• Adobe Premiere Pro

  Setting up a reasonable video archive with XDCam/MXF

  Posted by Eric Barker on August 18, 2010 at 1:06 am

  Hello, my TV station is setting up a number of CS5 edit suites for our news department, which, up until now, has been working off of BetaCam linear editing systems. We’ve bought a number of brand new JVC GY-100U cameras which work on the XDCam EX file format. As the production manager, it’s going to be my job to train them and devise an effective long-term archival strategy.

  In my work as a commercial producer, I’ve setup a video server with a concise hierarchy. For the news department, I want them to generate a similar hierarchical folder structure in which to log and store their video for ease of re-using later.

  Unfortunately, since XDCam stores clips in file groups with integrated metadata, we would be unable to simply log and store clips as I have done with DV-AVIs in the past. So labeling and storing clips for later use seems to be a nightmare with XDCam.

  What is everyone else doing with tapeless video logging? Surely they’re not simply grabbing the entire BPAV folders and sticking on a server, willy-nilly? I mean, CS4/5 has the ability to import a BPAV folder and break it down to individual clips, but that does NOTHING for long-term video archival.

  So are other people decoding XDCam to some other format for clip logging? MXF? MP4? How is everyone here dealing with logging of large amount of data for easy access?

  So far, my best luck has been using the Sony XDCam Clip Browser, and outputting the BPAV folder has MXF files. It works great except for two things: I can’t find a good stable MXF video player for quick viewing (VLC crashes for some reason), and the Clip Browser seems to create files with 4 mono audio channels, though the files originally had just one stereo one.

  I’ve been driving myself crazy with this. The solution must be obvious, since these tapeless formats are so predominant and used by so many organizations.

  Television Producer
  KTVF-11 Fairbanks, Alaska
  video.ericbarker.com

  Eric Barker replied 16 years ago 1 Member · 0 Replies
• 0 Replies

Reply to this Discussion! Login or Sign Up