“AVOID XDCAM like the PLAGUE for editing on timeline!”

[Rafael Amador]

I agree very much with Andy’s suggestion about a Proress sequence.
As he points the Proress renders from an XDCAM sequence are ignored, so if you go to end up in Proress is a waist of time. The footage will play the same in both sequences.
Rafael

http://www.nagavideo.com

[Philip Owens]

[Rafael Amador] “I agree very much with Andy’s suggestion about a Proress sequence. “

One other question – most of the XDCAM dailies are two cameras, which are all synced and multiclipped. Will the ProRes timeline handle that in realtime too?

[Andy Mees]

[Philip Owens] “Will I be able to cut SD DV @ 29.97, SD and HD ProRes @ 23.98 and 29.97 and XDCAM HD @ 23.98 clips onto that timeline? That’s the sum of my media types.”

Hey Philip
Mixed resolution should present no more problem to a ProRes timeline than to your XDCAM native timeline … indeed the nature of the sequence codec should make the rendering of the source clips to the sequence’s resolution much easier on your system. Mixed frame rates on the other hand … FCP’s none too clever with mixed frame rates I’m afraid.
Andy

[Philip Owens]

[Andy Mees] ” FCP’s none too clever with mixed frame rates I’m afraid. “

That’s OK, we’re not doing finishing, this is offline only. And for those purposes, the frame rate handling in FCP fine by me.

[Michael Adante]

Yes.. It\’ll be 4-5 times larger, depending on which flavor of Xdcam you\’re working with. Our 35mb 1920 25p was 4.

How big is the total media? Have u considered putting together a JBod?

I don\’t know the prices where u are, we put a 6TB one together here in Aust. for less than 800 bucks.

[Michael Adante]

Yes.. It\’ll be 4-5 times larger, depending on which flavor of Xdcam you\’re working with. Our 35mb 1920 25p was 4.

How big is the total media? Have u considered putting together a JBod?

I don\’t know the prices where u are, we put a 6TB one together here in Aust. for less than 800 bucks.

[Philip Owens]

[Michael Adante] “How big is the total media? Have u considered putting together a JBod? “

I’ve already filled up my 5TB RAID and have begun overflowing onto FW drives (ugh). And of course I have a backup identical RAID set offsite. So I would need two ~20TB RAID’s to move all media to ProResHQ. Which is a little prohibitive to the show’s money…

But I’ll switch to a ProRes timeline over the next few days and see how that goes.

[Philip Owens]

Well, I moved all my timelines over to ProRes this morning, but sad to report it has had no effect on the crashing problem – six crashes already this morning. Tonight I’ll see if it helps the exporting problem.

[Andy Mees]

Nightmare, Philip. Where I’m am we’ve been working day in and day out with XDCAM HD for over 3 years and have never suffered these problems … but the hardware in question is usually a MacBook Pro, which judging from reports seems to be somewhat inexplicably immune, furthermore those XDCAM HD native timelines are not often more that 5 minutes (mostly news packages turned around in the field) and all long form programme edits are captured and cut using an intermediate codec, not native XDCAM HD. That said, I’m aware of many systems designed around XDCAM HD based edit workflows and certainly the majority are working flawlessly (not surprisingly, internet forums generally attract those for whom things are not working so well, so you’ll rarely hear from the majority in that regard). Those working with native XDCAM HD source footage within ProRes sequences also seem to be having a happy and stable time of things too so I’m hard pushed to explain the root of your problem here …. but I will say this, your earlier note that “I’ve already filled up my 5TB RAID and have begun overflowing onto FW drives” has fire engine red warning bells ringing all over the interwebs, but am assuming you’ve explored that already.

Keep us posted, how you get on with the export
Andy

[Philip Owens]

Switching to ProRes timelines was absolutely no help at all. Yesterday it finally all became unworkable, as I would do an edit, crash, recover, re-do the edit, save, try the next edit, crash, recover… just awful. I got three edits successfully done in 40 minutes. SO I’m Media Managing as much of the project as I can to ProRes over the weekend and we’ll see how that goes. I’ve transcoded the timeline (it’s 1:20), all my B-Roll, and various selects sequences, but I’ll leave my interview dailies in XDCAM for now -I simply don’t have the space to transcode all of those. Hopefully that will at least reduce the crashing to a manageable level.

Tell me – do you think multicam cliips in ProRes will work well (or at all) off a firewire 800 G-Tech drive?