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6 January, 2009

blue dots  HDR-SR1 Shooting for the Future

My Mom helped set up and run a school for teaching math, science and technology to disadvantaged young women in Chicago. When Oprah set out to build a similar school in South Africa, she asked my Mom for advice.

Now my Mom has been invited to South Africa to see the opening of this school over New Year's 2006-2007. She has an invitation +1, and my stepfather and my brother both opted to let me go, since I've never been to Africa south of Morocco and they both have.

Oprah, lions, hippos, hot air balloon rides, I needed a camera solution. I thought about bringing a nice still camera and my old camcorder. Carrying and charging up two cameras bothered me, so did logging and capturing hours of footage as I was on my way out of Africa and back to school at the IMD.

Long ago in the midst of taping with my 2003-era Sony PC-101, I declared I would never buy a tape-based camera again. Coming up on this trip I decided I might re-outfit for road video.

Sony HDR-SR1

After consulting with Kenyatta Cheese, I decided to splurge on a Sony HDR-SR1 camera. It's Sony's first high definition, hard-drive based camcorder.

Kenyatta had worked with an artist at Eyebeam who had gotten great use out of this camera. The HDR-SR1 seemed to fit most all my criteria: smallish, hard drive based, high definition, headphone jack, microphone jack, under $1500 at Samy's on Venice. You can tape 4 hours of high def onto the hard drive without changing tapes once! You can tape 27 hours of standard definition onto the harddrive without changing tapes once!

Then when you go to edit or look through the footage, it's already a file on a portable hard drive, drag it to your computer. No more logging and capturing! Or at least, just renaming files. Or tagging them! All meta-data.

What this camera, and all camcorders need, by the way, is in-camera, during filming meta-data. I want to be able to tag a moment "funny" or "violent" or just mark when the peak moment was - just after the moment passed. Or during downtime with the camera, give scenes titles and list the people in them (drawn from my mobile phone buddy list, perhaps?).

Total life integration aside, there's one primary drawback to this shiny new camera: no compatibility with Macintosh computers running OSX. The camera uses a new AVCHD format, meaning the videos are written to the camera's hard drive in a video language that Apple doesn't yet speak. So I can drag them to my hard drive (which the manual says I shouldn't do - I should use their software to migrate the files onto this drive). Then I double click on them - the standard definition files play without sound (because of Muxing, I believe). The high definition files are a complete mystery to my MacBook Pro.

Apple, Microsoft, Sony Conga Line

I'm thinking I might be able to hack my way through that - I got the Sony Picture Motion Browser software running through Windows XP running with Parallels on my MacBook Pro. Holy smokes! It's like three layers of computer magic - Apple, Microsoft, Sony in my video production conga line.

I fixed my documents to point to a shared portion of my Mac hard drive, but only after I'd set the defaults up for the Sony Picture Motion Browser. Now I can see tiny iconic glimpses of my footage, but none will play back in the Sony software. An erase and restart might be called for in that regard - hum.

Even if I can coax my computer to play the footage back in Windows, I still won't be able to edit properly in Final Cut, without decreasing the quality through some voodoo encoding to get Apple to speak AVCHD. So I'll write a long blog post so the next sucka who searches for HDR-SR1 OSX or "parallels hdr-sr1" discovers they are not alone and maybe we can pool knowledge and whup this new format.

From what I've read, new video formats face a few months of limbo before they're incorporated. AVCHD is supported by Sony and Panasonic, so hopefully it's not going away. My plane lands back from South Africa and Botswana about 30 minutes into Steve Jobs's MacWorld keynote, so I'll have my fingers crossed that I'll be able to actually view and edit the footage I'm shooting.

Posted by justin at December 25, 2006 9:46 PM

Comments

I was looking at the SR1 a few months ago, but lack of AVCHD support from any NLE was a bummer to say the least (well, really, makes the SR1 pretty useless).

I haven't seen too many software solutions that don't involve transcoding... but here's one that doesn't: the BlackMagic Intensity is a relatively cheap HDMI input card, which will let you do a real-time capture in uncompressed, DV100, or MJPEG format. Ideal? Not by far - having to do realtime sort of defeats a lot of the purpose of having HD capture in the first place. But, if Apple doesn't make any announcements at MacWorld, that might be your best choice (unless you want to go w/ a lossy transcode).

What can you do? It's a Sony. (remember when that use to be a good thing?)

Posted by: Leonard Lin [TypeKey Profile Page] at December 26, 2006 3:32 AM

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