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

[Michael Adante]

“3 Edits in 40 mins”… I think the old film splicers, the Steenbeck’s worked faster than this.. 🙂

We had the same happening here… totally sympathize with your pain Phil.

Prores422 should read off your drive, we have a similar FW800 and it plays fine. If you’ve gone LT or Proxy it should be faster.

[Andy Mees]

Bugger. Well if all else has failed then its pointless to carry on struggling with XDCAM HD/EX so you’re taking the best option available to you at this time :/

I still wish I knew what was going on with your setup tho :/. Theres a good deal of general aversion to Long GOP based editing in pro circles, and mostly for good reason (eg performance) sometimes for bad reasons (eg ignorance) but stability is not (or shouldn’t be) one of those reasons. XDCAM HD/EX is, after all’s said and done, just plain old Long GOP MPEG2 editing, and whilst we all know that that’s a considerably more complex operation than intraframe format editing, well it’s not exactly rocket science either (and Apple have had it licked for years with HDV)

Clearly there are issue with XDCAM HD/EX handling on your setup, and clearly you’re not alone in seeing these issues … but nonetheless I’d still argue that it is not in and of itself an issue with the XDCAM HD/EX codec nor your MacPro or FCP’s general ability to handle it.

It sure is a puzzler, and I (almost) wish I had a machine suffering these problems so I could sit down and figure out exactly what it is. That said, I don’t envy anyone trying to actually get a job finished on a system suffering such critical problems.

Hope the transcode solves it (or at least bypasses it) for you.
Best
Andy

[Philip Owens]

Well, there goes the Lost Weekend of Transcoding. All went fairly well, and at the very least I now have all my B-Roll and secondary stories in ProRes. However, I simply don’t have the space to do the same to my interviews (or time – the estimated time to transcode all that media is about 10 days!). So I’m going to live with that material in XDCAM for now.

The only significant problem I now face is that quite a number of multicam clips ‘failed’ in transcoding, and though media clips were created for them, the content of both A & V is blank. So I have to go back through my timeline, identify those, and drop back in the XDCAM clips for those again. In short, Media Manager didn’t seem to handle the multicam clips well.

Ah, the joys of Sony formats continues.

[Philip Owens]

Although at this point I may only be talking to myself, I always like to find out what finally happened when I read a thread. In the end, none of my attempts to move to another format worked. Media Manager (in FCP 6.06) unreliably mangles multicam clips, and that ruled out transcoding the timeline. To transcode ~100 hours of interview dailies was going to take perhaps 10 days, and would have required another, much larger RAID, for which the show neither had the time nor the money. So, in the end, I have transcoded my single stream material (one of the stories, and all my B-Roll), stuck with the XDCAM for the multicam interviews, and broken down my timelines into sub-20 min sequences. FCP still crashes (maybe ten times a day), but not as much as before (ten times times an hour), and this will simply have to do. Not an ideal solution by any manner of means, but it’s the pragmatic solution. And a big lesson to always start in the right format. I wish I’d had that choice, but I didn’t. Oh, one last thing – never attempt a long format project in XDCAM!

Thanks to all for their helpful suggestions.

[Rafael Amador]

Hi Philip,
You are not alone. But apart of some system maintenance, no much to suggests.
The weird thing for me is the “octocore issue”.
Right now I’m archiving EX-1 footage with my old G5 (2004).
I have a project with some 15 hours footage. Often I have 5 or 6 open sequences, and some almost two hours long. The G5 works without a glitch.
rafael

http://www.nagavideo.com

[Jeremy Garchow]

Thanks for the follow up. You put a hefty task on to Media Manager. I don’t think it was up to that task.

Digital Rebellion just released the FCS Maintenance Pack. I just learned on another thread that it’s free to try for 15 days. It includes a corrupt clip finder. Maybe take a look and see what’s going on with a duplicated project?

Jeremy