Upcoming Sony Products: PMW-F3 & SR-R1 Deck

Upcoming Sony Products:  PMW-F3 & SR-R1 Deck 

I briefly checked out the PMW-F3 camcorder at a Sony demo at B&H the other day and I'm pretty blown away. Sony has crammed so much flexibility and high quality into such a small and relatively affordable package that I'm wondering if they may end up cannibalizing their higher end business. In a lot of ways, this is the camera I've been waiting for since I first got involved in video over 10 years ago. Needless to say after seeing it firsthand, the seed's been planted and I want one bad!. There's no point in going over specs here as that info is already on every frickin' blog out there. I've said it before here but I'll say it again - what really excites me most about this camera is RGB (444) output and S Log gamma (to be available at a later date via upgrades). This a master quality video signal we're talking about here and to be able to get it from a tiny $16,000 camcorder with a Super 35 sized sensor and PL mount is huge to say the least. The XDCAM EX workflow is already very well understood and the fact that you can easily do a higher quality external recording while simultaneously recording to SxS cards opens the door for this camera to vastly different productions of all ranges of budget. I personally think it's going to be a massive hit in the pro video world and cannot wait to start working with it.

The other product that was discussed is the upcoming Sony SR-R1 deck - "the SRW-1 of solid state recorders." I've been hearing about this thing for awhile now and it won't actually be officially announced until NAB this year. It records in the same bit rates as HDCAM SR tape, "virtually uncompressed" HQ 880 and SQ 440 mbps but now has a 220 mbps option as well. It can do dual and single stream, has a bevy of 3D recording and monitoring options, and supposedly will be priced for purchase by users and not just rental companies unlike the SRW-1. It records onto these neat solid state data packs as seen below. Love it. A perfect compliment to the F3.

The F3 will hit the street in 3 short weeks and the SR-R1 probably by the summer. NAB is always cool but this may be the year to put in some face time. If anyone out there is interested in collaborating on covering the event, let's talk.

I recommend reading Jon Fauer's article for more thorough information on these products.

http://www.fdtimes.com/articles/sony/FDTimes-SonyF3-HiRez.pdf

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Quantel's Digital Factbook

Quantel's Digital Factbook

I read this on a recent plane ride and felt it was worth sharing. Anyone nerdy enough to follow this site will definitely appreciate its thorough and concise presentation of just about all the terminology you'll encounter in video engineering, digital cinema, stereoscopic 3D, and post production. Quantel has done a great job of collecting this info and keeping it up to date, this latest edition clocking in at over 200 pages. Yes it's an incredibly boring read but despite my desire to focus more on creativity this year, I'm constantly reminded that to stay technically relevant in this business, learning and keeping up to date is practically a full time job. C'est la vie. 

20th Edition Digital Factbook

Random Gotcha - 01/15/11 - Glue Tools Phantom Cine

Random Gotcha - 01/15/11 - Glue Tools Phantom Cine

I'm on my way out of town but I feel inclined to post this BIG old gotcha before I sign off for the week.

As if the Phantom workflow wasn't buggy enough.. Glue Tools makes a plugin that allows for native, real time de-bayering of the Phantom sensor data (.cine file) within Quicktime/Final Cut. It's a pretty great tool because it allows you to make a Compressor droplet for batch transcoding as well as audit the files in an actual video wrapper. The only other way to create useful media from the original camera files is to do it on the PC side in the Phantom software which has a few simple export commands like Uncompressed .mov's, DPX and Tiff stacks, etc. This method is painfully slow so really in my opinion, Glue Tools is the best solution out there for Phantom post. BUT as several users have discovered, occasionally it simply can't read the .cine file and when you open it in Quicktime, this is what you get.

Just a black, unreadable image. No item properties or anything and you'll have the same problem if you try and import it into FCP. This seems to have a lot to do with which Phantom camera the files came out of. I've recently had this problem with HD Gold and v640 files but not Flex. Very odd. The good news is that there is a very easy fix but it's not well known and it was discovered totally by chance in the futility of trying everything to get these files to read. 

Go to System Prefs and open the Glue Tools Phantom Cine controls. Go to "Info" and "Delete Prefs"

That's all there is to it. The files will now open flawlessly in QT and you can very easily set up a Batch Transcode. No mention of this anywhere on the Glue Tools Support Forum. Very frustrating.