BBC camera choices

Philip Johnston has his own unique take on the restructuring of BBC services. While he seems to have a problem with the programming on BBC Scotland, he's particularly disappointed that they seem to be stuck in DV land, and even worse, that the BBC has just gone out and bought a bunch of "wrong" cameras:
Sony have just brought out the NX-5 which films HD and SD and is streets ahead of the Sony z5…the BBC in their wisdom have recently purchased 50 Sony z5 HDV camcorders !
You see my point HDV is not a good format and suffers from frequent timecode breaks which makes it a pain trying to ingest footage into a non-linear edit suite. Sony must have offered the BBC a great deal to offload 50 Z5’s.
He also thinks they should have gotten EX-1Rs or EX-3s.

While I agree; an EX-1 is better than a HVR-Z5U, I'm not sure it's a spectacularly bad choice, or even that the NX-5 is necessarily much better. While I agree that timecode might be an issue for some, there are some advantages to going with the Z5U; particularly if your editing systems are currently set up for DV.

Still, fifty is a lot of cameras. Maybe they should have mixed it up a little....but maybe it was a really good deal.

Source: BBC trim services to add £600m for programme making

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