Time Remaining innacurate with color bars
 

Here's an anomoly I just discovered. I was running some tests. I put up color bars and recorded for a while. The "Time Remaining" indicator in the upper left corner of the viewfinder was very innacurate. I reformatted the cards, switched slots, tried 3 different cards, both SDHC 16gb & SxS 8gb. Always way off comparing timecode to time remaining.

Switched to live picture and ran all the tests again and no problems with time remaining. It matched fine with timecode.

Is the time remaining longer with just colour bars?

Remember the EX1 uses a VBR codec. Colour bars don't exactly require a high bitrate so it may be you get longer from this material.

After about 4 or more minutes of runtime, the time remaining shows I used 1 minute

Your EX1 /3 is a great audio recorder - switch to colour bars and input stereo sound and off you go - about 4 hours per 16gigs if I remember correctly.

Paul

Sounds like a good tip, shame you can't turn off the LCD screen though.

Why not just close it?

What fun! VBR at its purest.

I got to almost 7 hours recording (had to stop half way to change batteries) before I got bored and went to bed - IIRC 5 mins space still left on the card.

But with the changes to the limiter settings and other tweaks, I'd have to do much more testing before I'll completely trust it as an audio recorder. And at £5k a pop, I doubt it will make much impact on that market. :)

That's hard to do on an EX-3 :)

Good point - didn't occur to me, Paul :)

I have a Sony PCM D50 which does a very good job with audio, and it fits in my pocket too. However, the built in microphones are next to useless if there is any wind, and the recorder doesn't have a XLR input either, only mini plug. Can't have it every way I suppose.

Am in the process of editing over 23 hours of African footage - need to make a 20 minute DVD from it. Will publish something next week.

Happy New Year to you all