Sony Reveals HDCAM SR Strategy

Sony Professional unveiled a series of announcements for its HDCAM SR range at their Power of Images event at London's Gibson Hall.
The company said that the announcements offered "unprecedented developments in the areas of acquisition, storage, archive and workflow efficiency".
Delivering new opportunities for high end acquisition and post production, Sony's HDCAM SR technology is set to go beyond today's quality standards and bring the benefits of file-based SR operations at a more cost-effective price point.
For the high-end user, the roadmap delivers the next evolution in SR beyond today's quality standards and the arrival of new products and solution to deliver file-based acquisition and production.
For the more mainstream market, Sony delivers an SR strategy that brings the benefits of file-based SR operations at a more cost-effective price point. Sony says that the scale of the developments is unprecedented in the history of the format.
Promoted as a "camcorder for life" and launched at NAB 2009 as the next generation of digital 24P technology, Sony's SRW-9000 combines the format's renowned image quality with the versatility of a one-piece camcorder. It will ship in December as a full HD (1920 x 1080) resolution camcorder using 2/3-inch CCDs and is capable of 4:2:2 10-bit recording, as well as being configurable up to 4:4:4 in multi-frame rate from 1 to 60p.
Within the industry, the SRW-9000 is recognised as the highest quality 2/3" camcorder on the market. At the Power of Images event, Sony unveiled an upgrade path for the SRW-9000 to 35mm, based on customer feedback and recognising a market requirement for a 35mm PL mount 'B' camera to the F35, in order to further strengthen the flexibility the camcorder can provide.
Olivier Bovis, General Manager, Content Creation Group, Sony Professional, said: "When Sony's SRW-9000 launched in April, it was undoubtedly a no-compromise product that was head and shoulders above anything else available at the time. As file-based working gains momentum, the move to memory-based acquisition is also becoming increasingly important and Sony is committing to a future upgrade path to SR memory for the SRW-9000."
Since its introduction, HDCAM SR has established itself as a mainstay of post production. As HD programming has become more commonplace, so has the demand for higher video bit rates, higher frame rates, and greater format flexibility as well as workflow optimisation.
Across the SR range, Sony can deliver up to 1080/60P and 50P recording through the use of 880 Mb/s data rate and has also introduced a next generation file transfer and storage technology.
Based on the open MPEG-4 SStP (Simple Studio Profile) codec together with an MXF wrapper, which ensures data remains compressed during transfer and enables an almost real time exchange over the GB Ethernet connection, HDCAM SR can now deliver increased workflow efficiency with a de-facto standard and open codec that is ideal for high end broadcast.
In addition, using the benefit of SR compression the storage requirements are reduced to a quarter, so a compressed future 4k file has the same storage transfer characteristics as native 2k today.
These three transfer rates of 880Mbps, 440Mbps and 220Mbps will all be available in future products, but more importantly within the current SRW-5800 with some straightforward hardware updates.
To derive the greatest benefit from a Digital Cinema camera, every HDCAM SR cassette also has a Telefile label built-in as contactless memory storage. This data can be used to generate an EDL that relates exactly to the actual shooting as an automatic logging system.
Currently, Sony are working with the Filmlight Truelight box as an on, or near set first pass grading system. CDL files, an industry standard, are generated and will be recorded onto SR tape. Providing an automated EDL and CDL directly to the grading suite will tremendously speed up the process of a one light grade.
Sony's technology will enable users to move to a revolutionary and unique Nonlinear Media. The new memory cards deliver transfer rates of up to 6Gbp/s and a native acquisition from 3D 1080p all the way up to 4k. Initially available in 250GB and 500GB, the storage reliably transfers data 9x faster than any other device!
Plans to deliver an upgrade path to SR memory on the existing SRW-9000 have been announced together with a memory adapter for the F35.
Mr Bovis said that Sony had unveiled "the media of the future". He said: "There is nothing else capable of this level of quality native recording anywhere on the market today. Sony has extensive experience of taking customers from tape to file-based workflow. We have shown the power of a total HDCAM SR solution as well as a future-proofed roadmap that offers a path to 4K and 3D native recording. It doesn't get any better."
The new HDCAM SR roadmap and the strong commitment to move to file base workflow will see SR tapes offer value at every point in the workflow from acquisition with the first SR tape camcorder, to archiving with further opportunities foreseen with upgrades to the SRW-5800 VTR.
While acquisition is moving to file-based working over time, archive solutions will remain tape-based. Combined with the new pricing policy delivered today, SR Tape remains the most robust and reliable option for archive and with the future upgrades to the SRW-5800, it will record content at twice real time.
(KMcA/BMcC)