Sony XDCAM Family Expands With Storage, Acquisition Options

Sony will exhibit an expanded XDCAM family at the NAB Show, with products designed to make it easier to archive and store hours upon hours of XDCAM material at a production facility, as well as a new PMW-500 shoulder camcorder.

The camcorder offers high-end 4:2:2 recording at 50 Mbps, features ⅔-in. Full HD Power HAD FX CCDs, and weighs only 3.4 lb. New features include proxy recording on USB memory cards and loading of camera-setting files from USB drives.

Sony is also rolling out versions of XDCAM media that, while not compatible with current XDCAM decks, promise new benefits for users of future decks (including the three to be introduced at the show). A 128-GB Quad-L XDCAM disc that holds four hours of 50-Mbps material will be introduced, and a prototype 100-GB Triple-L rewritable disc will be on display. A 64-GB SxS memory card is expected to be a game changer.

But it is developments for the production facility or news department that will turn the most heads at the show. A new dual-channel head system will be found in three new recording decks that will be able to read material 2.6 times faster and write material 1.5 times faster than the PDW-U1 deck.

The three decks are the XDS-1000, the PD1000, and the PD2000; the last two are designed as bridge products between the SxS format and XDCAM. All feature a half-terabyte solid-state drive with 16 hours of recording and a hard-disk drive with 1 TB of storage for 30 hours of recording. As for the differences between the three, the XDS model does not have a professional XDCAM drive while both PD versions have a built-in XDCAM drive. The 2000 also contains connections for nonlinear-editing and IT needs.

Coupled with the new XDCAM Juke and XDCAM Archive system, all three drives open up new workflows and solve issues related to tapeless acquisition in the field. The XDCAM Juke has two XDCAM drives and two bins that can hold 15 discs each. If all 30 discs are loaded with quad-layer, it can store up to 120 hours of content.

The new tapeless workflow begins with the ingest of material through the drives and onto the facility’s online video server along with simultaneous creation of discs for offline storage. The Juke can also upload material to the production or on-air server and pump content to the offline archive system.