New Favorite

Just recently I started experimenting with a camera we had sitting around in the TV station. The camera took absolutely amazing footage that blew everything else we had out of the water! I'm talking about the Sony XDCAM PMW-EX3, and I'm going to tell you guys about it, but instead of talking about all the technical stuff, I'm going to keep it to my experiences with the camera so far. So, let me know what you guys think of the less technical format.

To start off, I love using this camera! I haven't used a camcorder that I've enjoyed this much before. The camera isn't perfect (which I'll talk about later). But it is one of the best experiences with a piece of hardware that I've ever had while shooting. All of the settings that I normally need to mess with while shooting were of no concern with this camera. For example, I have to mess with the iris a lot when I'm working with a camera like this, because of the changing lighting conditions in both daylight and that of a theater stage. The auto iris on this camera is amazing, in that it is far faster and more accurate than I am with the iris dial, so that is something I rarely need to change while shooting with it. Also, it's a really comfortable camera to be carrying around on your shoulder, or by the handle for smooth and steady shots, although it is pretty heavy for a camcorder. This is not nearly an exhaustive list about the things I love about this camera, but before I go on to the bad, I want to say, I think the good definitely outweighs the bad.

These are two of the 32 GB proprietary Sony memory cards
that I use for shooting with this camera.

Now for the not so great parts of this camera, at least in my experience. We'll start off small, but the mount for an external microphone is absolutely terrible. I put a shotgun mic in there to test it out, because I was going to use it for a shoot, but it kept shaking at the slightest movement of the camera or touch on the body of the camera. It made an external mic basically unusable, because every time it moved, the mic would pick up that sound. This isn't a huge deal for my use case though, since the camera has a really solid built in mic already. But the biggest problem with this camera, and is one that I think should not even exist, and I'm not sure if it still does with the more modern XDCAMs, is the fact that a computer cannot read/play the footage from the memory cards immediately. You first have to import the footage into Sony's proprietary Catalyst software, from their proprietary and frankly, stupidly expensive memory cards, then you can actually watch your footage on the computer, but you can't do anything with it yet. You then have to export the footage from their Catalyst software into a format that a video editing software can actually work with, and that is when you can finally import the footage to your editing software and work with it. It's a lot of ridiculous extra steps and costs that shouldn't exist, because a normal SD card can do the same thing, at one-fifth the cost for 128 GB of storage, which is four times the size of one of the $300 proprietary memory cards!

Anyway, that rant is over now. Overall, the camera does what I need it to do extremely well, and with only a few things that I would definitely want to change or improve, it's a camera that has become my favorite of all of the ones we have to use. It's fun to shoot with and it gives me a lot of flexibility with how I shoot, which is something you can take for granted when you shoot video.