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Working with EX1
Hi,
I’m shooting a low/no budget short on the weekend with a Sony EX1 and it seems I’m going to have to handle the media (ie upload to a laptop, back up etc) on set. As I’m not familiar with tapeless capture I want to make sure I’m transferring the media correctly and not stuffing anything up.
I have downloaded the free software from Sony (‘XDCAM Transfer’)
and it seems to be working OK.1st Question.
When my clips appear in the XD cam transfer browser (transfering via USB card reader) it says the Video Format is ‘MPEG HD’ and the bit rate is 35 Mbps however when I import them to FCP the ‘data rate’ column in the browser window reads 4.3 Mbps. Is this of concern?
2. The codec says: ‘Apple XDCAM EX 1080p25 (35 Mb/s VBR)’
Is this what I edit with or should I be converting these files to some other format.3. Once I’ve imported these files into FCP is it OK to grab the media from the scratch disc & copy to an external drive for back-up? Is that the correct method?
Apologies for the basic questions…
Regards,
Peter -
2 Replies
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[Peter Humble] “3. Once I’ve imported these files into FCP is it OK to grab the media from the scratch disc & copy to an external drive for back-up? Is that the correct method? “
Yes, this is what I do but keep in mind that the only way to work with these files in the future is to have the XDCAM EX codec for Quicktime residing on the machine you want to view the files with. The actual EX codec is part of FCP and not Quicktime Pro Player, or Sony’s Transfer Tool Software, etc. Only FCP.
In order to keep your native EX files as generic as possible in the future you should choose to copy the entire BPAV folder from the SxS Pro cards to a hard drive and don’t alter the folder contents in any way. That way both Mac and Windows-based editors will be able to convert the native EX .mp4 files to their own editing codecs sometime down the road. But if you think you’ll be the only one ever editing with your clips then don’t worry about it. Just select all your converted EX .mov files and copy them to another hard drive for archiving. There are several ways to store your backup clips and using dedicated hard drives is one of the more popular ways.
– Don
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[Peter Humble] “When my clips appear in the XD cam transfer browser (transfering via USB card reader) it says the Video Format is ‘MPEG HD’ and the bit rate is 35 Mbps however when I import them to FCP the ‘data rate’ column in the browser window reads 4.3 Mbps. Is this of concern?”
The data rate column in FCP is in megabytes (MB) per second whereas the 35 Mbps bitrate of your file is in megabits (Mb) per second. Divide the Mbps by 8 to convert to MB, and you’ll get 4.375, so there’s nothing to be concerned about.
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