EX-1 editing in the field. Kit & FCp setup

[Noah Kadner]

There’s no reason not to cut in XDCAM EX- you’ll save a lot of space and time over encoding all your dailies to ProRes. You can do that at your final output. Typically I go to ProRes HQ as my archival master and mixdown of all of my filters, effects,etc. Then I can derive an HD or SD DVD master as well from that ProRes. But the editing in the meantime of native XDCAM EX is great in FCP.

As for the gear- the MBP is fine. Personally I think you’ll want another HD drive. 500GB goes fast depending on how much you shoot. If you get a second drive you can RAID them together and have instant backups of all of you material. This goes a long way toward making the tapeless workflow a little less scary.

-Noah

My FCP Blog. Unlock the secrets of the DVX100, HVX200 and Apple Color. Now featuring the Sony EX1 Guidebook
https://www.callboxlive.com

[Rafael Amador]

Hi Arnljot,
i second Noah. i’m cutting directly in an EX-1 sequence. I’m working with a couple of LaCie with eSata, FW and USB. I connect them by FW800 to download, and I plug them with a Sonnet eSATA Express card for editing. The HDs reads and writes some 70MBps so the speed is great for editing.
The best I found of the EX-1 is that now is really worth to go to Color for grading. The secondary CC is incredible with this footage.

Mac OX 10.5.2-FC 6.02-QT 7.4.1
G5 2x2Gh 4GbRAM-BlackMagic Extreme
PMBP 17″Core2Duo 4GbRAM-AJA ioHD
JVC DTV-17″
SONY EX-1 . SONY PD170
..and always a big mess on top of the table.

[Tom David]

Definately get yourself some sort of external RAID 1 drive – you’ll need the extra space (I think we shot eight hours of 35M/Bit XDCam to total around 350MB), but also you’ll need the extra data reliability those drives provide.

Cheers,
Tom

Camera Operator – Editor – Motion Graphics
(https://www.tomdavid.com.au)

[Arnljot Bringedal]

Okey:
You are advising me to go for RAID 1 – which makes lots of sense.

Can someone recommend a model? I was under the impression that the read / write times for RAID 1 are low……

Bear in mind that I need something portable – that an assistant or myself can use on location…..

Your advice are appreciated!

*** Norwegian videojournalist & Editor***

[Arnljot Bringedal]

I would like to leave the expresscard slot on the MBP for the SxS cards…….

If not I would have gone for the sonnet fusion…….

It is my understanding that the external card readers read the SxS cards are WAY slower than the Expresscard port, as they use FW 800 or USB……..

And also : if I were to chose two f.w 800 drives i would probably need to use the card slot for an extra 80 card – to have two separate busses – and then i would be back to square one…

darn…… esata should be built in on the MBP……

So what Im hoping for is:

SxS dumping throught eh expresscard slot.

RAID 1 ( fast enough for the XDCAM HD HQ 35 VBR and maybe even prores 422 HQ ? ) – connected somehow…..

*** Norwegian videojournalist & Editor***

[Tom David]

I use a 2TB Taurus 3.5″ Dual Bay SATA Enclosure. This is basically a portable dual hard drive enclosure. It operates in two modes:

RAID 0 – Hard drive appears as one single 2GB drive on your desktop, or you can ‘stripe’ the drives for data transfer speeds (ie: split data across two drives, thus becomes a 1TB drive). Though if one drive fails when striping, the data on other drive can often be left useless – though again, suits high speed transfers and data rates.

RAID 1 – Mirrors info on two drives. If error on one, replace with identical make and model for unit to rebuild and sync up the drives again.

This uses firewire 800 / 400 / USB2 – so will leave your SxS slot for card transfers.

Hope this helps. If looking for info on the web, it has a silver enclosure to fit in with MAC design.

Cheers,
Tom

Camera Operator – Editor – Motion Graphics
(https://www.tomdavid.com.au)