Any News on Updated Firmware to allow other brand SxS Cards?
 

Has anyone heard anything yet? I am anxiously awaiting the firmware upgrade and am going to start bugging Sony about it soon. Card prices are outrageous. I understand they're marketing the EX1 towards the film industry and comparing recording times to film, but what about the guys who actually need to shoot for a "reasonable" amount of time? I can't afford $5000 in cards for each of our camers (we're purchasing 4-6 cams very shortly), nor do I want to take my card out every 5 minutes and dump it to a laptop, then have to turn around and dump it again to our editing box. Crossing my fingers big time for this firmware upgrade to happen soon.....

Any News?

Thanks in advance,
Kit

I understand and hope to get cheaper cards too...but what cards are you using that only lets you record 5 minutes? 16gb cards at full HQ record almost an hour!

Perhaps you should consider a tape based camera instead!

I was not literally meaning 5 minutes, Phil. But you know what I'm saying. $899 for a 16GB card is way too much. That will record 50 minutes in HQ mode. We do a lot of things like cheer competitions, graduations, Dance Recitals, etc. Some are only a couple hours, some are 8-10 hours. But just for reference, Lets say I did want to purchase enough cards right now for the 5 cameras we will have in mid January. To record on all 5 Cameras for 5 hours, I'll need 6 cards / camera, so 30 cards total. $899 x 30 cards is $4,495 / camera, $26,970 total. Just for media. That's ridiculous.


Find me a camera even close to the same price range that has the image quality and features of this camera that records @ 35Mb/s and 1080p and you've got me sold. We just sold off our last JVC HD-110 and we're not looking back. tape takes way too much time - besides, I don't know about you, but dumping 25 - 50 hours of tape is not really practical for most workflows.

Look, I'm just saying that there needs to be a better solution and soon rather than making people have to buy Sony cards at unreasonable prices. I completely understand the reason behind a tapeless workflow. I think it's revolutionary. But what I don't understand is why it has to be $899 for 50 minutes of recording time, especially when there are other companies producing Expresscards at less than half the price. It's just not practical and there needs to be options. It's not like Sony is going to lose money over this - driving down the prices on SxS cards is only going to help camera sales and get more people into their products. We've never used anything but JVC, but we're pretty sold on the EX1 and "want" to go that route - the only problem for us being that the media costs so much and Sony not releasing a firmware update that they apparently have promised. It is possible that we may look into some other things because of this....
Kit

I understand all your points and Sony have promised an update soon. This is official.

Try being an HVX owner, when i got mine a year ago it was £900 ($1800) per 8gb card and all I could get was 8 minutes on it. All I could afford was two! Giving me a total of 16 minutes. How useless was that? 32gb cards are coming out for them and they cost a huge amount and yet just 32 minutes.

EX1 owners are lucky. I would say within two months of it's release we will be able to buy 3rd party cards for around half the Sony price or less.

I know you are buying your equipment now but perhaps you should have waited until this firmware is released as cost understandably is a major issue for you. I have bought 3 x 16gb cards and have 2 x 8 cards. I can record just less than 4 hours. Enough for most days for me. In fact the most I have shot on a full on day with my ex1 was 2 and a half hours. But, as soon as the firmware comes out I will buy another 4 16Gb Sandisk cards. That way I wouldn't have to lug my laptop with me on an overnight.

Kit...
Sold your HD110 because you didn't like transferring from tape? DTE kits would have been cheaper than new EX1's. Nevertheless, I can understand your reasoning. The EX1 is much more automated and the pictures look stunning.

Maybe one of you guys can tell me something about CCing footage from the EX1. My HD110 makes really beautiful images...until I do a little color correcting on the footage. I beleive the noise that I'm seeing is the result of editting color info from 4:2:0 color space. Is the EX1 any better?

monopoly
 

What would motivate Sony to allow competitors to take away express card business from them? Manufacturers have lost business (e.g., tape decks) because of new technologies that are faster and cheaper.

I'll be surprised if Sony will allow other companies to get their foot in the XDCAM door.

BTW, Kit, why not just record to laptops and firewire drives?

The same argument was made a couple of years ago against P2, and the answer is the same today as it was then: use a portable FireWire hard disk recorder. Meanwhile, recording to inexpensive external FW drives through a laptop is certainly viable. History is repeating itself as I predicted back in July... the exact same topics from the the advent of P2 HD are coming around again. Not a problem though as none of this is new ground for us.

For reasons that should be obvious, it's *always* a good idea to mean what you say literally within an asynchronous text-based online discussion platform such as this one

No, we sold the 110's because of other things - we used firestore drives pretty much exclusively. The cameras were not bad, they produced a nice image under normal circumstances, but we found that when we tried to do things inside (ie. theaters), we would have to bump the gain quite a bit to get acceptable Iris levels. When the 110 gets grainy, it gets really grainy, sometimes to te point where it's unacceptable. I love the way they look and feel becuase we are used to pro cameras, but they are only 720p. We now have a need, based on some of our clients but mainly ourselves, to produce 1080p content.

About 98% of our work from here on out will all be recorded, edited and displayed natively in 1080p.

Although that is a great idea, and we have looked into this a great deal, there are many times that we have to be extremely mobile. Dragging around a laptop for each camera is not going to be feasible.


Well, the laptops are fine for some things, but not for others.


The biggest problem I have with the firewire drives right now is that they will only capture the 25mb/s or 19mb/s streams, whereas if the Sony is putting out a 35mb/s stream, why would you want to lower the quality of that? One of the main reasons for getting this camera is to have a nicer picture with less grain. The 1/2 inch cmos chips are very inticing, as well as the full progressive 1080p. If we're making an investment like this, we want to make sure we are able to get the highest quality we can out of the camera while keeping it as cost effective as possible.


My bad, I tend to be a pretty sarcastic person, I'll watch that in the future.

Thanks
Kit

Kit..

Thanx for answering. Makes sense to me. The JVC is terribly noisy in low light, it's true.

I'm still trying to figure out whether the noise I get after I CC is a JVC codec issue or do other cams, like the EX1, exhibit this noise.

I too am am in a fret with only one 8 gig card at the mo having spent my last penny just to get the camera. With that said I knew what I was getting into long before I considered going with the EX1 and am well aware that early adopters always pay a premium. Seems a bit early to try and make the point that the cards are overpriced. With the ability to swap cards even two 8 gig cards can get me a days worth of footage just dumping em, or having someone dump them, on location. Besides the obvious of being able to continue shooting once the day is done I won't even have to capture.

- Ray

Hey Bill,
Yes, we did get much more noise when color correcting. Because we do a lot of live events, we try to get all our white balance the same and usually we wouldn't have to do much CC at all, but when we did, we noticed the noise. During the day, the 110's were great cameras, as well as in well-lit situations like school gymnasiums. The problem we had was when we had dance recitals or plays, where some scenes and numbers were extremely dark. It looks like the 110 just threw up the footage in those instances, might as well have been some cheap consumer camcorder. We're also going to be running into a lot more of these situations, so we wanted to be prepared. We're extremely quality driven, making sure that all of our stuff is perfect. We feel this is the right camera with the right features at the right price, but the media really needs to be there too.

And for us...Dumping 8 gig cards from 5 cameras every 25 minutes will just not work. That's just one more person to pay and rely on.......

Great points Kit. Now that the lens problem seems to be addressed, the price/work flow of these cards is the only real reason not to buy this camera. I still like tape, but obviously it's not long for this world, at least in the smaller cams.

john

evilgeniusentertainment.com

What your not factoring in here is that once you've made the purchase, you have those cards, forever, and you can use them over and over again.

I've been working with solid state media all year long and the amount of money that we've saved by not purchasing tape stock is insane.

By the sound of things solid state might not be for you, i'd suggest you look into the full size XDCAM HD range, discs are cheap, and then you'll also get 2/3" ccds which will improve your lowlight levels.

I'm going to completely disagree here, the price of the cards and the workflow is one of the biggest reasons to buy the camera.

Solid state media pricing has dropped so much, with P2 and SxS media prices sitting pretty much level with each other it has never been a better time to invest in solid sate if you are in need of a new camera.

Things are going to get a LOT better. I predict by the end of next year, the SxS 8GB cards will not be worth much.

There comes a point eventually where solid state goes beyond just paying for itself. With P2 you compare it to how many $33 DVCPRO HD tapes equals a $900 P2 card... and the answer is, after using a P2 card less than thirty times, it becomes less expensive than DVCPRO HD tape. Same thing applies to XDCAM EX... I suppose its tape equivalent would be HDCAM. Same math in that case... a 16GB SxS card is paid for in less than thirty cycles, and thereafter it's "free" as opposed to everybody else who's still paying for HDCAM or DVCPRO HD tapes.

Well, yes.......and no. I mean, I see what you are saying, but what if you want to actually hold on to (or archive) the footage you are shooting? Well, then you need to spend MORE money.....either for a hard drive, some kind of XDcam or blu ray disk, or 'gasp!' tape to dump it back to. So it's not quite as simple as 30 uses of a $900 P2 card has saved you money over tape because you will likely be spending MORE money to 'archive' the footage somehow if you are using solid state, unless you have no use for holding onto the footage you shoot (and if that was true you could reuse your $33 DVCPRO HD tape if you were tape based)

That being said, there is a BIG attraction to not have to 'ingest' or 'capture' tapes! It is certainly the wave of the future and I am sure that prices will continue to go down on solid state options.

You're right, I neglected to factor in the cost of archiving... there are a number of ways to store that data, it could go to a hard drive, it could go to an LTO-3 tape drive... so let's call it 40 to 50 cycles then. Ultimately it depends on how much you're recording, and how much of that you're hanging on to besides the finished edit masters.

I would agree with Chris. If you look at the storage media on the basis of how much you're paying per gig of storage, a 500GB disk is a LOT cheaper.

Well, don't think I'm bad mouthing solid state....I almost certainly am going to purchase the EX. And you are right, you can reuse the cards over and over, which WILL eventually be a savings. I was just pointing out one extra thing to think of that you probably WILL be spending some money on.....a way to archive the footage. Most people (well, me anyways) are used to just storing their tapes for 'stock' footage.....I keep a tape log, and when I find a project that needs a shot of a bear grabbing a fish out of the river, I can go to 'tape 23, timecode 01:34:15 - 01:42:05' and find exactly the shot I need. So the solid state way of doing things is just NEW.....but once I get used to it, I'm sure there will be no going back!

Here's an affordable archive solution... the Iomega Rev Pro. One 70GB cart holds the contents of four 16GB SxS cards. The cost of the drive is between $300 and $400 (either USB2 or FireWire, Mac and PC compatible). The cost of a 70GB cart is about $70. So compare that to DVCPRO HD or HDCAM tape... a $400 drive replaces a $20,000 VTR, and the cost to archive that data is less than $20 per each full SxS card.

Thanks John.

Solid state is EXACTLY what we need. We need faster turnaround times and less labor costs ingesting everything. I think the full line of XDCAM stuff is awesome, but it's way out of our league cost wise. Spending $125k just on heads and lenses is not something that we can afford. It just makes sense that if Sony is going to offer a camera of this caliber at this pricepoint, they need to be realistic with who is going to be buying it and what they can afford. I don't think it's good business sense to "fool" people into thinking that this is going to be a less costly way to go, because when you really start getting down to the nitty gritty, purchasing the camera and say 10 hours worth of cards puts you back up not too shy of a 330 price wise. I just think they need to get the updated firmware out so that this camera can truly be one of the most successful cameras in history.

Just a note: the 355, 335 and 330 are 1/2" ccds, not 2/3". The EX1 has 1/2" cmos chips, which I like even better because of the newer technology and it seems like everything is going that way.

The SxS card standard is a Sony/Sandisk collaboration. I would guess it's more Sandisk than Sony. And Sony has said from the beginning at NAB 2007 where they first showed the EX 1 mockup that as long as the cards follow the SxS specs and speed requirement they will be usable. But it's still up to Sony to implement new cards in the firmware and that might take time because they want to cash in on the card sales in the beginning.

One motivation to let others in could be to get a much lower price on SxS than P2 since there is only P2 cards from Panasonic and they have a two year sales advantage for Sony to catch up to. A low card price would generate more camera sales in my opinion. I have seen P2 cards from other manufacturers than Panasonic but pana doesn't seem to like when others make and sell cards.

Sandisk might be number two out on the market and then probably followed by others, I have heard about TDK wanting to make SxS cards

And just to clarify it's XDCAM EX that is card based. XDCAM and XDCAM HD are disc based systems and there are disc from Sony, TDK and Fuji and probably some more manufacturers so they have already let others in the XDCAM door. And would probably keep it so even for XDCAM EX, but time will tell.

Ah yes,,, of course, they are 1/2" cameras, you are correct, it was far to early for me to be posting anyway, hadn't had any coffee at that point yet.

I think you need to rule out archiving on professional Solid state media for the time being, its just not viable right now and I personally don't see Sony bastardizing their own cards in favour of letting us use cheaper non-sony cards. I don't care what they've promised.. but i for one don't trust sony.

and if they do.. well awesome, it will be another reason for me to buy the camera (which yes i will be doing after teething problems are over) I reckon they will be other manufactured cards.. but pricing wont be to far from the sony ones.

Currently if you want to archive, the best way to do it is hard drives.. they are so cheap.

Although i've just been testing out dual layer blu ray discs.. and i might even switch to doing it that way.

Kit, I understand wanting to shoot at the HQ rate all the time, but it seems like shooting really long events at the 25 Mb/s rate on firestore, at least until the cards get cheaper, isn't a totally awful alternative.

I know, when parents watch my videos of their kids performing in plays put on by the local performing arts school that the first thing they say is; "Oh my goodness, that silly man is recording at 25 Mb/s and not 35!" " Whatever shall we do...?"

I understand where you're coming from, Eric, but you make it sound like that's all we do. Although we do a lot of that, there are much more critically demanding projects that we do as well. The whole point of getting this camera is to have something better than what we have had in the past. We've done the Firestore thing for a long time and have not always been happy with their workflow. The thing that bugs me the most about the FS-4 is that it is way too cumbersome, hard to mount, and we'll have to deal with the m2t files in some way...again. I was really looking forward to working with something else.

But here's the difference. "I" care about what our product looks like. I want it to be better than the next guy's product because that's what keeps us working. Mom & Pops may not notice the difference, but many of our clients will. That's who's ultimately keeping me in business - it's just an added benefit that the parents stay happy.

It's not an "awful alternative" as you put it, but finding a solution to this will keep us a step or two ahead of our competition.

Wow ...

"I don't think it's good business sense to "fool" people"

Would someone drop almost 7k on a camera and not find out how much the media is? Really, I just don't get the borderline hostility in these posts and frankly it's a bit perturbing.

If you care about what your product looks like, and if you want to be better than the guy next door, sorry but thats going to cost a bit more. If it didn't the guy next door would have em! I may be alone but that makes perfect sense to me. It just seems to me as though the slights toward Sony are more than a little unreasonable and completely unfounded. Again, early adopters ALWAYS pay a premium. How much was a flat screen HD TV two years ago? Or closer to the topic the P2 cards? Or hard drives. It's like this, things start out expensive, then they get less expensive but when they do there are new things that we want that are more expensive, thats the cycle of life, or at least technology.

- Ray

Hi Kit

I'd think that if you're going to do a shoot with 5 EX1s, recording each for 5hours, you're probably going to get good enough revenue for that event to be able to afford to have one ("junior"?) person dumping SxS cards to a laptop or external hard drive from the 5cams.

Maybe i'm missing something here, but surely you would only need two 16Gb cards per EX1 - whilst one is being recorded to, the other (at some point during the 50minutes "window") can be dumped to laptops/external hard-drives and then the card is cleared and ready for the next 50minutes. The EX1 cam seamlessly switches from one card to the next once the first one is full.
- You're going to need a 400Gb+ hard-drive space to accommodate 25hours worth of footage anyway.

The person doing the card dumping really doesnt need any "skills" at all - its just a repetitive procedural thing. I wouldnt think the cost to pay someone to do that would be much at all. Maybe one of the production people has a teenage son or something who'd be happy to do it ?? just an idea.

In this way, even if you use all 5 EX1s on that event, you'd only need 5 x 2 cards = 10 cards of 16Gb each.
Still a large cost, but if you can afford USD33,500 for 5 EX1s (plus battery costs & other bits & pieces etc for all 5 cams - the 10 U60 batts alone is going to be $2340), then you'll be able to afford the USD9000 for the 10 16Gb cards i'd imagine. At least that $9000 is a one-off capital-expenditure cost and not a consumable item.

Personally i have never needed to record more than about 3hours on a 1-cam 1-day event shoot, so my guess is, with every respect, that the 5cams for 5hours = 25hours of footage would be at the top-end of (timewise and cam-count wise) what you might need to shoot on an event. The editing alone for 25hours of raw footage would be really very onerous if one had to do that magnitude of editing too often..!

I do really think that within a relatively short space of time (a few months) these card prices will drop substantially. If the firmware update happens that will help a lot for sure, and Sandisk have now said that they are going to release a card that works for the Ex1 (so i read in another post).

just my thoughts on that.

Raymond, TCO - Total cost of ownership (realistically) - you have to admit it's a little deceiving..... It's like getting the deal of a lifetime on a car and having to spend 3 grand a pop for each tire, but you can't buy the other brand's tires. But it does include a couple of spares to get you rolling down the road....

We have not purchased the cameras yet....What I am currently doing is called research. No hostility, just looking for opinions and answers.

Well, in this case A LOT more

I understand business and technology trends quite well, but if we're comparing TVs now...been shopping for one of those too. Sony TVs are still still way overpriced...LOL


Ray, I'm not trying to be hostile towards anyone. I welcome your opinion as well as anyone elses. Just trying to spark some discussion here.



But that means that EVERY time we do a shoot, we have to have someone dumping things. Sometimes we have multiple shoots going on in the same day, so then we'll need more people. We'll also have to lug around extra laptops, cabling, etc. Then we have to take all those back to the shop and set them up, transfer everything over again, etc. It's just a very bulky workflow that could be easily addressed by having more cards, which brings us back full circle to square one.

I definitely don't want to trust the transfer of our footage to someone that doesn't know what they are doing.

True, but it's really just not going to be efficient.

You are correct, This is an extreme situation, but one we run into multiple times throughout the year. There are many times we are running multiple events as well, maybe having a camera or 2 somewhere and a few cameras doing something else. Typically in a 5 camera live setup, we'll switch it live and record to computer & tape. But there are a few things we do every year that require us to have multiple mobile cameras for most of the day, such as some of the emergency training excercises that we do.

I sure hope so, for everyone's sake.

Thanks to everyone for chiming in, this has been great. I know there are other ways of doing things such as DTE drives, etc, which may suffice for the time being. I just really hope that there are some other alternatives coming out in the near future.

Aren't the Rev Pro drives essentially removable hard drive platters? I can't see how that would be more reliable in terms of long term storage than a standard hard drive. It seems like now you're taking all the issues a hard drive has (susceptible to magnetic fields & shock), removing the platters from their sealed metal enclosure and putting them in a plastic box with a door on it... and charging more than a hard drive would cost. I get that the heads aren't near the platters if you drop a Rev cartridge, but most laptop drives park the heads off the platters when they are powered down so I can't see much advantage.

Seagate's momentus laptop drives have operating shock tolerances of 350 Gs and 900 Gs non-operating, cost $1/gig or less, they're smaller than the Rev cartridges, and come fully enclosed in a metal enclosure with no door to allow dust/moisture in. That seems like a much better archive option even before you start considering Iomega's track record - I've had far more zip and jazz disks fail over the years than hard drives, and that makes me very wary of any of their products when it comes to long-term reliability for archiving.

Have you used this Chris? Is it reliable?

I think one of the cheaper ways to go storage wise is just a straight up raid 5 array. Only a snowball chance in hell that more than 1 drive would go bad at the same time. You would probably have a much better chance of having a fire or water damage destroy all your stuff than 2 drives going out at the same time. If 1 drive goes bad, you can rebuild the drive from the others in a matter of hours. You're talking a 2TB redundant solution for around $500, which is only around $.25 per GB.

I'm all for removeable media, But the cost to archive the footage on this solution for a full 16Gb SxS would be only $4.

i still think the only reliable way to long term store is the xdcam hd professional discs. They are so solid and reliable. As soon as the usb drive will record in full hd i will buy it.

I sometimes work for Sky News in London, my old company, they will completely switch to p2 in January. That's like 60 odd cameras. They are archiving on XDCAM as they don't trust their servers or hard drives. Kind of would have made sense to just buy XDCAM!

Interesting Phil about Sky News going to P2 since TF1 in France have also gone over to P2 with a large purchase of these cameras to Digibeta SX. Not sure about TF1's archiving plans.

Ok - the cards are expensive, but how much does a service cost on a tape based system? How much is a set of new heads? The income Sony get from service has virtually vanished overnight - one of my old Betacam SPs that still has really nice pictures now needs $1500 spending on it - which isn't worth it. apart from buying the new cameras, what running costs are there? none worth mentioning - so why all the moaning about media costs?

I've had one Rev Pro drive in the house for about nine months... so far so good. It's handy.

Just mentioning it as one of several possible options. Certainly not ideal but maybe useful to someone.