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Sony HD XDCam-First trial
Hi All.
Had the chance to work with some files from a Sony HD XDCam. The footage was shot on the 350 version of the camera at 24P at 35 MBSP. I downloaded the drivers that allowed direct import of the files from Sony’s website and installed on a Quad G5 system running FCP5.1.2.
Everything worked as advertised. At first the deck, a PDW F70, would not play back the 25P files. Going on a hunch based on capturing from it’s bigger HD Cam brother, I looked arounf the setup menu until I founf the setting to change the sync base from 30fps to 24fps. After that everything played fine.
I captured thru the import menu directly from the deck via Firewire. It took a while to import the HD files but it seemed to still be just a bit faster than realtime. I was pretty painless for the most part.
The files themselves played back without any problems at all. Editing was straightforward after setting the proper settings for the sequence. Even though the files were mpeg based, they looked and felt like “regular” video. I tried a green screen shot just to see how the format would handle it and the final composite looked pretty good for a quick and dirty attempt. I used DV Matte for the key. It worked well with the HD footage. The render times were fairly long as you might expect with HD video. Got a new message while rendering: “Conforming Mpeg 2”.
After rendering, the clip looked pretty good considering all I did was stand someone in front of an unevenly lit portable green screen. The only problem was the clip appeared a bit noisey on the final composite!? I’m going to do a bit more experimentation on this one.All in all, it was some nice looking video and it seemed to, so far, play well with FCP.
Anyone else had a chance to use HD XDCam in a real work situation? Any comments?
Tom -
1 Reply
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Yeah… Been using for some time now…. Since May. The only problems I seem to have with it is the support that FCP has. Yes…. I have FCP 5.1.2 and the latest drivers from Sony but if for some reason I want to say composite soemthing in AfterEffects and do my final render in the XDCAM HD codec…. Well, let’s just say… it sucks! When I import back into FCP the data rate is on 2.3 mb/sec, which I don’t think is correct and the video quality is awful. But this is just dealing with the codec and FCP.
Otherwise, the format is stunning!
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Wayne Carey
Schazam Productions
http://www.schazamproductions.com
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