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first person: sony xdcam hd camcorder Apr 24, 2006 10:54 AM, By Mark Falstad, director/cameraman

Disc-based recording faces cold, vibration, and racing dogs. It sounded easy enough. Take three of Sony’s brand-new XDCAM HD PDW-F350 camcorders to Alaska to shoot a documentary on the 2006 Iditarod, The Last Great Race! First scene: four-time champion Martin Buser working his dogs one last time before the start. Trying to stay ahead of his 16-dog team, I was riding backwards on a snowmobile, nothing to hang onto, flying over a rough trail. Suddenly, the snowmobile veered sharply and I went tumbling off. Cameraman instincts kicked in. I tucked the camera into my chest. I was trying my best to keep it from becoming the second casualty of our first day of production. Only an hour before, another careful, but unlucky, crewmember had slipped on the ice carrying one of the XDCAM HD’s, breaking the lens off the camera. Great. We had just started an eightday shoot and within an afternoon, two of our three brand-new XDCAM HD’s were trashed. As it turned out, this wasn’t the case. The camera that hit the ice was back up and running with a lens change, and my camera, despite hitting and rolling with me on the ground, worked great as soon as I dug it out of a snow bank and cleaned the lens and viewfinder. Lucky for me, I was so bundled up in arctic clothing that I had plenty of padding for protection. This was the start of another great assignment in Alaska, my favorite place to shoot. I’m a freelance cameraman who specializes in network newsmagazines. Sony asked my team to test three prototype XDCAM HD’s in the cold and harsh physical environments of the Iditarod. Could they take the brutal temperatures and the punishing shocks that are synonymous with this event? To find out, Sony asked us to produce two pieces, a 10-minute feature-style documentary and a general assignment news story. The purpose? To show the XDCAM HD can be the camera of choice for both genres. The elements for the documentary were shot in 16:9 and principally in 24p using the highest of the three quality settings (variable 35Mbps bitrate, along with 18Mbps variable and 25Mbps constant bitrate). This gave us at least 60 minutes of 1080 HD images on each disc. The elements for the news story were shot in 60i with the 4:3 marker on so we could punch out in post in order to show how XDCAM can automatically downconvert to SD and thus still have the HD material for archive. We shot the news story at 25Mbps, giving us 90 minutes per disc. However, the camcorder won’t record different formats on the same disc, so when we went from 24p to 60i, we had to change them. This wasn’t an issue because I was able to change discs faster than I can change tapes on my Betacam. Another advantage of discs is that they take up a lot less real estate in the run bag than a comparable supply of tapes. Less space for discs means more space for batteries—a good thing when shooting outside all day in the cold. My co-cameraman was Tom Krohn from TagTeam Film and Video in St. Paul, Minn. He and I had very little time with the cameras before the shoot. They arrived from Japan just days before the race began. Hours after arriving in Anchorage, Ala., Sony field engineers Doug Bruns and Peter Crithary gave us a crash course. Given the time constraints, I was very happy to find the menus on the XDCAM HD are the most intuitive of any camera I’ve used. The pages are grouped in a common sense order. I found I could quickly get to any of the features I needed without a guidebook. Lenses were a concern. To achieve the $25,000 price point, Sony made these cameras with 1/2in. chips, saving $15,000 over 2/3in. chips. Sony makes an adaptor to mount 2/3in. lenses on the XD, but the result is that it makes those useful wide-angle lenses perform more like a standard lens. We had the brand-new Canon 1/2in. wide-angle lens and Fujinon lenses to try out and they worked great. For news stations and freelancers upgrading to their first HD cameras and lens packages, this isn’t much of an issue. It’s only a problem for those of us who have already invested in 2/3in. HD lenses. As with any new toy, there were features we were eager to try out. The XDCAM HD PDW-F350 camera has over crank and under crank, impressive for a HD camera at that price. On our first day out, we shot some beautiful slow motion footage of Martin’s dogs running toward the lens, paws flying, snow kicking up, ears and tongues everywhere. Unlike the Panasonic VariCam, we were able to see the effect of the over crank in the camera during playback. Which brings us to another advantage of the XDCAM— thumbnail viewing in the field. It really changes how those of us who have been shooting tape for years do business. No need to lay down bars and tone for 30 seconds at the head of the tape to get past the bad part. No more worrying that you’ll lose the action in front of you while recording that obligatory B+T. Simply lay down bars and tone anytime. It comes up as a thumbnail that is instantly accessible by the editor. A great feature for multiple camera shoots like this is the ability to easily go into the white balance menu and set the exact color temperature I wanted on all three cameras. When shooting the ceremonial start in downtown Anchorage, the sun popped out of deep overcast. It was easy to hop on the walkies and tell the other two crews to dial in a 7000-degree color temp. No more huddling together with a white card,

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First Person: Sony XDCAM HD Camcorder

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hoping that we were at just the right angle to get the color balance we wanted. The biggest concern for any freelancer shooting for the networks is the reliability of our gear. Can the XDCAM HD with the optical disc really take a pounding? The big test for that came when we mounted the camera on a sled being mushed by Zoya Denure, a former international runway model who moved to Alaska to pursue her dog sledding dreams. She is training dogs she has rescued from local pounds for next year’s Iditarod. We built the mount out of 2x4s and bolted it to the sled. We wanted to capture how rough the ride can be for mushers because most pictures make it look like the sled is floating across the snow when, actually, it can be a bone-jarring ride. The ride was so rough, in fact, that on the first two runs, the tripod head came loose in the high hat and the camera was thrown straight down. On the third run, we used tie down straps to keep the camera upright, and Denure and her team were off again. Despite the hammering the sled and the mount took, every frame was perfect. Not a single dropout even on the footage from the first two runs. We spent the first night of the race at the checkpoint in Skwentna, Ala., a tiny village 150 miles from Anchorage. This was the first place that some of the mushers overnighted their teams. The only available lights were the tiny LED headlamps that the mushers and volunteers wore on their heads. Thanks to Anton Bauer’s new HyTron 140 batteries powering three Ultralights, we were able to shoot the teams arriving in the middle of the night. I found the HD version of the XDCAM wasn’t as sensitive in low light as the SD version, at least on the prototype models that we were using. My favorite pictures were the time lapses of teams arriving using the frame accumulation feature. The camera was set up to record one frame every five seconds for time lapse. With frame accumulation, each recorded frame was made up of 60 frames of video. This basically amplified the light 60 times without any noise. We turned off the Ultralights, and in almost total darkness, I shot a time lapse of teams arriving in Skwentna lit only by the headlamps. On another 10-degree night, Peter Crithary volunteered to baby-sit the camera for a time lapse of the northern lights, again using the frame accumulation feature. He used one frame every 10 seconds for this time lapse. Even though the aurora was faint, the camera was still able to capture the beautiful lights on a spectacular Alaskan night. Overall, I was very impressed with the XDCAM HD. I liked the images, the color saturation, detail, and latitude. The camera did well handling contrast in the cottonball, bright overcast sky and snow. With all the features packed into the XDCAM HD and all the advantages of the disc system, I find this camera to be a tremendous value for any users interested in upgrading to HD.

Read about Falstad and other filmmakers and NAB-goers at NABlog.

Mark Falstad is a two-time national Emmy award-winning director/cameraman. In addition to his network newsmagazine work, he is also adjunct professor in the MFA Program in Science and Natural History Filmmaking at Montana State University in Bozeman. He can be reached [email protected].

For more information about Sony’s XDCAM HD, click here.

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