Other: Sony X-CON Compressed RAW

Intrigued by this, which I guess is an attempt to have competition for Redcode. Shame there are only two compression options as on red I would often go from 4:1, 6:1, 8:1 and 10:1.

Sadly the only way this will ever work or take off is if it is recording that natively in-camera. SO I guess we'll wait for the FS8/F6/F66
 
Do you think this can trickle down to the lower priced models and even the mirrorless cameras? Does it need a lot of resources to process? Give me 16bit RAW over the gray shades of LOG any day!
 
If you think about the latest camera with the fastest raw capture at the moment - 1DX mk2 - that can currently do 14fps raw. SO already that is nowhere near fast enough for motion.

Now imagine in between each frame capture the electronics would have to compress the file and then save it to SD/XQD/CFAST etc... That would knock that down to some even more unusable amount.

Now look at something like a Red Dragon which is shooting compressed raw at 24-300fps depending on setting and look at the price, the amount of dedicated ASICS and most importantly, the huge industrial sized fans on it to stop it overheating, and there's your answer.

Basically that is many many many years away from being able to be shrunk down to an A7-sized camera. In fact the A7 already has issues with overheating just recording 8-bit XVACs.
 
Thanks. I still think the industry went to 4k before the hardware was ready to handle it. A round of 1080p RAW cameras might have appeared given the lower technical hurdles if time allowed it. Which would be more useful for a lot of owner operators where 4k is not a delivery option. But they gotta try to sell those TVs. (I know, a bad word against 4k, how can it be?).
 
The problem is that when Red were leading the charge for 4K Sony and Arri and Panasonic et al were laughing at them saying it would never ever catch on and is ridiculous.

Then suddenly they cottoned on the the fact that there was a demand and a huge potential market for it and ever since have been bringing out products (with a couple of exceptions) that aren't quite fit for purpose, especially on the consumer end. Sony's existing implementation of raw is poor at best, but they get to put 'raw' on the box as a feature. Same as 4k except for the FS7, F5 and F55/65.

Exactly the same thing is going on with VR right now. I've worked for Nvidia (so Occulus and Vive) last year and Playstation VR this year and it's no ready, bar a few awesome but short proof of concept titles. But it is being pushed so hard as a 'must have' when in truth it is still a couple of years away from being able to be packed into a device in your front room that can do it justice - and titles are having VR shoehorned into them like movies did with 3D.
 
Yes, you can see that in computer processing power as well. The enthusiast chips from Intel are barely hanging on with 4k editing and 4k encoding is a step back in time. 1 stream is fine but larger projects need all the horsepower available and a few years into the future.
 
To be honest get yourself 32Gb ram and a Geforce 1080 and you are good to go on the multiple streams of 4k front as long as your drives can handle it.
 
Ben Scott said:
If you think about the latest camera with the fastest raw capture at the moment - 1DX mk2 - that can currently do 14fps raw. SO already that is nowhere near fast enough for motion...
Click to expand...

1D XII has a 20 MPX sensor. 20 x 14 = 280. 280 / 8.8 = 32 fps.

As to X-CON (an "ex-con"? .... great name, Sony), its LT is "only" 390 Mbps, which is a lower bit rate than ProRes Standard and about a half of ProRes HQ.
 
I'm not quite sure what those maths are supposed to represent in real terms. It's not like a 4k frame size cut of the sensor would automatically be capable of 32fps raw.

Also, it's not the bitrate that would cause the issues so much as the compressing before that and the resultant heat. Not to mention battery draw.
 
this has been in the works at sony for a while....afaik the new external recorder is required and so it looks for now this is F5/F55...which breathes new life into these bodies...again?!
i think the real use for this will be in the next gen bodies and i guess we will see at that point how far it will trickle down....i don't expect to see this in an A7(8/9) body....sony has great compression with XVAC and we will most likely see more/better in the smaller bodies....
the other thing to consider is that sony is huge and makes so much stuff and is in many ways all over the place....RED can focus....i am pretty sure the team that worked on this X-CON at sony is not even talking to anyone making sensors or cameras....
regardless: nobody makes better sensors then sony right now, and i love that they just keep pushing in all directions....the variable ND of the FS5, better and better AF....and they can do a lot of this stuff because of their huge consumer camera range....
 
I think it's a good idea that Sony is offering compressed RAW formats, but its not going to come cheap.

The AXS-R7 is probably going to run $5000-6000 and the AXS Blue Cards are 256GB / 512GB / 1024GB @ $1200 / $1800 / $3600.

You need the Blue cards to shoot 4k RAW @120 fps. I think the older cards will work at lower frame rates.

In any case you're looking at about $9000-10000 for the recorder and 3 - 4 cards to reduce file size by about 1/3rd.

$10,000 buys a lot of disk space these days...


Hopefully the next generation of cameras will support X-OCN at a lower price point. If the compression is done in camera the results could even be dumped to something like an Odyssey (which would also give you an on board monitor).
 
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Ben Scott said:
If you think about the latest camera with the fastest raw capture at the moment - 1DX mk2 - that can currently do 14fps raw. SO already that is nowhere near fast enough for motion.

Now imagine in between each frame capture the electronics would have to compress the file and then save it to SD/XQD/CFAST etc... That would knock that down to some even more unusable amount.

Now look at something like a Red Dragon which is shooting compressed raw at 24-300fps depending on setting and look at the price, the amount of dedicated ASICS and most importantly, the huge industrial sized fans on it to stop it overheating, and there's your answer.

Basically that is many many many years away from being able to be shrunk down to an A7-sized camera. In fact the A7 already has issues with overheating just recording 8-bit XVACs.
Click to expand...

How relevant 1DX Mk2's max frame rate is? It's the mechanics of the shutter and mirror which needs to be flipped up and down every actuation that are the biggest limitation, not the speed of the processors or cards.
 
It's relevant because it is the fastest currently. I could have said A7sII if you like which has no mirror but that's not as fast.... And overheats a lot quicker.
 
there are plenty cameras shooting raw, including sonys....and BM does compressed raw as well....now sony is doing it as well....a DSLR shooting raw is a different thing, mirror mechanics....it just makes no sense to try and make a DSLR shoot 24 or 30 fps raw....
the next sony A (9? 99?) is rumored to have 2 XQD card slots for high speed constant shooting raw images....and with mirrorless that blurs the line between still and motion capture....all they have to figure out is to get the sensor readout/data transfer/compression(if any) and the biggest issue (for a small mirrorless body) heat...

i just thought about this and the Fs7 and Fs5 have the same sensor as F5/F55 which are pretty old now....it will be interesting to see which sensor(s) sony will use in their next line up....
 
I have a Titan X and I can kick around as many UHD Prores streams as I want... or one XAVC stream. Dual Xeon CPUs.
 
Basspig, on your UHD video, can you try adding unsharp mask (in Adobe Premiere) and see how fast your PC respond
 
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