-
“AVOID XDCAM like the PLAGUE for editing on timeline!”
Hi guys,
We’re at the beginning of a drama and have been told to “Avoid XDCAM EX codec for editing in FCP” like the plague.. we took this advice but commenced cutting anyway on the XDCAM.
At the start, everything was peachy..
Now, as we’re slightly into the project, final cut has been CRASHING like crazy!
We posted earlier and some cow members gave some great advice (incl Walter) who suggested raiding the media to prevent the crashing.
Well we did that, plus the following.. NO DICE, Crashes, upon Crashes!!
** All of them caused by principally the Apple VA Driver.**
We tried:
1) Repair Permissions with Safe Boot.
2) Doing a Save as, creating new project.
3) Changing the Secquence Codec to Apple Pro Res (so it was XDCAM clips on a Pro Res Timeline) **We got really excited about this one.. another disappointment.
4) Using Disk Warrior one the Drives.FINALLY!!..
5) We said F%CK IT! Let’s reinstall the entire OS and FCP Studio from scratch.
The awesome Apple logo loaded with the beaty ‘welcome’ music. Like it was a new machine. We loaded the project and for a few hours.. it looked like it was working.
Then suddenly… CRASSSHHH!!
Again caused by the AppleVADriverG5.
Now, the first thing Apple told us, “You might want to upgrade your system to Mac Pro.”
And for ten mins we thought “Yeah, that’s what we need, a Shiny new Box!.. were sold on this. We looked at our system (Mac Quad, 2.5ghz, 12gig ram, Blackmagic HD Extreme3) , did some research and found a similar error happening on Mac Pro 8 cores. So more fire power isn’t the solution.
So right now.. we’re LOST.
The only other option LEFT is to Media Manage the entire project, which is 1TB on XDCam, to 4TB on Apple Pro Res and edit in Pro Res.
Is there anyone ELSE who is having this problem with XDCAM EX?
Is cutting in ProRes and getting out of the XDCAM EX wrapper the best solution?
Any advice?
Michael
-
66 Replies
-
Here no problems after one year and half editing EX-1. Now editing XDCAM HD 422 (220Mbps) everything working.
[Michael Adante] “4) Using Disk Warrior one the Drives”
No much sense to run DW in the media drives if you don’t run it in your System HD.
rafael -
My suite completed an Xdcam offline of a 60min doc a couple of months ago. There were issues with crashing – not of the severity your message seems to convey (my sympathies!). The main problem was VBR Xdcam: I couldn’t get it to play without sync issues (initially, like you, there were no crashes). My solution was to use full screen playback in FCP so that the second Dell computer monitor was the client screen. Audio routed as usual.
Meanwhile, since the editor wanted two screens of FCP (don’t blame him), I switched on the mirror desktop on my Aja card (Blackmagic will have similar, won’t it?). That way, it was a bit non-traditional but the sync worked and they were able to spend over 6 weeks suffering relatively minor crashes (if there are minor crashes) which seemed to be caused more by the size of the project than anything else….
I haven’t tried this yet, but maybe it’ll help:
https://www.calibratedsoftware.com/MXFImport_Mac.asp
Good luck!
Todd.
-
Thanks Raf,
Seeing that you’ve been working with XDCAM for so long, what do you think the problem could be?
Is the project too big?
What is an Apple VA Driver crash?
We have on average, four to five timelines opened at the same time.
Michael
-
Hi Michael,
Few months ago was people complaining about the same problems than you. All they were working with Octocores.
Had you tried a bit of System maintenance? Diskwarrior, permissions,..
rafael -
Are you running the EX flavor of XDCAM HD or are you running the full 50mbps XDCAM HD?
Folks seem to have no problems with EX flavor, it’s the 50mbps that seems to be causing some issues, though I will say the PBS station I worked with here in Atlanta to set up 8 HD suites are all cutting XDCAM and the only issues they are having are some playback to monitor issues in 50mbps. The workaround to that is to simply switch the Kona output to 10bit Uncompressed HD.
But the systems themselves are very stable.
I can’t stand XDCAM HD as a format and I do completely avoid it at all costs, but for me it’s a quality / workflow thing. I much prefer the Panasonic workflow for HD over Sony. But in terms of stability, I can only guess it’s something to do with 50mbps XDCAM HD and/or having too slow of media drives / corrupted media drives.
Walter Biscardi, Jr.
Editor, Colorist, Director, Writer, Consultant, Author.
Credits include multiple Emmy, Telly, Aurora and Peabody Awards.
Owner, Biscardi Creative Media featuring HD Post
Biscardi Creative MediaCreative Cow Forum Host:
Apple Final Cut Pro, Apple Motion, Apple Color, AJA Kona, Business & Marketing, Maxx Digital. -
I would definitely recommend making your render settings ProRes 422. Editing in XDCAM EX works fine here though… although, I’m on a MacBook Pro, running Tiger (10.4.11) and FCS2.
Best of luck.
Bob
CAMERAS
Sony EX3 & Sony DXC637/PVV3 Betacam-SPPORTABLE EDITING
*MacBook Pro – 2.33Ghz – 2Gb RAM
*Matrox MXO / 23″ Cinema DisplayDESKTOP
*DualG5 2Ghz w/2.5Gb RAM
*UL4D SCSI Card
*HMV800 DualMax RAID0
*AJA IO
*Sony 2800SOFTWARE
*OSX10.4.11, QT 7.5, FCP 6.0.4, Livetype 2.1.3, Soundtrack Pro 2.0.2, DVDSP4.2.1, Adobe CS3 Prod Suite -
Hi Walter,
It’s the XDCAM EX 35MB VBR.
Like Raf points out, a lot of people with 8 Core machines and 4 cores were having a similar issue.
We just don’t know how to get around this.. one of the editors joked that we could offer a pagan goat sacrifice to the Mac.. hoping to please it.. this is where we’re at.. it’s laughable.. this issue isn’t making sense to anyone. 😀
We’ve repaired permissions in the following softwares:
Maintenance.
FCS Maintenance (by Digital Rebelion)
Tech Tools Pro
Plus the old ‘Safe Boot’ Drive UtilityWe’re now considering the following workflow..
1) Media Manage the entire rushes media to Pro Res 422 (keeping same clip names), relink the clips, so it doesn’t effect our current progress…
2) Edit…
3) Export to Color for Grade..
4) Export from Color (using Pro Res HQ or Uncompressed 10-bit) back to FCP..
5) Master to HDCAM SR and create DPX or Cineon.
What do you think? Now the only issue/snag one of my colleagues has brought up is.. if we’re cutting on Pro Res 422, sending to Color.
Would we need to RE-CONFORM the entire project in the original XDCAM EX codec, media manage to ProRes HQ or Uncompressed for the grade? So the images going into Color are 10 bit?
Or is the Pro Res422 good enough to ‘Send to Color’, ‘Grade’ and Output to Prores HQ or Uncompressed 10-bit?
Has anyone gone through this workflow? Any pitfalls above?
Thanks a lot guys.
-
[Michael Adante] “It’s the XDCAM EX 35MB VBR.
Like Raf points out, a lot of people with 8 Core machines and 4 cores were having a similar issue. “
All of the 8 machines we installed here in Atlanta are 4 and 8 core machines so I honestly don’t know what to tell you. They’re not reporting any issues at all with the 35mbps material to me.
Walter Biscardi, Jr.
Editor, Colorist, Director, Writer, Consultant, Author.
Credits include multiple Emmy, Telly, Aurora and Peabody Awards.
Owner, Biscardi Creative Media featuring HD Post
Biscardi Creative MediaCreative Cow Forum Host:
Apple Final Cut Pro, Apple Motion, Apple Color, AJA Kona, Business & Marketing, Maxx Digital. -
Hi Raf,
Yes, we’ve tried everything below.
Repairing Permissions.
Disk Warrior.
Tech Tools Pro.We even tried exporting/using an Apple VADriver from a Macbook Pro. (As you can guess the Permissions loved that.)
No dice…
Myself and my colleagues have cut smaller jobs on the XDCAM before and haven’t seen this.
FCS Repair tool analyzed the Crash Log and came back with Data Corruption. Which we’re guessing is in one of the XDCAM files.
It must’ve come across (or happened) when the B-Pav’s we exporting the Quicktimes in Sony’s XDCAM Transfer Utility.
Our best guess is this…
FCP is going past the corrupted data, it’s long gop, so it’s trying to solve it. It can’t and is crashing.
Thoughts? Anyone?
-
It’s very strange..
There’s a “GHOST IN THE MACHINE”.. 😀
Reply to this Discussion! Login or Sign Up