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Filed under: Cameras •Hardware •

Review: Sony HXR-MC1 1-CMOS AVCHD POV Camcorder

Operation and Handling

There’s not a lot to be said about operating the camera head: you stick it on a tripod, slide it into a shoe mount, or gaffer-tape it to some unlikely location, and then leave it alone. As it is unprovided with a handle, grip, viewfinder, controls, or any other concession to handheld operation, trying to use it like a normal handheld camera is downright silly, and somewhat frustrating. I did have some fun handholding it out of a car’s sunroof and window, but really, if you want a handycam, get a handycam! Stick the head where it belongs, which is somewhere too high, too low, too cramped, or too hazardous to be suitable for attended operation, and hie thee to the main body, where the fun begins.

On the way to the main body, there’s a great big nine foot cable to deal with. I mention this because it’s permanently attached; you can’t unplug it from the lump on either end so as to be able to thread it through tight spaces. If you want to pass the cable through a hole, the hole has to be big enough to fit the camera through. Furthermore, if you start at the camera end, rigging it in place with clamps, gaffer tape, bungees, and spit, you won’t be able to pass the cable through any hole too small to pass the main body through. It’s not really a problem, it’s just something to keep in mind when you’re planning a setup. I affixed the camera to the chainstay of my Moulton New Series bicycle with the intent of threading the cable through the spaceframe up to the handlebar, but the main body didn’t fit through the gaps—so I wound up tie-wrapping it along the outer tubes instead.

HXR-MC1 main body mounted on mini-tripod head attached to handlebars.

HXR-MC1 camera head gaffer-taped to the chainstay.

What the camera sees from that vantage point.

The main body is where all the action is controlled, monitored, and recorded. Its 2.7” LCD shows about 92% of the image, roughly the safe-action area, and has a resolution of 960x220 pixels, which sounds a lot worse than it is: in practical use, it’s usually sharp enough for on-the-go focusing, at about 300-350 TVl/ph. While that’s poor by most standards, for a camera best run in autofocus in most situations I didn’t find that it was a hindrance. Even the lack of focusing aids—peaking, focus-in-red, expanded focus, etc.—didn’t bother me (most of the time) because I wasn’t in controlled, focus-critical situations where I had the time and luxury of carefully setting my focus.

The screen is reasonably uncluttered, with icons in three corners to bring up the main menu, the options menu, and to toggle the MC1 between recording and playback operations. Status indicators for recording format, remaining time, manual settings (such as they are), and the like sit around the edges of the image. You can remove most of the overlays (except transport status, manual setting status, and the zebra-on indicator) with a single push of the DISPLAY button. That button, pushed when the camera is off, brings up a battery-remaining display, so you don’t have to switch the unit on just to check the battery.

There is a zebra display; it can be switched on at 100%, at 70%, or turned off as desired.

The zoom rocker offers fairly smooth control, though the slowest speed of about 20 seconds end-to-end isn’t slow enough for a finely feathered ease-in or out. Mind you, this camera isn’t likely to be used in situations requiring a slow zoom in the first place. At full speed, the zoom traverses the range in a mere two seconds, so quickly framing up a shot isn’t a problem, and with a little practice I was able to move smoothly into and out of high-speed zooms with too obvious a bump on either end of the move.

CAM CTRL can be assigned to focus, exposure, AE Shift, or WB Shift, simply by pressing and holding the MANUAL button.

Pressing and holding the MANUAL button brings up this menu.

The CAM CTRL roller is reasonably good if you’re slow and deliberate with it, but trying to focus with it in a hurry is frustrating: the control has a highly nonlinear action, taking a single thumb-flick to traverse the entire focus range when full wide, to anywhere from 15 to 30 such flicks at full telephoto (with the low number coming from slow flicks; apparently the wheel’s encoder is overwhelmed by fast motion). As with many consumer cameras, using any of the manual settings is best done as a “set and forget” function, not as anything you’ll want to perform while recording is in progress.

Fortunately, the MC1 offers two “spot” functions, spot meter and spot focus. Engage these modes as needed, then simply touch the screen at the point where you want the camera to set exposure or focus. The camera will set the appropriate parameter and then leave it alone, so you can bypass the fiddly thumbwheel altogether for fixed-focus and/or fixed-exposure situations.

I set up the MC1 in my back yard, the better to spy on some hungry birds. I soon realized two things: I really, really wanted a remote-control pan/tilt head, and I really, really wanted a proper focus control. I shot more out-of-focus bird clips than I would have expected; autofocus tended to hold onto the crisp, contrasty background even when a bird wandered in front of the lens, and manual focus attempts usually had me getting focused about the time the bird wandered off camera.

Backyard birding: oh, for a remote pan/tilt head!

Once I started working with the camera instead of against it, my luck improved: I enabled the “spot focus” mode. Spot focus took between one and two seconds to lock in, but at least I could keep pointing out birds to the camera, and it would focus on them instead of on the background.

In most of my tests, though, I found that letting the camera set focus and exposure automatically gave me the most consistently pleasing results. Even when cycling between sunlit and shaded stretches of road, autoexposure kept contrast and brightness under control—and kept the action visible—while my fixed-exposure tests kept the image more cinematically consistent, but sacrificed the moment-by-moment viewability of the action when the lighting changed radically.

Here’s a short demo clip; you’ll need QuickTime, and browser plugins enabled:

(I normally don’t post clips, because the required compression compromises quality, but here it’s appropriate. While you shouldn’t study this clip for specifics of fine detail rendering and camera compression artifacts, do notice (a) autoexposure varying the shutter speed to maintain the picture, and the sky blowing out in places; and (b) how little that matters given the nature of the shot. Also note the quality of the ambient audio, the flare off the polished metal, and the stability of the image.)

The camera lacks any sort of image stabilization, but I didn’t find this to be much of a deficit. My handheld out-the-window shots were a bit wobbly, but this actually added to the immediacy and excitement of the images. Any time I hard-mounted the camera to a vehicle (bicycle frame or helmet, car dashboard, airplane glareshield) the lightness of the camera coupled to the solidity of the mounting surface meant that there was no noticeable vibration imparted to the image. Indeed, the impressive stability of such images, even when hard-mounted to a vibrating surface, may be in part due to the fact that the MC1 doesn’t have any image-moving stabilizer to be shaken around.

Like many of Sony’s recent CMOS cameras, the MC1 offers Smooth Slow Rec, which shoots at 4x normal speed for 3 seconds (thus, 12 seconds in playback) It uses a very coarse, aliased, and artifact-heavy compression for the capture; as with other Sonys offering this feature, it’s best used sparingly, for special effects. Smooth Slow Recording lets you choose to record the three seconds after you press the record trigger, or before; you can set it up to grab “what just happened” instead of what will happen, a great boon when shooting unpredictable events.

Stills may be grabbed while shooting video by pushing the PHOTO button; in such cases, the still will be a grab of the video frame in the current aspect ratio. Still resolutions are 2304x1728, 2034x1296 (16x9), 1600x1200, and 640x480. You can also push a button to turn the MC1 into a stills-only camera, in which case the normal START/STOP trigger is used as the shutter release.

Note that there’s no headphone jack on the MC1. If you want to monitor audio, you do it through a small but effective speaker on the main body.

Playback

You switch the camera to playback mode by touching the icon in the lower left corner of the display. The camera shows you clip thumbnails organized by shooting date. You can set magnification to se two rows of three thimbnails, or three rows of four. Two tabs on the bottom of the display let you choose either stills and video. Simply touch a thumbnail to play its clip; icons around the screen perimeter provide transport controls: play/pause, previous/next clip, high-speed scan (in play mode) or slo-mo (in pause mode). The camera will play forward in slow motion showing every frame, but in reverse it only shows frames at half-second intervals; presumably these are the I-frames in each compression GOP (group of pictures).

The HXR-MC1’s playback thumbnail display. The camera’s component output cable is attached on the left.

You can hide all the overlays by pressing the DISPLAY button. Pressing the button again, or touching the screen, brings the overlays back.

The camera has a “Film Roll” function, used to set “subclips” at fixed intervals within a continuous clip, allowing quick navigation of thumbnails. There’s also “Face Index”, which grabs thumbnails whenever a face is detected in the scene (though glasses and hats are said to give it trouble). You can then ask the camera to display the index of detected faces; touching a thumbnail starts playback of the clip containing that thumbnail.

You can also divide a clip at a selected point, allowing you to “top and tail” a long clip and throw away the bits you don’t want. (Clip division occurs on GOP boundaries, so don’t pick a frame within half a second of the images you need to keep, lest the nearest GOP boundary fall within the section of interest.)

You can zoom into stills during playback up to 5x, and pan ‘n’ scan by touching the part of the image you want centered. Zooming into video clips isn’t provided.

Sony’s PMB (Picture Motion Browser) software is for Windows only (XP SP3 or Vista SP1, with DirectX 9.0c or later); it supports importing clips from the camera, simple editing, and writing them to Blu-ray. Mac support consists of a webpage that describes importing stills. I found that connecting the MC1’s USB port to various Macs let Final Cut Pro 6, iMovie 08, and iMovie 09 see the clips recorded on the camera’s MS Pro Duo card with no extra work or software needed. Likewise, Aperture saw the MC1’s stills. (The MC1 was happy to talk over USB on battery power, unlike the Canon HF11 and HF200 AVCHD cameras I’ve used recently. Sony is to be commended for allowing USB connections while on battery power, since it’s frequently useful to be able to suck clips off a memory card in the field, far removed from an AC outlet.)

Next: Menus and Performance.

(Page 2 of 4 pages for this article  <  1 2 3 4 >)

I used FCP 7, and the MC1’s footage appeared in Log & Transfer just like any other clips. In transferred as ProRes422 and had no problems with the transcoding or the editing.

Posted by Adam Wilt  on  02/21  at  01:11 AM

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