Sony HVR-V1U HDV Camcorder, Part 1: An Interview with Sony's Bob Ott

Interview: Page (1) of 2 - 09/20/06

Sony HVR-V1U HDV Camcorder, Part 1: An Interview with Sony's Bob Ott Talking HDV 24p, CCDs vs. CMOS, hard disk recording By Charlie White

Editor's Note: Read our full report of the Sony HVR-V1U HDV camcorder event here.

In this exclusive interview, Bob Ott, VP of Optical and Network Systems at Sony Electronics talks with Digital Media Net's Charlie White at Sony's US headquarters on Madison Avenue in New York City. In part one of this two-part interview, Ott talks about the upcoming release of the Sony HVR-V1U HDV camcorder, its three CMOS imagers, and the way 24p is used inside the camcorder and in the edit suite. Ott also explains Sony's philosophy of instant archiving when using the new HVR-DR60 hard disk recording unit simultaneously with conventional HDV tape.

DMN: You're showing the brand-new Sony HVR-V1U HDV Camcorder today. Can you give us the banner headline?

Ott: The banner headline is 24p and ClearVid CMOS, without a doubt. I've heard a few people commenting on it, and they've heard horror stories about implementing CMOS in a moving camera -- not a still image camera, but in a camera that's shooting moving images. I think the key ingredient there is our EIP, the electronic image processor that's doing a lot of processing to make the pictures that you see without it looking like a processed picture. There are companies who use processing chips and you can see the aliasing, the digitizing of the image. In this instance, we're showing super-clean images, making nice pictures, and people are saying, "wow."

DMN: What are users going to get from the CMOS imagers that they weren't getting from the CCDs you were using in the previous generation camcorders?

Ott: Two areas: One of them is kind of innocuous, but CCDs use more power than CMOS. So the camera, from the standpoint of overall efficiency, is going to have longer battery life. The second aspect is, because of the nature of CMOS, we can actually take each individual pixel and process it in the EIP as compared to CCD. So in that process, a good example would be if I shoot toward us sitting here from over there across the street, because of the low light here and the high light outside, this detail on a typical camera is wiped out. Because of the ability to individually adjust pixels and their output, the electronic image processor, depending on the settings in the camera, if you want to bring this detail up, the way you would bring it up on a normal camera is you'd hit the backlight compensation, and details of the building outside more or less get washed out, and this detail inside comes up. With this camera, when you go through these functions, the outside and the inside, this is still darker but now you can see the detail without sacrificing the image outside.

DMN: We saw an example of that in the demo where there was a hang glider against the sun and you could still see detail in that red parasail. That's what you're talking about, right?

Ott: That's what we're talking about. That's a big advantage with the way CMOS has been implemented in the camera. The other big thing is three CMOS imagers versus a single CMOS. Some said it's impossible to do it because of registration. There were a whole plethora of things that were deemed to be a physical, electronic, technological aspects. This three-CMOS implementation, once again shows that you can really produce some phenomenal pictures with this camera.

DMN: Another one of the headlines you just mentioned is 24p. This is something that everybody's been wanting for a long time. The last time we had a demo here in New York at the Sony headquarters, it was 24-frame.

Ott: CineFrame 24.

DMN: Okay, so can you tell me the difference? What is advantage of this 24p over CineFrame 24?

Ott: The big difference between CineFrame 24 and this 24p is we're giving much more adjustability to the shutter and a number of parameters. In the Sony Z1U HDV camcorder, CineFrame 24 is not limited, but the shutter can only go to a 60th of a second, whereas, in this particular product, the shutter is at 1/48th or 1/24th of a second. You're at the 24p imaging capability at that point. With CineFrame 24 you can achieve the 24-frame look, but you have the restriction that it can't do 48th and 24th. When you boil it down to the basics, that's the biggest difference between the two.

DMN: The camera internally processes this video at 1080p, right?

Ott: What the camera does is the imagers are 1080/60p imagers. Going into the EIP chip is 1080/60p and then it outputs it to the circuitry as a 1080i signal.

DMN: But what about when you're shooting 24p?

Ott: When you're shooting 24p, it's going 24-frame onto the tape. Basically what we wanted to achieve out of this was that you could take that tape that was a shot at 24p, and without having to go to an NLE system like our competition does, you can take the tape (or the hard drive) and play it back on a 60i monitor and get the 24p look. There are a variety of reasons why we like that. When you edit in 24-frame, the concept is that you're going to transfer this to film. But what we're finding is, a high percentage of users aren't bothering to go to film -- they go right to video. So what's nice is you don't have to go through this process, the extra mechanics of taking it from 60i to 24p look, to true 24p, or whatever you want to call that 24-frame look. You don't have to go through all those processes. You can edit it in the 60i mode, using existing technology.

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