Ralston Humble of Pablo Post recently shot in South Africa with two Sony EX3s. Here, he details the features of the camera and explains how the new XDCAMs performed.

Article first published: September 2008

Having bought and used a Sony EX1, I was interested in checking out the EX3 camera. Recently, I went on a shoot in South Africa with two Sony 750s, but when the opportunity arose to do a similar shoot, we decided to take two EX3 cameras from the UK, rather than hiring 750s locally.

The EX3 not only gave us removable lenses, but also timecode in, timecode out and genlock flexibility. They arrived here one Friday in August and we flew out with them the next day, the immediate advantage being that we were able to put two cameras in one Petrol bag as cabin baggage for the flight. Arriving in Johannesburg, we immediately went into the shoot; we took the cameras out of the bags and straight onto the tripods.

Some of the controls, such as the on and off button, which used to be at the back, are now located at the side. Another change is the variable frame rate controller; on the EX1 this was located in the menu structure, but now it's a button on the side of the camera. Pushing the button for a few seconds turns it blue, and this allows us the change the frame rate. So we can go for 1080p24 down to or 720p60 and do slow motion. It has true 24 progressive, as well as 25 and 23.98.

The first two days of the shoot were in a conference situation, where were able to film modules lasting two and a half hours by hot swapping the cards. The new 3.5 inch monitor is really good quality and a nice size viewfinder. There's a large eyepiece that slots on to the side, so you can rest the camera on your shoulder and shoot wedding videographer-style. At the conference I found myself shooting by holding the camera low and looking through the monitor because another feature I like on the EX3 is expand focus, a button on the side that enlarges the center of the viewfinder image by three to four times, enabling you to check focus. I use that all the time, as it works while the camera is still recording, unlike on the Z1, where you have to pause to camera.

There are four assignable buttons that allow you to set up lens information, histograms, brightness control at the click of a button. These used to be in the menu system. At the front you will find more professional features: peaking, contrast and brightness, zebra controls, and the ability to turn the monitor off and on. There's an interesting button called mirror image, which flips the picture, ideal for when we put the camera on our 3D stereoscopic mirror rig. My only niggle is that the viewfinder gets in the way when trying to pack it in a bag. You can strip it down, but there are still parts projecting out, which get in the way.

The handgrip has the same functionality as the EX1: there's a release function that allows us to rotate the handgrip. As with the EX1, we have monitor out and S-video out, the only difference is that on the back of the camera we find a lot more ins and outs, timecode in/timecode out, but more importantly we have genlock in, which enables us to slave multiple cameras together. If we use the Sony Anycard vision mixer, we can have a multi-camera shoot, with all the cameras slaved together.

On the side of the camera there is monitor out, which can be HD-SDI, SDI or composite video out. At the conference, we had HD-SDI going out to our Astro, and because we were shooting a video conference, sending the images back to London, we were able to take a composite video out from the camera, simultaneously downconverted and squeezed, to the conferencing software.

SxS cards

The biggest advantage is recording to the new media. We took about eight 16Gb and eight 8Gb cards. They slot into the side of the cameras and record 35Mbit/s HD. A 16Gb drive gives you 56 minutes and an 8Gb gives you around 26 minutes. You can put in two disks and when one disk is full it automatically changes to the other disk, so you won't lose any media, and when it's finished recording you can stick it straight into your Macbook Pro and start archiving. We were able to mount the card using the EX software, and instantly start playing back our rushes. At this point, we can set up indexes so we can select the shots we are interested in, or we can 'select all' and drop the files into our external Firewire drive for archiving.

A really interesting feature is transition shot mode. Very simply, it allows you to zoom in to a shot, set the iris, focus and zoom, and store it like a keyframe. You can then change to another position, alter the iris, focus and zoom, and save that position. So before the shoot, you can set up both cameras with these settings. It's a very clever idea if we take it one stage further and apply it to our 3D rig. For example, I can set it for a close-up shot, then a couple of seconds later when I hit record, it will automatically keyframe through to the next shot. So with two cameras, we can go in for a close-up and set both cameras for that (shot B), come out for a wide shot with both cameras (shot A), then using the infrared remote control, we can start the recording, and a few seconds later both cameras will either do a transitioned linear or cushioned shot from shot A to shot B.

The audio recording features are similar to the EX1. On the side of the camera we have internal and external settings with audio monitoring. On the front of the camera there are professional XLR inputs with phantom out, and data management control are on the top of the camera with a thumbwheel menu.

HD-SDI out

The interesting thing is the quality of the EX1 and EX3. We have run tests where we took HD-SDI out of the camera and recorded it to an HDCAM SRW1 deck, supplied by Rogue Element Films. At the same time we recorded from the memory card and imported both signals into my Quantel Pablo. We did a half wipe from the two and noticed that the camera recording from the SR deck was far better quality when it came to grading. On a grade one monitor, the images look very similar. Only when you go into the Pablo and start grading the images do you notice that there is more latitude and information in the picture.

When we are recording 3D with our mirror rig, we are going to use HDCAM SR as our recording deck. The reason is because on the SRW1 we a have two 4:2:2 inputs, so we can put the left eye into one of the inputs and right eye into the other, then on just one SR tape we end up with left eye/right eye synchronized. We can genlock the two cameras together and also genlock the SRW1. We've been using the Ambient Lockit boxes, and when we are recording stereo on the mirror rig there are two Lockit boxes on the cameras and a third on the SRW1, so we can lock all the timecodes and video signals together.

READ MORE ABOUT THE P+S TECHNIK MIRROR RIG IN PHIL STREATHER'S ARTICLE

Ralston Humble Ralston is owner of Pablo Post, based at Pinewood Studios in the UK.