We started using the Sony SX laptop editor here a little over a year ago and what a godsend it was! The last assignment I used the old BVW75s for was the Eritrea/Ethiopia border war. I remember having to lug those machines a few times up and down four flights of stairs to the hotel room knowing that my new laptop was in Nairobi and hadn't cleared customs in time.
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t was very easy to use once I changed a couple of the menu settings to what I wanted. Otherwise it worked perfectly right out of the box. The size of course is it's main benefit since it's much easier and cheaper to travel with. Since it runs on batteries I can continue editing even when the power goes out and in the locations I find myself in Africa that happens a lot. Even when going to a feed point I don't have to waste time finding their power plug. The drawbacks are the cheap speakers it is equipped with but that can be overcome with good headphones or a Fostex speaker. The editing speed is a bit slower. What may have taken one hour to edit on BVW75s may take an extra fifteen or twenty minutes on the laptop since the speeds are slightly slower. That took some getting used to when I did my first few crash edit jobs on it.
The latches which keep the screen locked down are made out of plastic so one broke rather easily when a colleague (who never did own up to it!) used it for the first time. That can cause a problem if you're moving the machine to another room as the screen may flip open without you knowing it and catch the edge of a door frame. It hasn't happened yet as I've been conscious of it. The flat screen monitors are fine for location editing but back in the office I prefer looking at a good old regular tube monitor. I'd like to take an 8" monitor with me but when you start adding all the things you'd like on location it defeats the purpose of having a laptop in the first place! Initially when we started shooting for CNN we were on Pal BVW400 camera and 2 BVW 75s. We kept using that camera with the laptop until our new NTSC SX camera arrived. I simply had to change the 525/625 setting the day I received the new camera and we kept on working. We don't have a $15,000 standards converter (yet) but with the dual standard I can shoot NTSC and if I have to add file PAL video or agency video to my story I simply edit the piece as normal in NTSC and insert black where I want the PAL video to go. Then I leave about 30 seconds of black after the story and change the machine over to PAL. I'll then lay down in order the PAL shots I want inserted into the NTSC story. The editors in Atlanta then take it from there when they receive it.
With field transmission gear such as TOKO boxes and Livewires you can ship a whole camera/edit and satellite uplink kit in only a few boxes. You're not going to get good quality real time transmission of live reporter stand-ups with the TOKO or Livewire but we can at least get our stories out the same night without having to travel one or two days back to our base to feed. If you're a one person crew like myself though it can make for some very long days since you are editing and transmitting as well.
We've got four DNW-A25s so we can split it up how we'd like such as two edit packs, four viewing machines, whatever we need that day. That flexibility is great when it comes to maintenance. We just had a pinch roller damaged in Mozambique during the flood story but since we were using a third machine for agency dubs, satellite playback and general viewing we just moved that into the editing role. That pinch roller, one small audio recording problem and those cheap plastic screen latches I mentioned earlier are the only things that have gone wrong in the fourteen months we've had it. I'm not thrilled about it but that's what warranties are for!
I don't know what Sony has planned for the future but I've heard of things like a disk recorder that can be hooked up to one DNWA25, then when you edit onto the disk you transmit from that over your sat phone. Who knows? I'm sure we'll find out in a year or two. I heard that ABC had Sony make them Beta Sp laptops instead of SX ones. Why didn't Sony do that years ago? They would have kept the whole ENG/EFP market to themselves, let the owners keep their cameras longer, and then move into disk recording or cheaper DigiBeta and bypass SX altogether. Instead they lost some of the early business to DVCPRO. Can anyone give me more information on that?
Chris Matlock is a Canadian cameraman/editor based in Nairobi, Kenya for VIVID, an independent production company. He is frequently assigned to work with CNN covering the main stories that evolve in Africa.
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