My HDV camera fell off its perch today and smashed on to the carpet. It was a Sony Z1, originally costing us around five grand when purchased four or five years ago.
F....Ouch!
The fault was my own and after circling the damage on the floor, stamping and cursing a bit , I got on to the business of getting it repaired.
My little Sony has traveled quite a bit. I have used the Z1 to film a Jazz documentary in Dublin, Ireland and for a radio promos for "I-105 in Sligo. It filmed the Celtic Woman at Carnegie Hall and chased Bono around the stage all over southern California.
The Z1 was also one of seven cameras filming several jazz performers at the Blue Note in NYC and I have used it in a variety of locations around the world, to collect nearly 500+ hours of stock footage in both NTSC and PAL Truly, the camera has performed outstandingly under most conditions.
Yet, sadly, despite all that great history, the camera had been used very little in the last two years and in fact, the illustrious camera has been relegated to the embarrassing task of documenting the first shrieks of our baby daughter.
Important images, yes, I know. Still, it’s like asking Spielberg to shoot a Bar Mitzva.
The problem is not to do with the performance of the camera. The Sony HRV-Z1U remains one of the most reliable cameras that we have ever purchased and I had kept it in constant use, often in conditions of heat and high humidity.
What killed this camera was not the fall to the floor, but the HDV format and more specifically, the use of tape becoming obsolete. Alarmingly, it all became outdated in a very short period of time.
Progress can be painful when you own and operate an independent production company. Every upgrade is supposed to bring something wonderful and amazing that will enhance your creativity or at the least, repair a bug from the last version you purchased.
Upgrades can also be a pain in the ass when they require that you stay current to remain in the game Like your shinny new Mac wanting Quicktime 8.4 while your Avid system chokes on anything higher
than version 7.2. Sometimes it's the software, other times the computers or the cameras, but it's always costly in one way or another.
Through our own mistakes, we've learned not to take out a lease longer than two years, as the gear we acquire has a real chance of being unusable, long before it's paid off.
One particular upgrade that effected us was the arrival of XDCAM and Sony ‘s EX1 camera. (sigh)
The quality was phenomenal and the image was far superior to any other small camera, under twenty grand that we had acquired to date.
In the time we owned and used the Z1 cameras, none of our clients actually finished any of their programming in HD. They were all excited about capturing in HDV, but when it came time to mass-produce a DVD, they all stayed with SD.
Partly, because of the cost and more importantly, the low percentage of people that actually had the capability to play an HD disk. And if they did have an HD player, which format did they own, Blu-Ray or HDD?
The format war was raging on there, as well.
Although some productions required higher formats, not all of our clients needed the technical superiority of HDCAM or Varicam and if the budget was limited, (and how often is it not limited?) we’d prefer to spend their production dollars creating great imagery rather than at the rental house.
To this end, Sarah and I completed many successful productions with our DSR-570s and the Z1. The cameras were professional, affordable and the images they produced were perfect for the majority of programs were working on.
Then, the EX1 and EX3 arrive and all our existing footage looks like junk next to it. Even projects that we shot in HD and posted in SD made the older cameras look soft and mushy.
In some cases, the EX1 images trashed those from the DSR-570 when posted side by side and it only took one instance of the client asking “Is that last shot a little fuzzy?” to motivate me to go back and re-shoot a few scenes with the new format.
That became our point of no return.
It would have been nice if any of the accessories from the Sony Z1 would work on the new gear, but other than the tripod plate, everything had to be replaced from the zoom controller to the UV filter.
So, even knowing all this, I brought our poor wounded camera to Sony Service in Teaneck, NJ last week, figuring the baby deserves decent HDV quality in PAL and NTSC.
As always, they were helpful, caring and mindful to remind me that there was a $135.00 fee for estimating the damage. The total repair was close to $ 600.00 and Sarah and I took a good five minutes to discuss the camera’s “illustrious” career and its future. We decided that to pay for the estimate only and cut our losses.
The Z1 will adorn the shelf next to my PD-150 my Nikon F4 and my father’s Pentax.
No real complaints though. None of them owe us a dime.
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