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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Cinedeck - love this thing!

Cinedeck - love this thing!

I've been spending a lot of time lately with the Cinedeck Extreme and I'm super impressed with this versatile device. The Cinedeck occupies an interesting place in the market somewhere between high-end, uncompressed and very expensive solid state recorders like the S.Two OB-1 and Codex Onboard and much cheaper and smaller options that compress to editing codecs like ProRes or DNxHD like the Nano Flash and AJA Ki Pro. One thing the Cinedeck has that the others don't is a screen but that doesn't make it a monitor. Despite some helpful analysis tools like RGB Waveform and Clipping Warning, the "on-board monitor" aspect of it is more for interface than anything else. It's not a bad display but it has no calibration controls so I would say the image isn't useful for critical evaluation. Not that any small screen is for that matter. What the Cinedeck is though is a tiny, touch screen computer with the sole purpose of ingesting, encoding, and outputting video signals. Even though this is mainly what it's designed to do, it is still a Windows machine with wi-fi so you can even check your email on it!

First of all, I love the touch screen interface. It's very simple, elegant, and intuitive. Most users could pick it up and run with it in no time. The other point that jumps out at me immediately is the fact that this can record an Uncompressed 10 bit 422 or 444 1200/mbps 1080p video signal in realtime. It does this in the Final Cut Pro Uncompressed "codec" resulting in .mov files. The only requirement is special RAIDed SSD drives instead of the standard ones to achieve the throughput necessary to record such enormous files.

Here's a Cinedeck "mag" - a standard notebook SSD. I'm not sure the specs for compatibility with the deck but these 256 GB drives from Patriot Media seem to be what Cinedeck recommends. Hot swappable, plug and play. Just stick the thing in there and start shooting. Over 2 hours of high quality compressed recording. Fantastic.

Like the OB-1 whose 500 GB mag will only record 30 minutes of uncompressed footage, the Cinedeck's 256 GB mags will record about 17 min in that format. While I think there is something to be gained in uncompressed recording, this current crop of codecs, the Cineform family of codecs in particular are so well engineered that you can capture a very similar quality to uncompressed in a much smaller file. About 1/5 the overall size. Leads me to my next favorite feature on the Cinedeck - onboard Cineform encoding. 

Cineform NeoHD has quality options that are of a similar bit rate to those found in ProRes and DNxHD but these files are noticeably cleaner with less modulation and artifacting. The only catch is that you have to buy the codec from Cineform if you want to be able to work with the files in your NLE without limitations. It's 500 bucks which isn't cheap but I'm pretty impressed with it so I'd say that's a fair price for a license. You can get the free decoder here which will let you at least let you view the files and transcode to other formats in Compressor or whatever else you're using. Transcode to DPX sequences using Glue Tools for a particularly high quality image well suited to finishing and effects work. If you want to work with the Cineform files created with a Cinedeck you'll at least need the decoder. 

Or if that sounds like too much work, the Cinedeck can also create ProRes or DNx for you at any quality including the excellent ProRes 4444. For this you'll need a 444 source but going dual link to the deck is no problem. It's got every in and out you can think of. I believe these 2 SDI links will also be able to record stereo images encoding to Cineform Neo3D in a future version. 

Because it's a computer, it's infinitely upgradeable and adaptable. There are multiple USB interfaces, eSata port, LAN port, antennae for increasing wi fi range, HDMI in and out, Dual Link HD-SDI in and out, multiple audio inputs, VGA out for desktop extension, breakout for component, standard def, and deck control, and probably some other stuff though can't forget about another one of my fav features - built in Ambient Timecode Master Clock. Jam it in the morning and forget about it. You can feed the LTC to all your other devices and it won't slip a frame. Very impressed with this. Especially in this day and age where we're often creating 2 or 3 different formats on-set. Having reliable timecode is super clutch and this feature on the Cinedeck makes it a little easier.

Hats off to the Cinedeck team. Very nice people and if you need support, they're quick to respond. In usual Negative Spaces fashion, this is not an exhaustive product review, rather just a few thoughts from my own experience working with it. More in-depth information is available on their site. 

Transcodes-to-go

Transcodes-to-go

I'm really interested in these enclosures for the RED Rocket Card.

Mobile Rocket from Maxx Digital 

Offhollywood >>>

LaunchPAD by Peter Matajan

Both of these products while announced a year ago seem to be of somewhat limited availability and there aren't a whole lot of in-depth user reviews online. I'd love to chat with someone who has one and demo it if possible.

The technology behind these provides an external bus to attach a double wide PCIe card such as the Red Rocket, so it can be interfaced with via the ExpressCard slot on your laptop. I've never tested this. Never even seen it but I do know how buggy and crashy ExpressCard is on MacBook Pro. I also can speculate that when you take a device that's optimized to work on 8 Lanes and slow it down to 1 despite the accelerating hardware in the box, there's no way it can achieve top performance. According to the Maxx site -

"Speed of transcoding to QT/MXF is dependent on the laptop processor speed. (ProRes runs at about 14fps from 4k)"

Even 14fps to ProRes along with realtime playback of R3D's over SDI is enough to warrant having one of these. My current laptop is a 15" MacBook Pro with a 2.4 GHz chip and 4 GB RAM (yes I know I need a new computer) and to render a full debayer from 4k to 1080p ProRes 422 takes about 45 minutes per 1 minute of RED footage. It's simply impractical do transcodes on a laptop, even a maxed out 17" MBP, without dedicated hardware like the Rocket. Time like that can be incredibly costly and can grind things to a halt. Post and Transfer houses LOVE getting drives full of R3D's because all that transcode time costs a fortune. A production I was working with recently had a month long RED shoot and didn't do anything with the files until photography wrapped. They handed a sizable stack of G-Raid drives to a well known post production facility and got a bill a few weeks later for $160,000. It's clearly advantageous for a production to do this on-set or to do it a facility that is equipped to transcode in real time. Namely with the Red Rocket, which zips on a Mac Pro Tower so even if it got to 50% of its potential on a laptop, that would be a massive improvement and in my mind, totally worth it. 

My only concern is crashiness. I'd love to take one for a test spin or I might just take the plunge. A tower would be the smart thing to do but it's just so much stuff to haul around and I don't do enough RED to really warrant the purchase of a 6 Core with 12GB RAM. 

I heard the video tap on the upcoming EPIC camera will be a clean (no overlays) 1080p. If that's the case, then great. Need on-set dailies or high quality offline media? No need to break out the Rocket, just record the video tap to ProRes with the upcoming Ki Pro Mini. Records to cheap Compact Flash cards in every flavor of ProRes and is only $2000. Get 2 and do one ProRes HQ for the editor and one ProRes Proxy for the director and producers. It's also the size of a Dionic battery. I think this little box is going to be everywhere. Why wouldn't you do a redundant recording in a high quality codec if it were so cheap and easy? (disclaimer - I'm also a fan of the NanoFlash which does some things this can't do.)

Ki Pro Mini Site >>>