Some more data points on rendering performance, Vegas Movie Studio Platinum v12 (MSP12).
Rendering to 1920×1080 is 3x to 3.5x slower than real time.
Rendering to 1280×720 speeds up rendering to 2.5x slower than real time.
Other factors e.g. output bit rate (50 25 or 16 mbits/sec) and the number of plug-ins (contrast, NewblueFX lens correction) makes less than 20% difference.
So really not much difference, no matter that you do.
The biggest difference by far was going to 64 bits, in my case from winXP-32 (MSP11) to win7-64 (MSP12). That is 2x to 2.5x speedup. I was running Vegas on both systems so have the comparative rendering times for that. I also have a win7-32 machine running Vegas (MSP11) and it rendered at almost the same speed as the winXP-32, even though the win7 is an i7 and the winXP is a QX9650.
A lot of things which people say should make a difference actually don’t make a significant difference.
Especially when reading about stuff like the rendering algorithm which uses the graphics card producing worse results than the one which uses the CPU. It just makes it not worth the bother to go digging for a compatible graphics card.
For me, the longest movie anyone is likely to ever want to watch will be c. 30 mins of finished footage, so a 90 min rendering time is very acceptable.
I suspect that Final Cut Pro renders faster simply because Apple control their hardware tightly and the FCP code has been done to use the graphics card as a coprocessor. In the Windows world, there is a vastly bigger variety of video cards and video editor developers have not kept pace with these.
But also when you have say a 6-core i7-970 CPU, the advantage of a coprocessor is a lot smaller than it was say 10 years ago. I used to have a single core AMD PC (still 3GHz) which rendered 30x slower than real time, and that was with no FX at all! Back then, a coprocessor could make a huge difference.
But this is getting off topic for the Sony camera. It belongs more here
A video comparing the 1000 with the 3000
Presumably this is 4k originally because the 1000 does not stabilise 4k.
The reduction in geometric distortion is also very visible.
If you want 4k, this camera is way ahead of anything from Go-Pro or anybody else.
One cannot do much with a 4k finished video (few playback options, especially online) but 4k is a good starting point for any form of editing where you are cropping. Any geometric correction (and the 1000V needs plenty of that, like all current action cams) involves cropping. If OTOH you start at 1080P and render to 1080P, you are generating fake pixels.
OTOH I wonder whether even 1080P is worth it, because Vimeo (even my $50 subscription) compresses to about 5mbits/sec and Youtube does something similar. A high quality 1080P video is about 50mbits/sec! Meaningful 4k starts at 100mbits/sec which is beyond most ADSL services in Europe.
I have established an additional data point on the external power issue:
When the FDR-1000V is turned on, with external power provided, it looks at the USB voltage. If it is above about 5.1-5.2V (the actual value appearst to be temperature dependent) it uses external power and continues to use it even if the voltage subsequently drops to 5.0 or even 4.9V.
So you need to provide the higher input voltage for only that initial moment, of the camera being turned ON.
It took me ages to discover this, with the camera sometimes working great and sometimes just draining the battery right away.
With my Zendure, charge-through power pack, I have two options
It’s amazing how this sort of issue can remain undiscovered but that may just be due to nearly all action cam applications being OK with the 2hr internal battery life.
If one could get a USB power pack which outputs say 5.2-5.3V that would be great, but they don’t seem to exist. There are some 5.25V mains powered USB chargers (because the sensitivity to the USB voltage is becoming a well known issue with many tablets). One could build a power pack with e.g. a LIPO battery followed by a regulator…
What a find!!
Very clever too, using replaceable rechargeable batteries.
Unfortunately it is way too big. I was going to build one using a LIFE 2-cell battery (about 6.7V, so fine with a simple linear reg, and LIFE virtually cannot catch fire) but could not find any small enough.
My current plan, for the very rare times the camera will get used, is to plug in another USB power pack into the camera pack, for a few secs while turning the camera on. I have tested this, even putting the whole thing straight into -20C, and I get nearly 8hrs every time.
I bought the SONY a couple of months ago to make videos.
The big problem is, it doesn’t allow to record ATC while filming, because the plug for the mike / audio cable is on the underside of the camera behind the plastic cover, which – as a highlight of intelligent japanese engineering and thinking-through – is blocked by the plastic mount which you need to fix the cam to whatever you want to fix it to. Same applies for the famous underwater case; if you wrap that around the cam, no audio will ever be able to enter the cam except through the mike.
You can turn around the mount, but then it protrudes to the front of the cam and the connection is not really stable, which causes the cam to vibrate.
Well, yes, all that apart from the power loss issue, and so forth. Whoever wants to record his flights while holding the cam in his hand, or have his copilot hold it, can send me a PN, I give him the cam for a couple of bucks. It currently just lies around in the cupboard drawer.
The camera bottom
One could make a spacer for one or both of the mounting (threaded) attachment points, allowing a 3.5mm plug (right angle type)
to be plugged in.
Surely you are not giving the FDR-1000V away for $2 
I can machine up a custom mounting thingy for you…
Personally I don’t record sound with the camera because a far better result is obtained with a MP3 recorder connected into the aircraft intercom. You get total silence until someone speaks. It is way better than even the old simple method of tucking a camera mike into one’s headset earcup, and it is totally hands-free. Just start the camera at the same time as the recorder, for easy sync.
OTOH the separate recorder method is a big hassle if you turn the camera on/off during flight. I have a 128GB SD card in mine (10.5hrs for 1080P AVC 25mbits/sec or 5.5hrs for 1080P XAVC-S 50mbits/sec) and leave it on the whole flight.
Sony are stupid in having done a great design but
I have finally managed to get a 128GB SD card which is fast enough to enable me to test this camera at 4k
My advice is: don’t bother. As this consumer level, the 4k technology is not yet ready for prime time.
The top setting is 4k (2160 V pixels) 30fps 100mbits/sec and the camera shows 2hrs 39 mins capacity. This is as expected and compares with the 10.5hrs you get at 1080P 50fps 25mbits/sec at which you can also get stabilisation, and the reduced viewing angle of 120 degrees which makes the distortion fairly correctable. I get pretty good videos at this setting e.g.
The maximum 4k frame rate of 30fps makes for a “jumpy” video compared to 50 or 60 fps.
So I won’t bother with 4k on this camera. 4k at 50 fps and with stabilisation would be good but there isn’t anything on the affordable and compact market. Also, for what I want to use it for, I would need 500GB+ of storage.
For the real anoraks here, I have found a great secondary use for this camera!
With android v6, all file paths on an external SD card stupidly contain the card’s volume S/N e.g.
storage/3367-44FD/DCIM/etcetc
where 3367-44FD is the volume S/N of the SD card.
If you change the SD card, all the app config is lost. If like most people you kept your pics and movies on it, you have to reconfig your viewer. And reconfig everything else that references the SD card. A few (very few) apps auto-detect it…
The obvious solution is to hack the volume S/N of the new card to match the old one. But there doesn’t seem to be a utility for doing this for EXFAT cards. All the utilities I found are for FAT16 and FAT32. There is a way to format FAT32 cards over 32GB – there is an obscure windows app I have – but it is a bad hack because FAT32 has a 4GB file size limit. If anyone has a utility for EXFAT that would be great. But even Cyanogenmod (custom firmware) users don’t have a solution, looking at their forums.
One solution I found was to format the cards with the Sony FDR-1000V action cam, which conveniently formats to EXFAT and writes 0000-0000 I have used it for 64GB and 128GB cards. I don’t think 200GB cards work in it however.
Maybe a Go-Pro does the same?
