Sony SR-D1
Last night I thought a class to the students of a Cinematography program and we shot at UCLA with the Sony F65. It was my first time with the new firmware 2.0 issued last week with the 120fps and the anamorphic features. While I was there I got an email informing me that it is time for another firmware upgrade so called version 2.0 phase 2. We shot with a Ruby Zoom PL T2.8 and the F65 was mounted on an O’Connor 2575D Fluid Head attached to a 3.5 Cineped Slider supported by the Quattro. The Quattro is a part of the camera support system and it has four independently adjustable telescopic legs that can have different angles after making loose the rosetta joint present on each leg. As Director Monitor we used a Sony PVM Oled 2541 were we were outputting at 800% of 709 Color Space with the flicker free feature activated. Although we were shooting in 4K at 24fps we were using fast models of SR Media cards labeled S55 for their speed of 5.5 gigabit per second. The SR Media Card was subsequently red with the recently introduced reader Sony SR-D1, which has USB 3.0 and eSata ports in the back. I’m using the SR-D1 via USB 3.0 in conjunction with a new Apple MacBook Pro Retina Display 15” which is the first Mac with USB 3.0. Alternatively, I could have used a Sonnet Thunderbolt HUB which is a small metallic box that has a port for eSata Tempo Card 34 on one side and Thunderbolt connectivity on the other side. Unfortunately, although Lion OS X sees the HUB Thunderbolt device, I couldn’t have the dual eSata card working with my Mac, so I couldn’t compare the downloading speeds between the two technologies. Anyway, in my opinion the SR-D1 will make happy many people because is much easier to be used compared to the previous SR Media reader the SR-PC4. The SR D1 is more compact and lighter than the SR-PC 4, but also it doesn’t do the same things that the SR-PC 4 does once the user is connected to it via browser (Safari, Firefox, etc) and cat 5 cable. Basically, the SR-PC 4 gives you a HDsdi out put for monitoring from it and it can be used with an eSata PCI controller built into it or a 10 Gigabit Ethernet card, but it requires some studies and you need to be part DIT and part IT Engineer to use it. Indeed, I was using 4TB “G Raid” disk drives connected via eSata from the SR-PC 4 and having those two hard disks “visible” inside of the Sony/Safari user interface wasn’t always easy. The drives needed to be previously treated with disk utility for the permissions, but mainly they had to be formatted into a not Journaled mode. So in theory the Gigabit connectivity could represent a faster way to download the cartridges compared to eSata or USB 3.0, but the amount of work and thoughts involved in the procedure might have discouraged some people until now from using the F65. I heard many time “oh F65 really a great quality, but horrible workflow…” we’ll that is ending because with the SR-D1 the SR Media card is red in its reader and you can watch in teal time the 4K clips from the F65 RAW player without actually copying the clips on the laptop. The SR-PC 4 needs to be optimized via firmware to gain back its original Gigabit transfer speed and it represents a great solution for a DIT Carts, whereas the SR-D1 is for everyone, very easy to use “cut and paste” possibilities (well…remember checksum software are still a good habit) and real time play-back on the laptop without copying the clips.
Another good incentive to the usage of the Sony SR-D1 reader is that its price is less than half of the cost of a SR-PC4. Unfortunately, the SR Media cards S55 are still very expensive 512 GB over $6,000 and the 1TB is close to 12K! A very expensive one hour digital magazine that can run at 120fps (Sony likes HFR high frames Rate).