Sony HVR-V1U HDV Camcorder, Part 1: An Interview with Sony's Bob Ott
Editor's Note: Read our full report of the Sony HVR-V1U HDV camcorder event here.
In this exclusive interview, Bob Ott, VP of Optical and Network Systems at Sony Electronics talks with Digital Media Net's Charlie White at Sony's US headquarters on Madison Avenue in New York City. In part one of this two-part interview, Ott talks about the upcoming release of the Sony HVR-V1U HDV camcorder, its three CMOS imagers, and the way 24p is used inside the camcorder and in the edit suite. Ott also explains Sony's philosophy of instant archiving when using the new HVR-DR60 hard disk recording unit simultaneously with conventional HDV tape.
DMN: You're showing the brand-new Sony HVR-V1U HDV Camcorder today. Can you give us the banner headline?
Ott:
The banner headline is 24p and ClearVid CMOS, without a doubt. I've
heard a few people commenting on it, and they've heard horror stories
about implementing CMOS in a moving camera -- not a still image camera,
but in a camera that's shooting moving images. I think the key
ingredient there is our EIP, the electronic image processor that's doing
a lot of processing to make the pictures that you see without it looking like
a processed picture. There are companies who use processing chips and
you can see the aliasing, the digitizing of the image. In this instance,
we're showing super-clean images, making nice pictures, and people are
saying, "wow."
DMN: What are users going to get from the CMOS imagers that they weren't getting from the CCDs you were using in the previous generation camcorders?
Ott: Two areas: One of them is kind of innocuous, but CCDs use more power than CMOS. So the camera, from the standpoint of overall efficiency, is going to have longer battery life. The second aspect is, because of the nature of CMOS, we can actually take each individual pixel and process it in the EIP as compared to CCD. So in that process, a good example would be if I shoot toward us sitting here from over there across the street, because of the low light here and the high light outside, this detail on a typical camera is wiped out. Because of the ability to individually adjust pixels and their output, the electronic image processor, depending on the settings in the camera, if you want to bring this detail up, the way you would bring it up on a normal camera is you'd hit the backlight compensation, and details of the building outside more or less get washed out, and this detail inside comes up. With this camera, when you go through these functions, the outside and the inside, this is still darker but now you can see the detail without sacrificing the image outside.
DMN: We saw an example of that in the demo where there was a hang glider against the sun and you could still see detail in that red parasail. That's what you're talking about, right?
Ott: That's what we're talking about. That's a big advantage with the way CMOS has been implemented in the camera. The other big thing is three CMOS imagers versus a single CMOS. Some said it's impossible to do it because of registration. There were a whole plethora of things that were deemed to be a physical, electronic, technological aspects. This three-CMOS implementation, once again shows that you can really produce some phenomenal pictures with this camera
In this exclusive interview, Bob Ott, VP of Optical and Network Systems at Sony Electronics talks with Digital Media Net's Charlie White at Sony's US headquarters on Madison Avenue in New York City. In part one of this two-part interview, Ott talks about the upcoming release of the Sony HVR-V1U HDV camcorder, its three CMOS imagers, and the way 24p is used inside the camcorder and in the edit suite. Ott also explains Sony's philosophy of instant archiving when using the new HVR-DR60 hard disk recording unit simultaneously with conventional HDV tape.
DMN: You're showing the brand-new Sony HVR-V1U HDV Camcorder today. Can you give us the banner headline?
DMN: What are users going to get from the CMOS imagers that they weren't getting from the CCDs you were using in the previous generation camcorders?
Ott: Two areas: One of them is kind of innocuous, but CCDs use more power than CMOS. So the camera, from the standpoint of overall efficiency, is going to have longer battery life. The second aspect is, because of the nature of CMOS, we can actually take each individual pixel and process it in the EIP as compared to CCD. So in that process, a good example would be if I shoot toward us sitting here from over there across the street, because of the low light here and the high light outside, this detail on a typical camera is wiped out. Because of the ability to individually adjust pixels and their output, the electronic image processor, depending on the settings in the camera, if you want to bring this detail up, the way you would bring it up on a normal camera is you'd hit the backlight compensation, and details of the building outside more or less get washed out, and this detail inside comes up. With this camera, when you go through these functions, the outside and the inside, this is still darker but now you can see the detail without sacrificing the image outside.
DMN: We saw an example of that in the demo where there was a hang glider against the sun and you could still see detail in that red parasail. That's what you're talking about, right?
Ott: That's what we're talking about. That's a big advantage with the way CMOS has been implemented in the camera. The other big thing is three CMOS imagers versus a single CMOS. Some said it's impossible to do it because of registration. There were a whole plethora of things that were deemed to be a physical, electronic, technological aspects. This three-CMOS implementation, once again shows that you can really produce some phenomenal pictures with this camera
