger deal out of rolling shutters than they deserve. I have been shooting with a Sony A1 as my B cam for 2 years and have never had a problem related to the rolling shutter.

I have had occasional HDV codec break up with very rapid moving scenes, but this is not a rolling shutter issue. I know of others who have been shooting XD CAM for more than a year and have never had any issues with the Codec breaking at 35Mbs - so I think that you will be safe at this bit rate. On the other hand I have heard of vibrations from cars breaking the HDV 25Mbs codec. I will be interested to hear your feedback, but I think that you will be very safe at 35Mbs.

All the best,

great review. I hope you are enjoying the camera as much as me!

Graeme, I am mostly a defender of the rolling shutter technology for my intended use. I must determine if fast vibration, moving the EX1 back and forth, up and down during a scan cycle may be an issue when recording via car mount along the corrugated dirt road, although I hope not. Every other setup should be cool. Lots of tests in due course. Thanks for the feedback, I appreciate it, and looking forward to Erwin's images and report regarding his car mount test.

Wry nice rewiew
 

Hello Erwin, very nice rewiew.
I have a question of the equipment.
What Tripod head and tripod do you use in the picture 0028?

I drove around yesterday for a quick test (1080 30P 1/60). The EX1 was hand held with OIS off aimed out the windsheild.

Granted the footage did not look that great due to a lot of movement, I did not see any wobble. I imagine if I had the camera aimed out the side window there might be a bit of skew. But, with that type shot and all the motion blur, the slight skew will not be a problem for myself.

I understand why there is concern for rolling shutter artifacts, but I believe that Sony has done a decent job of minimizing these artifacts with the EX1.

I will have a look at that driving footage this weekend and will post it in the review when I update it this weekend.

Tripod used is the Sachtler DV6 SB, which is in my opinion a very nice and suitable tripod for the EX.



Regards,
Erwin

second part of review in India is up
 

Hello all,

Well, we made it, we filmed a week in India and we are back home safe with loads of footage and tons of impressions.

You will be glad to hear that the EX camera performed excellent, and this time in +33 degrees Celsius in harsh sunlight. Everyday a layer of brown/grey city dust was collected on the unit.

I just updated and finished the second part of my handson review, which I invite you to read:
http://www.dendv.nl/ex-review2.php

Now it's editting time! Will be happy to answer any questions.

Regards,
Erwin

Erwin, with what are you going to edit the EX1 footage, if I may ask? And what was the quality of the footage - 1080 or 720? This is presently my dilemma at the moment!

I am having trouble with your mxf files. They don't work with Cineform's HDLink (for AVI conversion) or DVfilm Raylight... Has anyone found a solution?

Best

Ruben

mxf files in Vegas and NeoHD
 

Hello Brian,

I am using Sony Vegas Pro version 8a for editting. All footage is in maximum quality 1080/50i.

The mxf files work fine on the timeline, but the computer power it pulls is enormous! My dual Xeon 3,2 GHz PC has a hard time: preview in quarter size gives 8 frames per second on average, project loading time is 5 minutes, switching windows back and forth is very very slow. Unfortunately I have no choice right now but to continue editting, maybe a new "muscle" PC will bring some relief...


Hello Ruben,

Be sure to get the latest version of NeoHD 3.2.2.b - other versions of HD link don't work properly with the EX mxf files. The latest HDLink version with NeoHD can convert the mxf files to avi, I tried it and it works. That said, I still encounter problems with NeoHD: 1 out of every 10 files it strangely refuses to convert to avi. That's why, for this project, I work with mxf directly on the timeline.

Regards,
Erwin

Actually I'm using Prospect2K and I'm having no luck with the conversion...

Not sure if it works with Prospect2K, you might ask the Cineform guys, they are always very helpful.

Editting is well underway at the moment. So far I am editting with the mxf files in Vegas. During editting I disable most of the color correction and filtering etc. to gain speed.

Regards,
Erwin

The footage looks great.... the colors are right on....

I played the orginal files back with VLC... they played fine and then I converted the files using Cineform Prospect to AVI, without issue...

then used MPlayer Classic for playback of the AVI files... looks great, the colors using that app popped very nicely...

I'm going to grade them tomorrow and see how it goes...

Thanks for sharing your experience with the cam/footage...

Hey Ray
I have VLC too but was unable to get the mxf files to play. I have Vegas 8 as well but it doesn't see .mxf files either. I've downloaded the windows driver and installed it (I think it came with the 1.1 reader) but no luck. WinXP SP2 on a regular 3GHz P5...
Ideas?
Chris

Check to see if you have the latest version of VLC.... its up to 8.6D and that may be the reason your's isn't playing them...

Ray -
Ta-da! Success! Thanks!
Cheers
Chris

Great stuff! Lots and lots of questions...

Looking at the footage, I notice you're shooting 1080i. Why not 1080p?

Looking at 030_0421_01 (red/gold interior), there's a bit of boiling noise in the reds, I guess this is about +6 dB gain? More?

There's been talk of 'rolling shutter' happening if you switch on the electronic shutter, but I note you're using a matte box. Were you using additional NDs in India, closing the iris more (in which case did you run into diffraction or softness?) or did you use higher (i.e. electronic) shutter speeds to cut exposure after the internal NDs ran out?

You report that you cut down the sharpness. Totally agree with you! If I were being very picky, I'm still seeing traces of it in the India footage - did you try reducing it further? Or did it end up looking soft?

Although the auto modes are handy, how did you get on with the histogram? How do the Zebras work out in anger? The auto-iris shots seem to display a little lag.

Were you able to exploit the narrower DoF of the EX-1 over a 1/3" camera such as the HD100 in a publicly shareable shot?

I also would like to know if you had gain set on in this shoot, as I would personaly have closed the iris a little bit to get more informations in highligts.

The biggest problem with this camera is the exposure range, which is far under the (not comparable too expensive) Sony F900.

What was you "picture profile" (if any) set in this shoot ?

Thanks, great work anyway.

Busy week again with shooting another project. Ok, here a few answers.

Red noise
The noise in the red on that particular shot could be from the gain but I am not sure anymore if I turned the gain on, perhaps a little of +3dB and I think I did close the iris a little. I don't know what is causing this noise on the red wall. On a TV the scene looks allright btw.

Shutter
I did not use the electronic shutter to change the exposure: everything was done with the built in ND filters. No immidiate notion of softness while using these. Besides that I used a matte box with 4x4 gradial ND filter a couple of times to darken the sky.

Picture Profile
Regarding Picture Profile: I only decreased the sharpness of the picture, no other settings were adjusted. I only received the camera a few days before the shoot and there was not enough time to test and get a feeling of what each setting would do. So only the sharpness was cut back.

Histogram & Zebra
I really liked the histogram and I switched it on quite often. It is superimposed on the lcd-screen very small, not really readable like you are used from a still photocamera, it is good enough to give a direction of the exposure of your shot. The 2 different zebra patterns are useful as well: the forward pattern is set to 70% and the backward pattern is set to 100% exposure.

The auto iris is lagging, that is true. The iris of the HD100 is lagging even more, so for me it is working better. I try to use manual iris anyway whenever possble.

DoF
The advantage of a 1/2" over the 1/3" of my previous HD100 is mostly noticed in the higher sensitivity: the camera needs less light. I did use a nice short DoF in a few shots (also with focus pulling) and during interviews, where I think the background was more nicely blurred than I am used to with a 1/3" camera.

Hope this answers a few of your questions!

Regards,
Erwin

many thanks for your feedback.

Great post Erwin, you answered many questions I had, thanks!