A1E - HELP! Supplied mic unusable

If this is the same as the one bundled with the PD-170 (and I think it is) it certainly is much less sensitive than others, but - on the upside it is always useful as a backup (assuming you have a spare audio channel) that is unlikely (nay, impossible) to overload when there is a sudden increase in level. But I agree: I do find it ONLY any use as a backup/security mic, and not as a "first use" mic.

Its frequency respose (bass) is nothing special either.

I expect Sony's view is "it's only a get-you-going mic" and they expect you to replace/supplement it. HTH

At the Video Forum both theA1Esand the Z1Es were fitted with the ECM1E

Its fitted as standard on the A1E but the Z1E doesnt have any mics fitted so I asked why they didnt ship it with the NV1.

The SONY reps response was "because Its crap!!"

I was looking to Buy the Z1E and he suggested going for the ECM 674 which is is lot cheaper than the ECM 678 that is shown in the brochure. Now whether that would be to big for the A1E I dont know?

Probably handy for that disco... :-)

Claire, I've noticed that the "XLR settings" menu items control the levels from the mics, but the "Volume" menu item controls sound level from whatever source is connected. I found that with the default settings, level is indeed very low, but once I realised that there are two sets of volume controls, it was fine. Today, I compared sound via the in-built stereo mic, the supplied stick, a MKE300, and a stereo JVC (CU-V10U), all were within 6dB of each other although the Sony stick was lowest and the JVC highest.

Check what the "Volume" is set to, maybe that's all it is.

Alan, is the "volume" you refer to the one described on page 58 of the user manual? This is the only one I find and I had discounted it as on my cam it only seems to control the sound from the camcorder's tiny built in loudspeaker. I can turn the "volume" off completely either from the menu or the "Exposure/Vol" lever it has no effect on sound output from the A/V socket.

BTW, can you hear much from the cam itself even with this lever turned right up? I have to place my ear an inch or so from the cam in a quiet room to hear this such a tiny squeaky sound.

Lastly, was the max of 6db difference between inboard and outboard mics with both mics set on auto or not? If I set the inboard to auto and the outboard to manual and "full on" I think there is about 9db difference.

Hi Claire, I'm finding this as confusing as you are, we're both exploring.

What I found yesterday is that the "XLR Set" controls are for sound balance between the XLR sources, but the "Volume" (P.58) is a collective control for whatever source is active. I found that it controlled the level I heard on headphones, and the sound meter levels in the lcd, so I presume if affects recording. The little switch undcer the lens seems to be a volume control for replay, but doesn't affect recording. I've not tried listening to the little speaker yet.

Let me know what you find, I'm still poking around.

Seems someone else likes the cam's audio features, but dislikes the supplied mic...

Googled.."In my tests, I removed the Sony mic and replaced it with a more appropriate hypercardioid, and that made a tremendous difference in the quality of sound I was able to achieve. It was tough to ascertain the audio quality of the balanced inputs and overall audio tools using the shotgun that comes in the box. However, I'm happy to say that with the hypercardioid in place, the audio features definitely passed muster".

Claire, I've just confirmed that you should think of recording sound in 2 stages, preamp and main.

Preamp
If you're using the internal mics, or external mics via the 3.5mm jack, the preamp settings are in "MIC LEVEL", which also has the Auto/Manual switch.
If you're using XLR inputs, the preamp settings are in "XLR SET" (AU CH1 LEVEL, AU CH 2 LEVEL, AU MAN GAIN).

Main
Recording level's set by "VOLUME" P56.

The Exposure/Vol control under the lens is only for the tiny replay speaker.

I've now tried all the combinations, and it seems to work.

Clearly, the camera grew from the HC1, because the XLR stuff is quite separated from normal audio controls in the menu, an afterthought.

So, try winding "VOLUME" up to max, then see what the XLR SET>AU CH LEVEL controls do, I get decent level from the supplied mic. Incidentally, it's nothing like as directional as it's shape indicates, it seems to be a cardioid rather than hypercardioid.

Hope that helps.

P.S.: I've spent a while meddling this morning:-

The Volume slider in the menus is +16 to -16, factory default is the middle. This is for all other settings as well. I found that I get equal signal levels to the Sony NV1 with:

MKE300, volume -10 notches wrt NV1
Cheapo lapel mic (GenEXXA, 33-3003), volume -3 notches wrt NV1

Can't easily make the same comparison with the JVC. It looks like the NV1 is typically about --6 wrt my other mics.

Alan, thanks for your input on this, let me go over a couple of things,

1/ "VOLUME" P56 is on Page 58 not 56, probably a typo..

2/ I think you will find that "Exposure/Vol control under the lens" is in fact linked to the "VOL control P58" when in playback mode. If I move the lever under the lens when in Play mode and select volume in the menu I see the LCD panel's VOLUME display level move in harmony and vice versa. Do you see this?

All this control does on my cam is to alter the playback volume, it has no effect at all on the recording level and yes I am using the XLR socket and associated menu for recording level.

I turned this lever VOL control down to minimum and can record audio just the same as with it full on... the Volume slider in menu has only 8 - 0 - 8 steps, it's the audio channel levels in the XLR set menu that has 16 -0 16 levels, do you agree?

Please understand it's this XLR set levels that I have been using from the very beginning and have both input 1 and 2 turned up full. I should also state I don't have the switches on the XLR box set to attenuate.

Will try another field test tomorrow.

Agreed, a typo, sorry.

And, yes, the little lever works only on playback (I thought I said that ?).

It's the "VOLUME" menu item that controls record level as a master, "MIC LEVEL" and "XLR SET" control the mic levels as preamp stages. Both "MIC LEVEL" (for internal or external 3.5mm) and "XLR SET" control the levels sent to "VOLUME" as sources, so if "VOLUME is set low, no amount of setting "MIC LEVEL" or "XLR SET" will give you high level. Both sets of controls go down to zero, that's your problem. Go into "VOLUME" and wind it up to max (+16), then into "XLR SET" and tweak channel levels, and you'll get more.

Alan,

The "VOLUME" menu item in my can simply does NOT work as you describe, seems I am having difficulty conveying this so my apologies for not being clear.

This control only works for me as a playback volume and definitely does not work as a control master recording level as you decribe.

I say again the position of this control has no effect at all on recordings, only the XLR mic level affects this, is your cam different?

Anyway, pushing this confusion aside I am now a very happy bunny since this morning I took delivery of a new Rode NTG1 mic. This phantom powered Super Cardioid mic has a much higher output and is matching the cam just great, far louder and a much fuller sound, a world of difference, especially in the low frequencies.

Since the suppplied Sony mic jappears to just have a moulded lead straight out of the mic (no plug), a quick trip to Maplins was required to buy parts to make a proper lead. I got an XLR plug and socket plus a metre of high quality balanced cable and after some soldering work, (groan.. I hate soldering), by lunchtime the required lead was made up and I was out doing the field tests. Well, the sensitivity of this NTG1 is just perfect for me, I can now at last use the automatic levels in the cam's XLR settings).

Satisfaction at last!

Claire, you're absolutely right, I got it wrong. The "VOLUME" menu item is a mimic of the external switch and controls only the loudspeaker and headphones, whether on record or play. Sorry for misleading you, I'd been monitoring on cans without recording. Again, sorry for causing more confusion than necessary.

ooh! well, good! Because that's got that cleared up...

And I just might end up getting a Rode NTG1 as well.....

Ahem, I've been doing some technical measurements on my A1, and am very surprised at the results. So much so that it's worth doing an official BBC setup for it as an addendum to http://www.bbc.co.uk/rd/pubs/whp/whp034.shtml (although I won't get paid for this one). I'd not expected it to be anything as good as it is, quite amazed really. Somebody at Sony has obviously been reading documents on the web :D

Is this better than its two elder/bigger brothers, Alan?

To be honest, I don't know. That's because I haven't got a FX1/Z1 to measure. However, some aspects of the performance of the HC1/A1 are significantly better than the FX1/Z1, for very good scientific reasons. I'm going to carry on with my analysis for a few days and see where it goes. If the results are significant to my BBC sponsors, then maybe they'll arrange for a Z1 so that I can carry out the same procedures.

I don't want to go into more details yet, because this is very much "work in progress", and I've got an article to do for Broadcast Engineering as well. So I'm a bit busy right now.

OK, thanks Alan. Any information you are able to provide in due course would naturally be appreciated by many here, I'm sure. :)

I've rummaged the gamma-correction now, it's far better than I'd hoped for, I'm impressed.

And I've just spent a while shining a Maglite into the lens to see what the iris does. The Exposure control never reports the aperture, under any circumstances. Both the Exposure menu control and the external switch control it in discrete lumps, the magnitude of the lump is exactly a half-stop (I've measured it). The lens says "F/1.8" on the front, and there are 23 click steps in the control, so it goes down to an effective F/100, which would be ludicrous to say the least.

So, I set Shutter to Auto and tweak exposure. For the first 7 clicks from open (that's F/1.8 to F/6.1 effective) the iris does not appear to move at all (but maybe I just can't see the edges), so it's tweaking the shutter. The next 8 clicks visibly close the iris, then the rest of the range uses a neutral (I can see it moving in). For an Auto setting, that sounds sensible to me.

Set Shutter to Manual (1/50) and tweak exposure. It seems to do the same. But Shutter can only be set Manual when Exposure's Auto, so it's effectively setting Shutter/Iris priority Auto, but press the Exposure button on the lens and you get manual control anyway. Given that, I'm not exactly sure yet about how this works, but it seems to be seamless.

The smallest physical aperture appears to be about 1mm diameter, a sensible limit to avoid diffraction-limitation.

''The Exposure control never reports the aperture, under any circumstances'' What about on replay of the tape with 'display' selected Alan?

''For the first 7 clicks from open (that's F/1.8 to F/6.1 effective) the iris does not appear to move at all, so it's tweaking the shutter.'' This would suggest that left to its own devices it will be using 1/600th sec at f/1.8 before the aperture blades start to close. I'd think that this was highly unlikely as the staccato footage would look awful. It must be ND, mustn't it?

8 clicks down from max take us to f/6.5 and to f/9 at full telephoto. Just about OK with 1/3" chips.

You say that the shutter can only be set to Manual when Exposure's Auto, but this would suggest that you can *never* lock the exposure, with whatever settings you choose. More investigations needed please Alan. I'm sure we'll get to the bottom of this, and my guess is there's a graduated ND filter at work here somewhere.

tom.

There certainly is a graduated filter, I can see it moving in and out.

And thanks for the tip about replay display, here's what happens. I recorded a few seconds at each "stop" setting of the exposure control:

F1.8 18dB
F1.8 12dB
F1.8 6dB
F1.8 0dB
F2.4 0dB
F3.4 0dB
F4 0dB
F4 0dB
F4 0dB
F4 0dB
F5.6 0dB
F8 0dB

So, clearly the neutral comes in at F4 (and does 3 stops-worth), and when that runs out, it carries on with the iris. That's certainly what I see when I peer into the lens with a little Maglite. For this run, the shutter was fixed at 1/50. It seems that shutter can be set only when "Program AE" mode is set to Auto in the menus; taking manual control on the switch doesn't change the shutter from that setting. In this mode, exposure control works as I've described. What I'm really interested in now is how the resolution changes with format (Sharpness is a bit adventurous, it needs to be set about 3 notches down from mid for clean SD, not sure about HD yet, that comes later).

Gamma is very interesting, there's one setting that does ITU709 gamma to a very close approximation, and appears to capture over 11 stops of contrast (I measured 2,500:1, 11.3 stops) :D

More when I'm done.

Can we take it that you are happy with your purchase then? :)

Steven

So far, yes. But I'm even more happy that my measurement methods seems to be working properly; it takes much of the work out of the lab, I'm doing nothing that any of you can't do, once you know how. And wouldn't it be nice if magazine reviews did analysis like this, instead of just reading the advertising puff?

''And wouldn't it be nice if magazine reviews did analysis like this'' Hear hear Alan. That's why this message board is so good. There's no punches need pulling, no back-handers to plaster over the cracks.

Absolutely. The numbers and science behind them tell you far more about a camera than anything else ever will. Of course this would also require the articles to be written by experts. :)

It'd also be nice if there was an article explaining how to do the tests ourselves and what they are measuring -- although I suspect that might put you out of a job... :P

Steven

When I'm done on this one, I'll tell all. I just don't want to have to go into all the details right now, a bit too busy.

Here's an update on the Rode NTG1 mic...

Most of my work is done outdoors, often in windy spots, so I added a Rode "Dead Cat" to the mic.

Hmm, to me it looks more like a dead hamster .

It was blowing hard the other day so it got well tested and seems effective but I had a problem when using the wide angle lens because some of the hairs from it's front end could be seen blowing around in the top right corner of the shots - outside of the safe area markers but it concerned me.

The lens is x0.7, a Sony VCL-HG0737Y. I am very impressed with this lens, it's very sharp with amazingly little distortion.

Because the shotgun mic mount on the A1E is more or less on the side of the XLR box, the mic is quite close to the WA lens and I wondered if it could be moved to the extra cold shoe which Sony has placed on the top of the XLR box so I looked carefully at the options open to me.

Finally I bought a Rode SM3 "hot shoe shock mount" to fit onto this cold shoe. This has raised the mic a good couple of inches higher than before and afterwards I unscrewed the now redundant original sleeve mount from the camera.

Hey It looks NEAT! ..and no more hairs!!

Going to do some more field tests today.

And that should put the mic central over the camera, better for weight balance. Nice idea.

Hey Alan, it looks like someone's tried to photograph the A1's ND rising behind the two bladed iris:
http://cinoche.blogsource.com

Indeed, but not very revealing. The neutral is a single part, with a density of 0.9 (3 stops). It moves into the aperture, obscuring a portion of it. You can clearly see it doing this (at least, I can). The maths of how it works is quite easy, it doesn't need a graded neutral, a single solid one works fine.

If the portion of the aperture area that's covered is p, then the portion that's not ncovered is 1-p. The transmittance of the aperture would be 1 if the neutral were not there. With the neutral in place, the transmittance is p/8+(1-p). So, to get a one stop performance from the neutral, all we have to do is to solve:

p/8+(1-p)=1/2

That's easy, p=2/3. And for 2 stops, p=8/9, and obviously p=1 for 3 stops. And that's exactly what I see when I peer into the lens.

It just doesn't seem very nice to be photographing through the cut edge of the filter. I know it's way out of focus but even so it doesn't seem a very pure way of soaking the light, and you'd think that even in its designed position it would tend to darken the top of the frame before the bottom as it rises upward during a shot.

tom.

No Tom, it's in the same plane (near enough) as the iris, and that doesn't darken the frame in any place, does it? In the plane of the iris/neutral, each pixel fills the aperture; the effect of the aperture is to restrict the amount of light falling onto each pixel, so the shape and content of the aperture has no effect on the image other than regulating the light throughput. No camer with mobile neutrals like this actually uses graded filters, its always a single filter moved through the iris plane. In high-end cameras, where the neutrals are on a wheel in the camera body and the lens is removable, they can't do this trick, so each position of the neutral wheel has to have a discrete filter.

That's a very interesting link Tom (see post #30 above). But using my best school-boy French, doesn't this suggest that there are 2 NDs in use here (refered to as ND1 & ND2) which between them achieve a 7-stop change in exposure whilst the aperture is held at f/4 and the gain at 0dB?

Or have I got the wrong end of the stick?

Also there is mention of the HC1 at the top of the page - might the exposure control be different from the A1E?

Regards NL

Certainly, the A1 has only one such filter, and the reporting on replay tells the whole story. I'd be a bit surprised if the HC1 is that different inside, because it'd involve having more moving parts in the cheaper camera and I just can't believe that.

I got Babelfish to translate the blog, and it plainly claims that there are 2 neutrals. I don't believe it, but I'll have another look soon.

OK, here's what I get, starting from "closed" (exposure fully left).

#00 CLOSE
#01 F8 (iris moves)
#02 F6.8 (iris moves)
#03 F5.6 (iris moves)
#04 F4.8 (iris moves)
#05 F4.0 (iris moves)
#06 F4.0 (filter comes in)
#07 F4.0 (filter moves)
#08 F4.0 (filter moves)
#09 F4.0 (filter moves)
#10 F4.0 (filter moves)
#11 F4.0 (filter moves)
#12 F4.0 (filter moves)
#13 F3.4 (iris moves)
#14 F2.8 (iris moves)
#15 F2.4 (iris moves)
#16 F2.0 (iris moves)
#17 F1.8 (iris moves)

I see only one filter edge moving between steps #6 and #12, a range of 3.5 "stops". I see no evidence of there being two filters. Only one's required, I can't see any need for a second. According to these observations, the neutral must have a transmittance of 3.5 stops, 2^2.3=1/11.314, or a Density of LOG(2^3.5)=1.054. It strikes me they've used a neutral with Density=1, so the transmittance would be 0.1, 3.21928095 stops, close enough for jazz.

How'zat?

I can see why don't you believe it Alan, but then the PDX10 has three NDs, each rising to work in series with the one before. None of them look coated to me, so we've suddenly added three uncoated elements (6 uncoated surfaces) to the zoom line-up on sunny days. How does the fact that these filters have thickness not alter the focus of the image?

My 1976 Canon 310 XL Super-8 camera (3x zoom, f/1.0 throughout the zoom range) had a small piece of ND attached to the lower diaphragm blade, so it's nothing new. With 160 ASA Ektachrome film and a 235 degree shutter it would film when all in the v'finder looked black.

The viewfinder (for those interested) was a small 'light-pipe', a hanging-down periscope with a prism on the end of it. Again I was always surprised not to see this shadow the Kodachrome.

tom.

Hmmm - makes me wonder why that sort of (highly useful) lens couldn't be seen on todays video cameras. At least the f1.0 bit of it, and maybe with a 5x zoom. Actually, I don't wonder, 12x zoom just sounds so much better than 3x zoom on the spec sheet, doesn't it? And, just what is an f stop anyway? And how (unlike the zoom) can a salesman demonstrate it in Dixons?

Tom, I actually see one filter edge progress across the iris. Are you sure the PDX10 has separate filters? Optically, there's no need for more than one if it's in the iris plane.

Adding filters in the optical path does, indeed, change the image distance, but when the lens is part of the camera, there's no problem with compensating for it, just move the sensor(s), or the effect might be too small to have a significant effect.

And that's possibly why f/1.6 is as wide as camcorder manufacturers tend to go these days - for reasons of film plane tolerances and depth of focus at same. JVC had an f/1.4 zoom for a time but that may have been more to do with sales than engineering.

I tend to agree - one dense ND should do the trick, moving up in tiny increments to cover the aperture left by the iris. You can see the PDX10 uses three though, and they seem to be of varying absorbtion. My guess is that as f/4 is such a tiny diameter hole then moving the (single) ND by very tiny steps is less mechanically simple than moving in three separate NDs in big solid steps. Tiny steps must have bigger tolerance implications for the resulting exposure, and are possibly more expensive to engineer and to keep accurate under high G forces (a big dipper for instance).

We've really hi-jacked this thread though. 'Supplied mic unuseable' will mean lots of HC1/A1 folk missing and contributing to this discussion

tom.

Agreed about changing the topic, but it's still of interest.

Moving small bjects by small amounts is pretty easy, stepper motors are very small and light, and consume no power once stepped. If I were designing it, that's how I'd do it, one filter and a stepper. Sub-micron precision is routine these days, even in cheap consumer stuff (how about moving the lsaer in a dvd player?).

I like that Alan. 'Sub-micron precision is routine these days'. I'll use it if I may.

By all means, and I meant it, it's true.