Sony HXRM C50E professional camcorder - Pakistan Tribulations

By Brigitte Gardner - March 2010

This is Brigitte Gardner and I am an aid worker assisting on the relief operation for Pakistan’s 2010 floods. An estimated 20 million people have been affected. I am employed to organise the distribution of food to some of the millions of people displaced from their homes. Most flood affected people moved to tent camps wherever a piece of dirt could be found off the rising waters. Others remained beside or near their villages on the highest points [often roads or dykes] on “ islands” in the Indus River.



Relief work is seven days a week and often up to 15 hours of work per day. It is demanding yet extremely rewarding and you eat and breathe it. Being an emerging filmmaker in my other life, I was keen to capture what life was like for the flood victims and the local Pakistani people in the Sindh province, considered the poorest in Pakistan. Spare moments to have time to video were rare and having a tight 20kg baggage limit being a relief worker on the move, my only option was to find a robust and lightweight video camera for the job. The Sony HXRM C50E professional camcorder is proving to be a winner.



I spend most of my time living in a camp about 300km northeast from Karachi, where the longest lasting effects of the flood occurred. Being a tall foreign woman I stand out amongst the crowd despite my baggy Pakistan style clothing and head shawl.
I don’t enjoy attracting too much attention when video-graphing and find this Sony camera far less intimidating for my subjects after the larger Sony cameras I have used on location before.



With this size camera it seemed easier to build trust and gain permission to film with local people. The flood victims have been through enough trauma already so sensitivity is key. My translator/fixer explains to my subjects the importance of showing the western donors the important work that is being done with flood donations and the people were very obliging and receptive. The small size of the camera meant I could hide it under my shawl when moving between locations.



My baggage limit doesn’t permit me to carry my Miller tripod and I do seriously miss it. Instead I am impressed shooting a lot of handheld scenes with the Active Steadyshot function or on a cheap lightweight tripod that is half broken already. The small camcorder works well in this kind of environment where I am moving around between trucks and helicopters, in and out of tents and warehouses, grabbing quick colourful moments in the camps, along the riverbanks and on the streets.

Having spent a lot of my previous video-graphing time working meticulously to read and record audio levels, I was a little dubious about the inability to set recording levels on this camcorder and what the quality of the shotgun microphone supplied would be like. However I am very impressed with the quality of audio this camera produces! I also brought an extra length of 10m lead with me so I can conduct close up recording maximising audio quality when interviewing with the shotgun.

Before leaving Australia, I made a little windstopper-like piece to velcro over the inbuilt camera mike if I ended up catching moments on the run and not having time to fit the shotgun microphone. I generally always use the windjammer on the shotgun when working outside, as much for reducing the impacts of dust into the microphone as for wind.



I enjoy not having too many controls on the exterior of the camera as it is easier to keep it clean in this dusty environment. However my large sized paws meant using the touch menu on the screen can be a little frustrating at times as I almost crowd over two control options with my one finger [solved with a little pen to point at items]. The eyepiece is also too small to be useful. However the manual control wheel on the front of the camera is excellent and easy to use even with my large fingers. It gave easy access to adjusting manual settings such as exposure, focus or shutter speed.

I bought the Sony polariser and UV filter customised for this camera but am disappointed to find no lens cap was supplied or could be fitted with these on. Also when a filter or polariser is on the camera the lens hood could not be fitted. It would be great to be able to use these in combination.

Much of the time I leave the camera on automatic exposure and focus and am very impressed with what the camera produces. I work in very harsh light settings at times with lots of reflected light off the floodwaters or bright midday sun. The camera’s auto functions adjust admirably and I also enjoy the efficiency of the Face Detection and Spot Meter /Focus functions ensuring subjects looked good for spontaneous action segments. The GPS function is brilliant for mapping out the locations visited though be aware in some troubled countries border searches may be suspicious of electronic items with GPS functions, phones included.



I filmed footage in of flood victims in camps, big aerial views from helicopters, donkey and camel carts on the streets, food distribution programs with plenty of flying bags of wheat and other commodities and the Mohuna people living on traditional boats on the sides of the Indus. At the end of the day I loved the ease of previewing my fresh clips with the simple on screen menu. This camera is perfect for my aid mission and will accompany me on more relief operations to come.






All photos on this blog were taken with the extract photo from video function of the camcorder. For security reasons, pictures of the camcorder in operation are not available.

Filming Macquarie Island Pest Eradication Project with the new Sony HXRMC50E professional camcorder- Winter 2010

Hello. My name is Fred Olivier. I am a videographer currently based on remote Sub Antarctic Macquarie Island shooting a documentary on a world class pest eradication project. The project is the first of its kind aiming to eradicate three pest simultaneously (rats, rabbit and mice), which have been devastating the island and endangering population of native birds.

Picture extract from Google earth
Located in the fierce Southern Ocean, Macquarie island is the most rugged of places and offers a beautiful but very challenging environment for video production. After the experience of a high end BBC natural history production in 2007 (series ‘South Pacific’), which involved carrying hundreds of kilos of film gear on location, I learned my lesson: in a place where the only means of transport is walking on boggy tracks, through tussock grass mounts, rocky beaches or climbing steep slopes, I decide to go for the only option: light weight, portable equipment.



So I chose the smallest compact camcorder I could find which would give me professional quality vision, the Sony HXRMC50E. I advised Parks and Wildlife service to purchase two camcorders for their field monitoring purposes and the rangers loved the camera as much as I did.

The compact professional camcorder fits in a jacket pocket and weighs only 430g, ideal for this job (supported by a Miller Solo tripod, the kit weighed a bit over 6 kgs), a breather! It quickly won my heart over my trusty old Sony Z1 camera! The HXRMC50E comes with a good performance shotgun mic and a lens hood, very useful upgrades to its consumer cousin (CX550V) for the field documentary film maker or journalist.

Macquarie island is a cold place (temperature around zero degrees Celsius), which can somewhat affect battery life but the larger extra batteries provided hours of recording footage and re charging times are reasonable.



In the extremely wet, windy and misty environment of Macquarie Island, the touch screen menu of the camera is a perfect waterproof way of accessing controls, limiting the number of external buttons which can be affected by moisture. I particularly enjoyed the level of manual control that one can have on the camera by setting up the dial setting on the front to exposure, focus or shutter speed. Several parameters can be controlled simultaneously by accessing the touch screen menu, which can also be customized for easy-access functions.



I filmed everything from helicopter baiting operations, native wildlife and vegetation, walking parties searching for dead animals, building huts, interviewing people on the fly on the progress and results of the project.
Shooting interviews on the fly. Photo: Jeremy Smith



A grid Useful for landscape pans Photo: Martin Passingham



Macro shots of plants Photo: Martin Passingham

All of this required a lot of handheld work and fast, reliable auto focusing qualities. I was impressed with the face recognition feature, which instantly locked focus on talents. The steadyshot stabilizer function set on active mode did a remarkable job both on walking handheld shots, and for aerial work, helicopter vibrations were dampened dramatically too.





The camcorder fitted in the less turbulent helicopter front slide window. Though challenging, some good results can be obtained if the producer is not generous with helicopter time!


Photo: Martin Passingham


The zoom range was more than adequate for wildlife shots and the image quality after decompression to Apple Pro Res format absolutely incredible, even on the intermediate quality settings.

The camcorder deals very well with low light condition, which was a plus with the limited daylight hours of the austral winter at 54S latitude. Night vision feature, which has an active infrared light source was also used for some interestig sequences on the especially for the baiting and trapping of animals at night. On the other hand, it dealt very well with very bright condition such as snowy landscapes.

Photo: Martin Passingham


Clips stored on solid state memory can be reviewed easily on site and HD resolution 1080*1920 still frames can be extracted upon review. Here are a few examples of still photograph extracted form an aerial shoot.



Efficient AVCHD compression offers many hours of footage in the internal memory and on the flash card, and allowed autonomy in the field over multiday trips. Solid state memory provides the extra ruggedness needed for tough field shoots. My camcorder survived a 5 m fall (still works perfectly) and I wouldn't be surprised if it could be runover by a 2 ton elephant seal without failing!
MORE TO COME!



I have many more comments on the HXRMC50E features and how I used them.
Check: http://auscamonline.com/issue/july-2010/article/video-review-sony-hxr-mc50 where AUSCAM also provides a good review of this amazing compact professional camcorder.