Sony HDR-SR1

Having researched the range of Hard Disk video cameras on the market, mid 2007, the opportunity to purchase a Sony HDR-SR1 at a sony outlet store was an opp too good to pass up. While the camera boasts HD recording, our primary use is for producing YouTube videos for ChannelWhitsunday.com - so the HD is by the by.


The key features for mine where the external mic jack, portability and the convenience of being able to cut edit time by copying the .mpg's straight from the Hard Disk onto my Toshiba Windows XP notebook for editing with Abobe Premier Pro CS3.


A couple of problems have been overcome and the camera is now doing pretty much everything that I would want.

Some issues overcome:

Proprietory hot shoe
As is common place with consumer gear, Sony have their own hot shoe design. Ideal for Sony attachments, we use lights and Sannheiser radio microphones. Both require a generic hot shoe to bolt too. This problem was solved but cutting down a $20 hot shoe converter and gluing it to the top of the camera. It could look unsightly, but it doesn't. Solved.

Lense options
Having an investment in Kodak still cameras and lenses. I got hold of an old 55mm lense adapter from a Kodak DX6490 and cut it down so I just had the ring with the inner thread. This has been glued to the front of the camera. Once again, it could be ugly, but its low profile makes it look almost like it should have been there. Through laziness, I did not notch the base of this appendage, so the camera's still flash is partially obscured. That's ok, cause no stills will be taken with it.

In the photo above, you can see that the .7 wide angle lense (along with the Sannheiser wireless base), the camera almost looks nasty.

Premier Pro CS3 lack of audio when importing
For some reason (probably to impress the uneducated) this camera records in 5.1 Surround Sound. Premier Pro CS3 would over look the audio all together when importing, leaving you with just the vision. After searching and searching, I found references on the internet to installing Adobe Encore and moving a .dll file from that installation to the Premier program directory... and hey presto you now get audio. This was a huge relief. (I was otherwise converting the raw .mpgs to .wmv's using other software b4 import, which was giving the quality a hiding)

Premier Pro CS3 Red Frames
During some video imports to Premier, I was doing the edit and exporting for YouTube only to find that I would have a single frame that would just be red. That single red frame would bugger H.264... as the red would persist for several frames as the codec attempted to move back to the feature from Red. It was messy and would require copying the previous single frame in the timeline to another layer over the top of the red frame, then re-export. Seems the Internet did not have a fix for this ... and others had encountered it. The problem then went away! As soon as I went from 1GB RAM to 2GB RAM, hey presto, the Reddies went away. So I guess this would suggest that the import process was causing my poor XP to run short of real ram, and the import process would fall over here and there as it recovered. Further to this, imports now fly. So if you are getting red frames, buy some more RAM!

Problems still outstanding:
1. The focus ring has a hair trigger. The slightest turn can sometimes take you from a focal length of .3m to infinity. Argghh!
2. The progressive speed zoom in-out trigger has a similar problem and requires a delicate touch to get those nice slow ins and outs.


With this all fixed, this very portable, high quality camera nows goes most places with me as we attend events in the Whitsundays to produce ChannelWhitsunday.com. Come over and see the way we are using YouTube, community function to have fun, become local celeb's and make a few bucks. Make sure you register!