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Canon 5D to FCP to XDcam
So I may be nuts, but tell me if this would work. We have just acquired a Canon 5D Mark ll and are planning on shooting 1080p 30f with it. We’re trying to figure out where to go from there. We’d like to get the footage off the SD card and into a Final Cut system. That shouldn’t be hard, right? But what do I do to archive the footage? We don’t want to keep buying sd cards for every project, but we need a storage medium for the footage. I’m wondering about the Sony PDW U1 XDcam drive. Can we dump our footage onto an XD cam disc for storage? do we need to convert all the footage to HD422, the xdcam format? what about all the other components of the project like graphics, audio etc. Can we use the PDW as a high capacity optical disc? It would probably be hellish slow wouldn’t it. is there a faster solution? anyway, i’m new to all this file based stuff, so any advice would be appreciated.
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2 Replies
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[Jim Sprague] “We’d like to get the footage off the SD card and into a Final Cut system. That shouldn’t be hard, right? “
Hi Jim,
I have no much info about the Canon but, if I’m not wrong, I think it records in a H264 format.
This is not yet editable in FC. You need to transcode it and I think ProRess or 10b Unc would be the way.
For archiving XDCAM422 would be a good solution in term of files size/quality, but the encoding to XDCAM is quite slow.
I think the best is keeping the original format. Flash cards are getting so big and so cheap that will end up being a stocking solution. 32GBs in a thumbnail and with 20MB transfer is great.
At the moment I’m storing my Ex-1 footage in data Blue-ray disks, but I may end up archiving in Flash cards.
Cheers,
rafael -
as of right now the U1 drve CANNOT write data to Xdcam diacs. many of us figured this out after purchase. although sony has announced that by the end of summer the firmware upgrade to the U1 will make this possible. this would alow data storage on the Xdcam format, and an archive solution for many of us. I personally don’t care how cheap the little cards become, I don’t trust the longevity of my data on them. As for right now we are stuck archiving to scores of DVD DL or into a raid server.
Thompson
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