Sony X-OCN is a RAW digital cinematography format, unveiled by Sony in 2016 with new AXS-R7 recorder.
This video codec intends to provide the flexibility of a RAW format in terms of color grading and dynamic range, while keeping storage and transfer demands reasonable.
In typical Sony fashion, X-OCN stands for eXtended tonal range Original Camera Negative!
X-OCN is supported by new CineAlta Venice, by PMW-F55/F5 camcorders and AXS-R7 portable memory recorder.
Compared to Sony RAW codec introduced in 2012, the new X-OCN format addresses some of the issues that have prevented its successor from taking off:
- Same quality, at less than half of the size, enabling longer recording times, faster transfers, more economical post-production
- Use of MXF file container for video and audio
- Still a capture-only format, needs to transcode for post-production

Detection
Treasured can detect Sony X-OCN footage in corrupted files since version 4.4, and also in cards and in hard disks.
Treasured has a built-in preview function, and shows Sony X-OCN thumbnails that help identify the content of the corrupted media..

Sony Venice 6K, the flagship CineAlta camera
All flavours of Sony X-OCN (2K, 4K, ST and LT) are supported.
Failure modes
The causes of failure reported by Sony X-OCN users are:
- Device was turned off during recording (clip not finalized)
- Accidental deletion or formatting of card
- Card filled up and stopped recording. It didn't finish wrapping the MXF file
- Drive or card can't keep up writing at the required bitrate
Repairability and Pricing
Corrupted Sony X-OCN media can usually be repaired without major problem.
Huge MXF files (hundreds of GB) are not a problem for Treasured and our remote repair system, since only around 200 MB of data need to be sent via Internet. With a small sample, we can figure out the repair technique and send the repair program to the customer.
Aero Quartet engineers develop a Repair Kit with the following features:
- Repaired footage has same quality as originally recorded
- Repaired footage is compatible with edition and post-production workflows
Sony X-OCN repairs are only available through our 4K and Cinema plans.
Bitstream Analysis
Little is known about the internals of Sony X-OCN encoding. The codec remains proprietary.
- Footage is stored in an MXF container, with one track for video, one or several tracks for audio
- Video frame has a header and contains a pyramidal structure of tables:
0000: 53 42 52 65 'SBRe' marker 0008: 10 20 04 48 width (4128) and half height (1096). 32 pixels cropped 0010: 00 1A 10 00 length (24 bits) of first table row. 5 rows -> 5 values 0030: 03 00 0A 85 00 07 A6 00 07 E5 each table row contains 3 lengths (24 bits) whose sum 0040: 03 00 14 FB 00 0D AE 00 0E C4 is found at 0x0010: A850 + 7A60 + 7E50 = 1A100 0050: 03 00 3E 0F 00 27 C8 00 2B 8D 0060: 03 00 CA CE 00 68 79 00 78 95 4 rows with 3 entries 0070: 01 00 BE E4 and fifth row with 1 entry. Total: 13 entries With 13 lengths in table, we jump to 13 structures, the first one is found at 0x0080: 0080: 00 16 00 0A 6E 40 40 00 8A 10 structure header 0090: 01 4B 00 15 10 01 4A 00 14 D0 we find 137 values encoded on 12 bits plus 8 padding bits .... 01E0: 23 00 12 20 01 1B 00 00 00 00 137th and last value 01F0: 80 18 7C 15 11 44 1C E4 1A D4 payload of first slice. Length: 0x14B (value at 0x0090) .... 033B: 80 18 54 0F 08 84 9C EC C4 C8 payload of second slice .... For a 4K frame (4128 x 2192), we have in total 13 x 137 slices encoded in the frame. This suggests that each slice has a size of 320 x 16 pixels.