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Anyone using the PDW-F70 XDCAM HD deck?
We are looking at the XDCam HD family for our transition into HD. We were pretty much all set to go until I saw this on Avid.com:
“If you have connected your XDCAM deck via a serial control cable for capturing into a project, it is normal that Avid will not see the deck neither in the Capture tool, nor will it be listed in the Deck Configuration list.
With the current releases, Media Composer 2.7 and Xpress Pro 5.7, Avid only supports using XDCAM decks via Firewire. All media has to be imported using the deck’s FAM, or File Access Mode. While is it part of Avid’s plans to support serial control on the XDCAM decks, it is an XDCAM feature that is not yet fully supported.”The thing is, when we demoed the camera and had it hooked up via firewire in FAM mode, while the initial import was speedy, it was painfully slow at doing a batch import of the sequence in high res. Our fallback plan was to use the RS422 control and HDSDI like a regular deck. Now we just learned this is not supported by Avid.
Not having the deck in front of me, I’m just wondering what the workflow feels like for people currently using this deck. Should the FAM mode be faster? Perhaps we don’t have our Avid set up right? We need to know how this is going to work before we jump in.
Thanks,
Bryan
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4 Replies
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We don’t have the XDCAM deck, but I saw an Avid demo of XDCAM a few months ago, and they had everything hooked-up over Ethernet. You import the low-rez proxies over your network, do the rough cut, and then the portions of the hi-res transport streams used in the cut import almost instantaneously.
Bill Stephan
Senior Editor/DVD Author
USA Studios
New York City -
This is basically what we attempted at our facility (except firewire instead of ethernet). The import of proxy material was fast. It was the batch import of the portions of the hi rez material used in the cut that took forever. I wonder how they got it to go so fast at the demo you saw.
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I suggest you contact your friendly neighborhood Avid dealer. They should be willing to get the info from the tech support people at Avid if their own technicians don’t know how to make this work for you.
Bill Stephan
Senior Editor/DVD Author
USA Studios
New York City -
I’ve actually talked to an Avid Assurance support guy about this and he said the reason it takes a while is that it’s looking for timecode within the file, not just the whole file as when you first import the clip. He said the latest MC release (2.7) may improve things a little. Unfortunately that release is not yet approved for HP8000
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