Charlie Sorrel
Gear

Sony PDW-F355: HD Camcorder Plays Nice With Macs

At the moment it is Professional Disc only (Sony's proprietary optical disc) but future versions will let you pop in two of the SxS cards for up to four hours of 1080p recording on 3 chips (4:2:2) and eight sound channels. This starts to look more interesting when you realize that Apple's newly announced Final Cut Pro suite supports editing directly from these cards, which will slot into a standard MacBook Pro.

Sony Xdcam Hd Pdw-F355-Angle Lg 1

If you woke up this morning thinking "I wish there was yet another memory card format." then you're in luck! At the NAB (National Association of Broadcasters) show today, Sony and Sandisk announced the SxS, a 16GB card which fits into an ExpressCard slot.

The new PDW-F355 prosumer HD camcorder is planned to be one of the first products to use the new cards. At the moment it is Professional Disc only (Sony's proprietary optical disc) but future versions will let you pop in two of the SxS cards for up to four hours of 1080p recording on 3 chips (4:2:2) and eight sound channels.

This starts to look more interesting when you realize that Apple's newly announced Final Cut Pro suite supports editing directly from these cards, which will slot into a standard MacBook Pro. Transfer speed is 800 megabits per second, so that puts it behind a SATA hard drive (3Gbits per second), but it's still a lot quicker than encoding the footage. You just pop one of these babies in and you're ready to go.

No launch date, or price, but it's sure to be coming in at less than the RED.

Press release [Sony]

Press release [SanDisk]