Fun with the Sony EX-1

Last weekend, we helped a friend on a short project, which gave us our first real-world experience with the Sony EX-1; overall, we felt that it was a good strong image coming out of the camera.   Here are a few of our other first impressions and experiences:

•Before our shoot, cinematographer Eric Adkins very generously shared some of his EX-1 tips with us; one was that if you output from the camera using the HD-SDI port, you can go through a Blackmagic HDLink box to connect to an Apple Cinema display monitor for on-set viewing.  We happened to have an HDLink and a 23-inch Cinema display, and it worked great.   At 1080, the image filled the screen completely; we were shooting at 720 because we wanted to be able to do slow motion, so the image didn’t fill the screen, but it still looked very good and gave us the ability to really evaluate what we were shooting, especially focus.

• Most prosumer cameras have lens barrels that rotate without any stops on either end, so it was nice to find that the EX-1 (in manual focus mode) performed more like a standard movie lens, allowing us to properly pull focus as needed.

• Like the Panasonic HVX200 (which we have a lot of experience with), the EX-1 has a noisy image in general, but the fact that you can shoot at -3dB gain does help that, and we tried to shoot at -3dB as often as possible.

• The camera handled overexposure well; we could go to 106% exposure and still have it look decent.  Above that, it looked like ugly video overexposure.  (Eric did caution that unless you’re doing color correction that can accommodate those extra high values, it’s likely that anything over 100% exposure will get chopped off — but we haven’t gone through post or color correction yet, so we haven’t encountered that personally.)

• Don’t leave the batteries in the camera if you’re walking away from it for more than a few minutes, because the power will slowly drain out.  (This is apparently also true with the Panasonic HVX200.)  So during lunch and certainly overnight, take the batteries off the camera.

More will follow later, as we track the footage through post-production…