IBC 2011: Sony HX9V on ATOMOS Ninja – IBC floor walkthrough

by Sebastian WöberSeptember 13^th, 2011

IBC has ended today at 4pm and we’re at the airport right now, waiting for boarding.
We met with lots of cool people and enjoyed gadget-land, but now we’re happy to go home and get some sleep.

To give you a better sense of the floor and to follow up the announcements about the Atomos Samurai and Connect I reported about yesterday, I decided to post this grab from the Sony HX9V hdmi out.

Remember our in depth video review of this fun little point and shoot camera? Well we missed to tell you that it is one of the very few cameras that has a clean hdmi output.

This clip was recorded via hdmi directly from the camera onto the Atomos Ninja harddisk recorder in Apple ProRes 422. What comes out of the hdmi port is a very sharp and clean image. You’d be impressed if you’re used to an HDSLR camera. Unfortunately it’s interlaced, which means that you will either have to use a plugin to recalculate it to 25/30 progressive frames (time consuming, not worth it) or drop half of the lines and lose sharpness. That’s what I did, I recompressed in ProRes HQ and then to 8 mbit H.264 for vimeo. On the left are some grabs taken from the 2nd generation HQ line dropped version.

To conclude I must say it doesn’t make much sense to grab from the HX9v. It’s interesting to see a camera with clean hdmi out, I guess Sony decided it’s shitty enough to not cripple it in the usual way (squares, overlays, picture in picture, etc…). The fact that it’s interlaced is a shame though.

On the other hand the very sharp image and actual natural noise from the sensor is nice to see and something we miss when we record to H.264. Grading the footage a little I realized that the next hurdle we face is the 8bit color space. Once we’ve gotten rid of the compression, we’d actually need 10bit to use it properly because 8bit is just not enough information to start with.

We also managed to record from the new Sony VG-20 at the Sony booth. It has clean out and unlike other bloggers I’m quite interested in this camera as the Sony A77 and the 5N both didn’t offer a clean hdmi out to us.
But more on that in the next days. Cheers, and good night. Sebastian

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