Opinion
Andy Stout
Early adopter
explains how
this year’s
Gumball 3000
Rally benefited
from Sony’s
new diminutive
Small is beautiful
HD point-of-
view camera
The EX1 is one of Sony’s best used small cameras, but for certain uses
even a camera like the EX1 is too big, despite being a mere 2.8kg fully-
laden and measuring only 178 x 176 x 311.5mm. For bolting onto cars,
helmets and other moving objects and providing the visceral thrills that
viewers demand from sport and documentaries, what productions really
need is a POV (point-of-view) camera. Which is why one of Sony’s latest
entrants into the high definition camera market, the HXR-MC1P, is
making quite so many waves at the moment. ANDY STOUT
The HXR-MC1P is a full-HD POV camera whose camera head Industry journalist
measures a mere 37 x 42.5 x 86.5mm and weighs in at just 580g – a figure Andy Stout is a
which also includes the control unit, battery and recording media. freelance journalist
Despite its featherweight stats, it’s far from lacking in punch. It records who’s been writing
1920 x 1080i images via a one-fifth-inch Exmor CMOS sensor onto a about the broadcast
Memory Stick Pro Duo, using AVCHD compression, while the control and film industries for
unit has a 2.7-inch 16:9 touchscreen LCD panel through which all the over a decade. He
menu settings can be accessed. Also equipped with a handy 10x optical writes regularly for
zoom, the new camera means that HD can now go places that it couldn’t Broadcast, Televisual
even get close to before. and TVBEurope
One such place the HXR-MC1P has already been put to good use is
bolted onto the outside of several of the cars in this year’s Gumball 3000
Rally, which traversed the USA earlier this year. The Gumball rally has
become something of an extreme petrol-head institution, and each year
the rally is filmed by its own external production company, Gumball 3000
Film Limited.
Adam Barber is directing the 2009 television show covering the
Gumball 3000 Rally, which is currently in the offline edit. “The POV
camera was one of the main reasons we switched the production to Sony
cameras this year,” he says. “We have spent forever trying to do helmet
cams and so on but this camera is the breakthrough we’ve been waiting
for. POV footage has always stood out badly in our films due to the
camera’s lower resolution, but this is the first one where we can seamlessly
edit in the footage to the rest of the material.”
The production used five HXR-MC1Ps, three of which were fitted
with wide angle lenses – these were “definitely a necessity,” comments
Barber. The units were fitted to different vehicles at each stage of the rally,
with drivers under instructions to push a button whenever something
interesting happened.
The minor downside with this plan was that something interesting
happens a lot at the Gumball 3000 Rally, so, Barber adds, there was plenty
of footage to wade through in offline. However, with a storage capacity
of up to 405 minutes to play with, the team were unconcerned about
running out of storage space. Barber concludes, “The ease of mounting
and of controlling the camera via the on-screen menu was excellent for us.” in my view
Summer 2009 theproducer 15
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