Xacti waterproof Camera - long term real world test

dylanwinter

dylanwinter

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www.keepturningleft.co.uk
I earn my living as a professional cameraman - but over the past two years I have carried an Xacti Dual waterproof camera in my pocket or on the boat or in the glove box of the car. Its been a great experiment and rather frightening to learn how much you forget if you don't record it.

So if you want to know how these things cope with the real world



I have used three different cameras - the first was the CA8 standard definition 720 x 576

the second which I bought was the CA9 720 x 1280. I dropped that off the boat onto a slip and it broke so Sanyo (who had seen my work) replaced it with the CA100 full high definition camera.

The film on youtube is at 720 x 1280 - so some of the shots are expanded std definition and some of them are the full HD camera compressed to the smaller size.

All the audio was recorded on the camera microphone - no externals were used at all.

The cameras run on rechargeable batteries that cost £10 a pop and last an hour per charge. The SD cards cost about £10 for 90 minutes of recording time.

I have not been paid for this - but I do feel grateful to sanyo for replacing the dropped cameras with a better one. As a punter its good to know what these things are like in the real world before you buy.

I have really enjoyed having the camera with me all the time - a whole two years without once saying "man I wish I had my camera with me".

There is also a copy of the film I shot in mpg on my website - about 300mb for download - as opposed to this version which is a high compressed youtube at about 25mb. If you do download the mpg from the front page of the website then you might consider looking at the adverts and clicking on one

but only if it should be of any passing interest to you

I will earn a few pence towards the cost of the bandwidth for downloading the test film and the adversier will get a chance to sell you a powerboat course or some such thing..

V happy to answer any questions

Dylan Winter
 
Looking forward to seeing the films

I would love more of you guys to have a go at filming stuff. Having worked as a cameraman for so long, I love stills as well - but for me sailing is all about movement, the shift of light on water, the power of the wind in a sail, the feel of travelling which I think a still does not often convey

also filming moving pictures is much harder.

don't forget to tell sub santas that you would also like some spare batteries and a bigger SD card.

Dylan
 
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Boguth the CA 100 now, which is waterproof, has slightly higher resolution and charges straight off USB

Enjoyed your Xacti ad by the way, they should be paying you for that ;)
 
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thanks for noticing

idpnd said:
Boguth the CA 100 now, which is waterproof, has slightly higher resolution and charges straight off USB

Enjoyed your Xacti ad by the way, they should be paying you for that ;)
Click to expand...

people who have not tried making films often seem to think that they make themselves.
I was grateful to Sanyo UK sales director who loaned me one in the first place

then I bought one anyway because he wanted the loan one back

then I dropped it off the boat and onto the slip and so he replaced it with a better one

As for paying for a film about his camera - if you type xacti into youtube you will see films with many more hits

this sailing world is a very, very small place

and the web is a hard place to earn money.


As for charging off USB - I have done some tests and the separate battery charger seems to do a better job of looking after the battery - brings it up to a higher level.

D
 
Thanks for your quick response!

Shame to hear the usb charger doesnt really work - fiddling the battery in and out of CA10 was main reason to switch.

Am collecting footage for a clip myself - bit daunting the whole thing but your work seems to indicate it only takes a few decades to get right so there's hope yet.

Do you also find you have to tune the CA100 down to 1280x720x60, as the interlaced 1920x1080x"60i" results in annoying artifacts when moving the camera at any pace?

Edit: Just noted that a deinterlace filter in the video software really helps this..
 
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depends

idpnd said:
Thanks for your quick response!

Shame to hear the usb charger doesnt really work - fiddling the battery in and out of CA10 was main reason to switch.

Am collecting footage for a clip myself - bit daunting the whole thing but your work seems to indicate it only takes a few decades to get right so there's hope yet.

Do you also find you have to tune the CA100 down to 1080, as the interlaced "60i" speed results in annoying artifacts when moving the camera at any pace?

Edit: Just noted that a deinterlace filter in the video software really helps this..
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Its just my experience - besides the less often you use the sockets on a camera the better. You can also buy a brilliant little 12 volt charger.

The camera is running at 30 frames per second - actually 29.97 which is the American NTSC Standard - how the hell did they dream that up -

we can't see 60

also what you need depends on where its going to be seen. My website films are 720 x 1280 - the 720p - which looks great on a fastish desktop computer or a laptop

I did some tests with ktl subscribers and most computers can't handle full HD - 1080 x 1920 without choking and stopping and crashing and pausing and prompting ktl sailors to blame me.

so I record in the full blat, edit at full definition but downgrade it for the web. One day the web will catch up with ktl and then people can have full HD.

Most of the people who watch ktl are men aged between 45 and 65

not all of them are particularly web savvy.

The ones who cause me most trouble are the blokes who were talked into buying a really expensive mac seven or eight years ago and are then surprised when it can't talk to the PC dominated world anymore.

I also know that I am trouble if they call their machines their "pooter".

After ten support emails I offer them a refund - but first suggest they ask their grandson to help them out. They are either so offended that they never come back ---- or maybe their grandsons did sort them out.

I have some great stories to tell about becoming part of the digital industrial information infrastructure if anyone needsa good speaker ata business conference. I guarantee to wake the audience up in the deafd slot after the lunch break

D
 
dylanwinter said:
Its just my experience - besides the less often you use the sockets on a camera the better. You can also buy a brilliant little 12 volt charger.

The camera is running at 30 frames per second - actually 29.97 which is the American NTSC Standard - how the hell did they dream that up -

we can't see 60
Click to expand...

It used to be 30fps in America, until they came up with NTSC, when they found that the Colour Sub-carrier and Audio signals were in-phase and interfered with each other - 29.97 fps bodge fixes this. Not a problem with PAL at 25 fps.

You can definitely see the difference in motion between 29.97 and 59.94 fps - remember that persistence of vision is a myth and motion blur isn't. Higher framerates look more natural, especially as spatial resolution is increased: http://downloads.bbc.co.uk/rd/pubs/whp/whp-pdf-files/WHP169.pdf

The Xacti video looks good when there is light available - but there is something strange going on in the wooded scene - macro-blocking everywhere and the depth of field is changing quite rapidly. Are you editing in the same codec as used by the Xacti, or uncompressing it, or using some intermediate format? The output format is variable bitrate H.264 with it set to peak at 40 Mbps - but only uses Main profile?
 
have you downlaoded the mpeg

st599 said:
It used to be 30fps in America, until they came up with NTSC, when they found that the Colour Sub-carrier and Audio signals were in-phase and interfered with each other - 29.97 fps bodge fixes this. Not a problem with PAL at 25 fps.

You can definitely see the difference in motion between 29.97 and 59.94 fps - remember that persistence of vision is a myth and motion blur isn't. Higher framerates look more natural, especially as spatial resolution is increased: http://downloads.bbc.co.uk/rd/pubs/whp/whp-pdf-files/WHP169.pdf

The Xacti video looks good when there is light available - but there is something strange going on in the wooded scene - macro-blocking everywhere and the depth of field is changing quite rapidly. Are you editing in the same codec as used by the Xacti, or uncompressing it, or using some intermediate format? The output format is variable bitrate H.264 with it set to peak at 40 Mbps - but only uses Main profile?
Click to expand...

well you obviously know your stuff - and you make many good points

I think it is very hard for you to really judge given that what you are watching on you tube is a third or even fourth compression.

Did you try downloading it from the website at mpg (actually relabelled mp4) - even then that is three different compressions - but it has not been hammered as hard.

I chose the woodland because I could not think of a tougher gig for a camera

my pro camera would find it hard to cope.

The mpg2 master looks pretty good - but it was 700 mb for four minutes

some of the material was shot on a CA8 - std def which I expanded, some on the CA9 - 720 and the rest on the full HD CA10 - but brought back to 720

"The Xacti video looks good when there is light available"

absolutely true - but its a small hand held camera costing £200 that has a lens the size of a christmas postage stamp - not one the size of a saucer like my big panasonic - which is what I use for most of KTL and all my professional work.

I think its a great bit of gear and I never, literally never, leave the house without it.
 
dylanwinter said:
well you obviously know your stuff - and you make many good points

I think it is very hard for you to really judge given that what you are watching on you tube is a third or even fourth compression.

Did you try downloading it from the website at mpg (actually relabelled mp4) - even then that is three different compressions - but it has not been hammered as hard.

I chose the woodland because I could not think of a tougher gig for a camera

my pro camera would find it hard to cope.

The mpg2 master looks pretty good - but it was 700 mb for four minutes

some of the material was shot on a CA8 - std def which I expanded, some on the CA9 - 720 and the rest on the full HD CA10 - but brought back to 720

"The Xacti video looks good when there is light available"

absolutely true - but its a small hand held camera costing £200 that has a lens the size of a christmas postage stamp - not one the size of a saucer like my big panasonic - which is what I use for most of KTL and all my professional work.

I think its a great bit of gear and I never, literally never, leave the house without it.
Click to expand...

Cool - I did look at the downloaded MPG rather than the Youtube version (do they still us 3 Mbps 15fps but call it HD because of the number of pixels?)

Not only is the lens small, the sensor is small too. If you compare the size of the individual pixels on the sensor, they'll be tiny compared to the ones in a large Pro handheld - so even with the biggest lens a sensor can take without getting too hot, you won't be getting much light per pixel, which means the signal level will be nearer the noise level, plus you'll need some gain, which will make the noise even worse.

Another camera I've heard good stuff about is the GoPro Hero HD range - http://www.goprocamera.com/videos/?video=mRzhBkZNQFI Comes with a waterproof case and various types of mount - is smaller than the Xacti, but a worse User Interface.

However, I don't think you can judge a camera by the quality of its unedited rushes. Any normal prosumer workflow these days will have: the cameras built in record format, the edit format, a decent output format and a web-based output format, the latter of which is what your audience sees.
 
good points too

st599 said:
Cool - I did look at the downloaded MPG rather than the Youtube version (do they still us 3 Mbps 15fps but call it HD because of the number of pixels?)

Not only is the lens small, the sensor is small too. If you compare the size of the individual pixels on the sensor, they'll be tiny compared to the ones in a large Pro handheld - so even with the biggest lens a sensor can take without getting too hot, you won't be getting much light per pixel, which means the signal level will be nearer the noise level, plus you'll need some gain, which will make the noise even worse.

Another camera I've heard good stuff about is the GoPro Hero HD range - http://www.goprocamera.com/videos/?video=mRzhBkZNQFI Comes with a waterproof case and various types of mount - is smaller than the Xacti, but a worse User Interface.

However, I don't think you can judge a camera by the quality of its unedited rushes. Any normal prosumer workflow these days will have: the cameras built in record format, the edit format, a decent output format and a web-based output format, the latter of which is what your audience sees.
Click to expand...

the aim is to record in as good a quality as I can and keep the rushes so that I could go back and remake the films.

recreate the edit lists

so on formats I am between a rock and a hard place

at the moment I am editing films that are from the big panasonic, an older sony HDV and an Xacti.

I guess the pouint I was trying to make with the film is that if you don't have a camnera with you then you can't film anything and that with these small cameras you can be pretty creative

I do have pretty strong wrists - but getting a shot like the one on the horse using a pro camera would take a stupidly strong bloke and a well trained horse.

D
 
answers

snooks said:
Just a few quickies.

What's it like filming the inside of a boat? How wide is the wide angle? and finally does it have a socket for an external mic?


Thanks
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fine in daylight

impossible at night

wide angle - how big is your boat - done it on the slug - 18 foot

external mike on a waterproof camera!

surely you are asking for the moon on a stick there snooks - how could you engineer such a thing?

D
 
Dylan,
ever thought of selling an afternoon of your time teaching sailors the basics of how to shoot short films on their yachts? Maybe a small money making scheme.....
 
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