Clone an XDCAM disc?

[Alan Lacey]

I’ve never tried this but can’t you just copy/paste all the files over via the OS.

I’ve done this to an external drive before importing into FCP.

Alan

[Jeremy Doyle]

No that didn’t work. I tried. I ended up importing all the clips then exporting them back to a blank disc. However every time I tried to batch export I got error messages so the only way I was successful was to export the clips one by one. 96 clips. Batch would have been nice.

[Alan Lacey]

Hmmmm, see what you mean. I just tried copying all the files back to the XDcam disk. That disk seems irreversibly locked?

Alan

[Jeremy Doyle]

I wish it was that easy. You would think that it would be.

[Mark Maness]

It was supposed to be available with the release of the Sony Transfer software 2.1 BUT you can see clearly this didn’t happen.

Thus, Sony means Soon Only Not Yet or Shipping October Next Year….

_______________________________

Wayne Carey
Schazam Productions
http://www.schazamproductions.com
https://blogs.creativecow.net/waynecarey

[Craig Cerhit]

We’ve been wrestling with this issue for quite a while. We’re all Mac here too and I believe there is no current solution for us Mac users. We did try using the transfer software on a PC with two firewire ports and had zero luck. Let’s hope Sony can update the firmware on the decks so we can highspeed dub over HDSDI or firewire.

Please post if you find a solution.

Craig
Greedy Productions
Vancouver

Craig Cerhit
Supervising Producer

Greedy Productions
Vancouver, BC
http://www.labwithleo.com

[Kenneth Preston]

I’m interested in this topic too. I’ve been working for three day to make this happen. I finally got it to work with the really poor PDZ-1 V2.1 software and firewire. The idea of cloning a XDCam disc becomes reallllyyyy attractive when it takes ONE hour and FORTY-FIVE minutes to clone a 45 minute disc!!

Has anybody figured this out yet?

[Craig Cerhit]

We had limited success using the PDZ software but it took much longer than a HDSDI real time dub. We tried using macs which didn’t work. Tried Vista which didn’t work… I eventually gave up and were waiting for Sony to release some better software/firmware.

Please post if you have cracked this nut!
Craig

Craig Cerhit
Supervising Producer

Greedy Productions
Vancouver, BC
http://www.labwithleo.com

[Jason Lyons]

Ah.. well its slightly comforting seeing that Im not the only one stumped here.

Im giving Carbon Copy Cloner ( https://www.bombich.com/software/ccc.html) a try. I’ll post the results, so far so good except USBlllllaaaaaahhhh.

Details:
XDCAMHD Disc with 36.5 Used.
Reading from a PDW-U1 via USB (cough cough)
At 10 minutes = 4.26GB to external via FW800. System is a trusty Dual G5 2Ghz.

Later
j

[Jason Lyons]

Success! Carbon Copy Cloner does the trick… But it takes a while.
Updated system info from previous post – I had to move to a different machine because of an edit.

Ingredients:
2.4 Ghz iMac Aluminum or other suitable computer.
Sony’s PDW-U1 XDCAM HD reader.
Maxtor Firewire 400 drive
Carbon Copy Cloner
2 hours for a 50 GB disc.

Directions:
1) Download CCC ( https://www.bombich.com/software/ccc.html )
2) Mount the XDCAM disc
3) Open CCC – Select XDCAM disc as source
4) From the Target Disk Menu – choose “New Disc Image”
5) Navigate to your destination drive & Name the Image
6) Make sure the option under Additional disk image options is set to “Create a read-only disk image
7) Make sure the pull down menu for Cloning options is set to “Backup Everything”
NOTE- “Erase the target volume should be greyed out, if not make sure it is not selected.
8) Hit the clone button in the lower right
9) Coffee break and a good time to donate to bombich software for the Reallllllly nice tool! (BTW I am not affiliated with them, wishin I were that smart!)

I am cloning to a new hard drive, freshly formatted Mac Extended. After the cloning process completed I was able to double-click in the image and either wait for it to verify or skip verification and the disc appears on your desktop just as if you had just inserted it into a drive/deck. Next, I opened XDCAM transfer software I simply had to “Add Source” under the file menu. The tool started making proxies just like normal. I imported a few test files into FCP.

At this point the only drawback is the cloning time – right at 2 hours for a 50 GB disc.

Live on!
j