Thursday, January 16, 2014

Sony FDR-AX1 Digital 4K Video Camera Recorder

This is not a review but rather a display of lust.  I have not used this camera but it sure would be a pleasure to try out the Sony FDR-AX1 Digital 4K video camera recorder.  Be careful in proceeding as this camera goes for about $4500 at B&H.  Before you start working up any dreams of being Otto Preminger, it will take at least three of them to shoot just about anything and be interesting about it.  Without being able to cut to different camera angles, it will never be more than a home movie.



Something really astounding is that it can record 3840x2160 at 60 fps.  Capturing such an extraordinary amount of data at that speed is an enormous leap forward in video technology.  The immediate question is when will there be reasonably-priced televisions that can support such high resolution.

When TVs evolved to HD, most people upgraded even though they couldn't always see such a huge difference.  After a while there was 3D and hardly anyone bought them.  And now those should be abandoned to go up to 4K.  The resolution really is four times better than HD but it will be interesting to see how much willingness there might be for people to abandon those relatively-new HD TVs to switch to 4K.

There's a secondary consideration in using such a high-resolution camera in that the video is going to suck up an immense amount of disk space.  This is not just a consideration in capacity but also in terms of transfer rate as such large files will take quite a long time to load, process, etc without a very fast disk.  Thunderbolt is currently the fastest high-capacity disk transfer protocol but that means Apple only.  (I don't believe it's been implemented on other platforms but I don't know that for sure.)

And you better have enough compute power to handle all this video.  The rendering time in Final Cut will increase substantially so you may well be shopping for a new processor to handle the new content.

So, about $15K for cameras, about $10K for an Apple processor, and maybe $5K for a Thunderbolt disk RAID.  This might be a wee bit more than you want to spend to shoot weddings ... unless they're extremely ritzy weddings.

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