Using the Sony HDR-FX1
Notes & Observations
by John Beale
Aug. 2005 |
 |
Century wide-angle lens
Century Optics makes a 0.6 wide-angle lens (limited zoom-through) for
several cameras including the Panasonic DVX100 and the Sony FX1/Z1U. I
had the DVX100 model, but the only difference between that
and the FX1 is a slightly different bayonet attachment ring. You can
purchase just the adaptor ring
from Century for $100, which is quite a bit cheaper than the full lens
assembly. By releasing a setscrew,
you can unscrew one bayonet-mount ring and replace it with the other
model.
Here's some photos of the adaptor: two rings, and
assembled,
and mounting on the camera Cent-FX1a,
Cent-FX1b, Cent-FX1c.
Here are some still
frames that compare the view with and without the 0.6 wide
lens.
With the wide lens mounted, the FX1 focus distance
scale is not accurate: the indicated distance is 0.1 to 0.2m for all
subject distances. This lens is not "zoom-through". It works at
indicated focal
lengths from 4.5 to 17 mm, but looses focus beyond that. The
focal length on FX1 and Z1U cameras is 4.5 to 54 mm for a
horizontal field of view ranging from 58 degrees to 5.3 degrees. The
equivalent 35mm SLR lens lengths are 32.5 to 390 mm. This is
a
12x zoom range but you can use the only first 3.8x of that zoom
range with the Century 0.6x wide-angle lens attached. With the
0.6x adaptor, the maximum horizontal field of view is 85 degrees,
equivalent to
a 20 mm lens on a film SLR.
Rode Videomic
I found the Rode
Videomic to be have useful directionality and reasonably low internal
noise. I have used it as a backup to a lapel-mounted mic and
minidisc for capturing sound at a wedding ceremony, and it has
performed adequately. It has a 1/8" miniplug output which
matches the FX1 mic input. As far as I know it is the price-performance
leader at this point for camera-mount directional microphones; the
other directional mics in this price category are more noisy. I did not
observe any problem when using this microphone with the FX1. When used
with the VX2000, I heard some clipping on loud music and when the
audience was making a lot of noise.
You can use the Rode VXLR adaptor to connect this mic to an XLR input.
This does no impedance matching, just XLR to mono minijack, with XLR
pins 1 and 3 going to miniplug shield, and XLR pin 2 going to miniplug
tip and ring. Here is the VXLR internal
connection.
Camera Weight
Stock FX1 with F970 battery and 60 minute MiniDV tape: 2.394 kg.
Rode mic: 202 g. Bracket1.com bracket: 265 g.
Studio-1 XLR-PRO: 282 g. ECM MS-908C mic: 96 g. Senn EW100
G2 rcvr. w/2AA: 189 g. All of the foregoing: about 3.5 kg (about
7.5 pounds). Century 0.6 wide adaptor: 253 g.
XLR Audio connections
One advantage that the more expensive Sony Z1U has over the
FX1 is
professional XLR-type audio inputs. If you just need
line-level
balanced inputs (not phantom power for mics) you can use a passive
transformer box. Here's a photo
of my Jensen Iso-Max PI-2XX
box
with adaptor cables to 1/8" stereo miniplug, for the FX1 mic/line
input. Here is the wiring inside
the PI-2XX. To connect this box to the camera, I wired up the short
XLR-RCA jumpers myself, since
the commercial cables I found did not have the ground shield connecting
XLR pin 1 to the RCA plug shield as specified in the Isomax user
manual. Some people advise against transformers as
they can add distortion or frequency rolloff, but this particular one
is quite
good. In this RMAA
test I found it had essentially no measurable effect on audio
signals. In fact this box
is better than needed, given the quality of audio
feeds at
events I have recorded so far. For more convenient on-camera use,
most people use a smaller XLR adaptor such as the under-camera Beachtek or belt-mount Studio-1.
Note: in manual audio levels mode (both mic and line level) the FX1 has
an always-active internal limiter which starts around -8 dB full-scale
and limits the average recorded level to about -5 dB full-scale. I view
the presence of this limiter (which cannot be switched off, as far as I
know) as a good thing from a production standpoint, as it extends the
useful dynamic range of the audio inputs by about 20 dB before severe
clipping starts. However, it can complicate audio distortion
testing.
Recording to a
Hard Drive
The built-in tape drive on the camera is convenient, but it
occasionally has drop-outs (see also Sony's
statement on dropouts.)
Since HDV records in blocks of 0.5 second, a dropout gives you half a
second of black video and muted audio. I consider this unacceptable in
a professional environment. You can avoid tape drop outs by recording
the HDV signal via firewire to an external hard disk drive.
There
are dedicated hard drives for the purpose, although currently most
record only plain DV, and would require at least a firmware upgrade to
accomodate HDV. You can also use a laptop or notebook PC with built-in
or external USB2 or firewire drive. I know Vegas 6
and DV-Rack
with the HDV add-on can record HDV, but there is a simpler alternative:
a freely downloadable program called CAPDVHS
(thanks John Jay at DVInfo
for pointing
this out.)
CapDVHS was designed for D-VHS decks but it can capture MPEG-2 from any
firewire source, including for example HDV cameras. It requires Windows
XP. It works fine on my Dell Inspiron 9300, but does
not
work on my desktop WinXP box for unknown reasons (says "Error 80040217:
Cannot connect SampleGrabber").
NLE Software
A freeware utility called HDV Split
can read an entire tape from the FX1 and generate separate .m2t files
based on the time/date stamp, so each take is a separate file. I
find this very convenient. For simple editing of MPEG2 files
directly, I find Womble MPEG
Video Wizard to be convenient and much faster than Vegas 6.
iRiver MP3 recorder
With the number of wedding videographers reporting that they were happy
with their iRiver 7xx or 8xx models for grabbing extra audio tracks, I
decided to try one. These models are discontinued but like-new models
can be found on ebay for about $50. They feature an analog line-in
stereo minijack with a menu option that sets it to a
mic input. I recorded in 44.1 kHz stereo, 320 kbps MP3 mode.
Here's a quick
audio sample, with the "Giant Squid Audio" lapel mic (downconverted
to mono @ 128k for the web page). I hear a faint background buzz in the
playback that reminds me of insects, maybe cicadas at night. Apparently
this is digital noise from the unit. You can hear this noise clearly if
you listen in headphones as you record: the noise starts as soon as you
press "record" and stops when you stop recording. Here is an amplified
clip with just
the noise.
With RMAA, I measured the iRiver FP890 to have a dynamic range of 69.8
dBa (ref -50 dBV input, mic level) and 86.3 dBa (-10 dBV input, line
level), but the mic number may be optimistic as I believe the mics I
would use "for real" have a higher output impedance than the attenuator
I used for the mic measurement, hence more of the digital noise gets in.
If I had a tiny battery-powered 40 dB preamp to make mic level into
line level with negligible added noise, I'd be happy with the iRiver.
Such a mic preamp IS possible; the Sony HiMD units provide an existence
proof, so I don't know why such an item isn't widely available. As it
is, the iRiver is just a bit more noisy than I'm comfortable with.
You can see a few more audio details and graphs from the RMAA
testing program on this
page.
Time-Date
subtitle
As far as I know, the standard video editors like Sony Vegas do not
provide a function to read out the time/date info stored as a data
subcode in the HDV file and make them visible as a text overlay on the
video. However, there is a way to do this using an Avisynth
plugin
called HDVInfo by HDVSplit author Paviko, along with
DGIndex and a mpeg2 input filter. Here is an example frame showing the text
overlaid along the bottom of the frame. Text font, size, color and
format are adjustable from the avs script.
Here is the avs file that
generated the above example using AviSynth along with some plugins.
In addition to AviSynth v 2.5
and the HDVInfo
plugin, it requires DGIndex.exe and DGDecode.dll avisynth plugin, both
from DGMPGDEC.
