FCP to XDcam slow?

[Andy Mees]

>The other day i had to export my timeline (FCP 6) of 25 minutes back to a xd cam (sony 530 imx 30). The time it took surprised me somewhat.It took me about 65 minutes.

If the timeline had been fully rendered IMX30 then the export with rewrap would have taken just about 20 minutes. Worth noting that whilst an edit with motion and/or effects may playback in FCP’s timeline in full quality without render, that is not the same as actually being rendered. so the additional time may reflect that rendering process.

>The plan was to export the timeline back to xd disk and than beam everything up via satalite (for broadcast in another place) using sdi out (embedded). Is there a quicker way to do this.

You can set FCP’s Video and Audio Playback to Apple Firewire and push that DV output direct from the timeline through a suitable converter and into your feed point (or record it to a suitable DV device first and feed from that device).
Or you could us an MXO, MXO2, AJA Io, AJA Io HD or other suitable I/O device direct attached to directly provide the necessary output for your feed or interim recording device.

>Somebody told me that i could play the timeline from my macbook and use the xdcam as a bla bla converter en hook it up to the satilite in some way.

If the firewire interface on the 530 is like most of the other XDCAM cams then its probably output only, so it wouldn’t respect a DV input signal for recording or pass through when in AVC interface mode (or indeed any mode). That means, if I’m right, that it wouldn’t work as a convertor … you might want to confirm or disprove this using FCP’s live conversion to DV as described above to see if it works.

Fwiw, we use Matrox MXO’s as part of our field kits to provide realtime downconversion of XDCAM HD timeline’s at feed points … works a treat.