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.