Guidance Needed

[Craig Seeman]

XDCAM 35MB/s files are only about 30% bigger than DV files. If that 30% is going to make a big difference it would make more sense to me to buy more hard drives then loosing the option of using HD source in SD or editing in HD for futureproof and downconverting to SD. In fact if you use a “good” SD codec (8 bit uncompressed or ProRes for example) those files are going to be bigger than XDCAM.

[Steve Cohen]

I agree.
I didn’t know that they were that small.

We typically digitize at 8 bit uncompressed which is about 5 and a half time larger then DV, so we should have the room for the XD files.

Thanks again;

Steve Cohen
Editor
O2 Media Inc.

[Eli Kabillio]

Your best bet, is to have the Production Company capture the footage from the F350 at the end of each shoot day. They can use the camera, avoiding an extra rental and send you a drive with all of the footage already captured and ready to import into FCP. The added benefit of this, is that you don’t risk Fed Ex losing your camera masters. Footage transfers at about 1.8x speed, so a 64 minute disc will be captured in about 45 minutes – we’re usually done transferring before we wrap our gear. Your file size will be smaller than if you digitize the footage at 10 bit SD and you then have the flexibility of the HD frame size in case you need to blow up, zoom in, etc, or if you ever need an HD master.

Eli M. Kabillio

http://www.maddogfilms.com
MacPro 8 Core 2.8Ghz, 6G RAM, AJA IO/HD, FCP 6.04
MacPro 4 Core 2.66Ghz, 6G RAM, BlackMagic MultiBridge Pro, FCP 6.04
Sony PDW F350 XDCamHD