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Anyone using XDCam?
Has anyone worked with this? I have a project coming up and I’m exploring my options. What’s the word on it?
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9 Replies
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i love it!
i’ve always been a taped-based guy, but a few buddies had tried XDCam and loved it. i’ve now shot 10 episodes of an outdoor television show with it and really like it. it loads into FCP quite easily, the media is cheap, so archiving on the original discs is a no-brainer, and the image quality is quite good. you can delete bad takes in the field, though i haven’t had the guts to do that very much yet thinking that in the heat of the battle of shooting, i would hate to delete the wrong clip. but if you have the luxury of time on the set and you trust your little fingers, go for it, and then you don’t have so much to weed through when you go to download and edit. i’ve onlined my shows to HDCam and watched them on a 5 foot HD screen and they look great! at this point…and all this with no HD capture card. you can take the XDCam footage into (AND out of!) the camera via firewire. quite snappy.
my recommedation: rent it, play with it for a half-day or so, then go shoot like crazy and see what you think.
thanks again!
mh
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So does it record onto discs – like a DVD? Is that how it works?
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yes, Blu-Ray “type” discs. they hold 23 GB each, which will give you right at 70 minutes of HD recording with 2 channels of audio. you can do 4 audio channels as well, but i think it knocks the capacity down to around 60-63 minutes. each disc costs about $30, so you’re at about $.50 per minute, which is far cheaper than HDCam (with more capacity to boot). they’re fully erasable if need be, and you can master back to them as well. really a pretty cool format…though other stuff is looming on the horizon.
their new XDCam EX format just came out, and while it looks like another good thing, i think they’re going to run into the same roadblock as the P2 crowd: how to cheaply and quickly archive raw footage?
thanks again!
mh
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(cross-post, hopefully useful anyway …)
exactly – it’s disc-based media, which generally means it’s much easier to work with than tape in a post workflow (each button on/off is a new chapter). I haven’t used in on FCP, but I have used it with Avid on three big shows and like it a lot, and several DOPs in NZ swear by it (I get the impression it’s made a lot more inroads here than overseas). One nice advantage is that it creates proxies that can be used for easy viewing by directors for paper-edits with some viewer software.
And I love the look of it – the colors I see off it are just beautiful. Individual mileage may vary, of course.
For any standard def show where you can afford the cameras and a deck, I’d be pretty strongly tempted to go XDCam. I don’t really know anything about what’s going on with it in hi-def, so not qualified to comment one way or another.
(I believe there are some ways you can get yourself in danger if you edit off proxies and try to link up later, so do test your post workflow, of course …)
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The new EX works in FCP 6 and looks great.
Gary -
It’s worth pointing out that there are three (maybe four, depending on how you look at it) distinct versions of XDCAM.
The original XDCAM is a optical-disc based Standard Def format. It uses DVCAM, and MPEG IMX formats. There are camera models available that support only the DVCAM mode, but most will record DVCAM or IMX at 30, 40 or 50Mb/s (the 50Mb/s is virtually indistinguishable from Digibeta).
Then there is XDCAM HD – which uses the same disc technology, but basically records HDV onto it. However taking HDV a step further it supports an increased datarate of 35Mb/s (which equates to a very significant increase of quality). I believe these cameras are still ‘industrial’ with only 1/2″ CCDs, not the 2/3″ CCDs expected in modern EFP cameras.
And the new kid in the XDCAM family is XDCAM EX – a solid-state format that records on a new memory card format from Sony and Sandisk called SxS (S-by-S). Currently there is only one camera, and support is still fairly new – although initial reports are good, and the camera is excellent (with a fantastic lens).
To complicate matters, the disc-based XDCAM formats record MXF-wrapped files, while XDCAM EX records it’s video (a variation on HDV, with a full 1920×1080 raster) in MPEG4-wrapped files.
The disc-based XDCAM formats offer a great middle-ground between tape and file-based acquisition – offering the ease of use of non-linear file access, while still being cheap enough to stick on a shelf.
I’ve not used any of them in Final Cut Pro.
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XDCAM HD in HQ mode (35Mb/s VBR) is gorgeous. All the advantages of tapeless field acquisition. A single button press to add essence marks during shooting, to note good shots/takes as you go. Install Sony’s free XDCAM Transfer software, then connect your camera/deck to the mac via firewire and the disc pops up on the desktop. Use the transfer software either standalone or from within FCP to browse and log the clips, then transfer only whats needed… any of those essence marks you added in camera show up as markers within FCP on importing those clips.
The XDCAM HD codecs are fully supported in FCP since v5.1.2. In FCP 6, Apple introduced the ProRes codec together with the ability to specify it as a render codec for Long GOP format timelines. It makes editing with XDCAM HD a breeze, with render times dramatically reduced using ProRes. Timeline performance with the native codec is snappy … but at the end of the day its still an MPEG2 Long GOP timeline which means that if you are mastering back to XDCAM disc then the interminable waiting to conform annoyance still applies.
If you do go with XDCAM HD then consider adding an Matrox MXO into the mix … with that you can monitor full HD from the timeline and/or output back to a suitable deck without the blasted conform wait. (Make sure its compatible with your particular Mac)
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true, i had forgot about the XDCam SD stuff, and was only referring to the HD flavor…35mbps looks great to my eyes, and edits quite easily in FCP 6 (though now i’ve recently spent the big bucks and have upgraded to 6.0.2! : )
thanks again!
mh
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[mortimer heathcliff] “eir new XDCam EX format just came out, and while it looks like another good thing, i think they’re going to run into the same roadblock as the P2 crowd: how to cheaply and quickly archive raw footage?”
There are many affordable options. Keep in mind SxS transfers MUCH FASTER than P2.
Possible work flows:
Import to laptop Express port at 10x speed (2.5 minutes for 25 minutes of video) and burn to DL-DVD (8GB) – you now have disc you can give the client (and they can view with free Sony Clip Browser) and a backup on your hard drive (and you can make another disc).
Burn to Blu-ray disc. Sony confirms that if you simply change the .mp4 extenstion to .ts, you can burn that to disc with no further compression. XDCAM 35mbps .ts meets Blu-ray playback spec. The disc you created can be played back on Blu-ray player and PS3. In this case you have a disc you (your client) can screen with consumer gear.
While, like P2, you need to take an archival step, unlike P2, the steps are MUCH simpler and result in something you (your client) can screen easily.
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