HD XDCAM to FCP???

[Mark Maness]

Well… You’ll need a deck to capture from like the PDW-F70 XDCAM HD deck. I would hook it up HD-SDI and capture using the DVCPRO HD codec – 1080i

_______________________________

Wayne Carey
Schazam Productions
http://www.schazamproductions.com

[Ed Stevens]

Thanks for your reply.
I thought you could just transfer the files using the camera via FW?

[Craig Seeman]

And you might want/need Flip4Mac MXF (XDCAM) import component. It may work with XDCAM HD or at least soon.

[Andy Mees]

hi Ed

the camera/deck is not natively recognised by OSX so you can’t just plug it in thru FW and copy over the files, to do that it needs a FAM (File Acces Mode) driver
the necessary driver is/will be part of Sony’s plug-in, however, although this will allow you to mount and browse the disc on the desktop, and copy over the files, the hi-res HD media files are in stored in the MXF format, which is not a format natively recognised by QuickTime.
in order to work with the HD files in FCP they need to be ‘unwrapped’ from their MXF wrapper and re-wrapped in a QuickTime MOV wrapper.
the Sony plugin will allow you to do all this but is not yet released (although the full public release is scheduled sometime soon). afaik it will be a commercial release, meaning you’ll have to buy it … price? i don’t know.
alternatively, you can use the already available Flip4Mac MXF Import Component (v2) which allows you to connect to the camera/deck via ethernet, browse the low-res proxies and import the hi-res media files (it also unwraps the MXF media and re-wraps in the MOV format as part of the transfer process) … it doesn’t actually mount the disc on the desktop (ie it has no FAM driver) but it enables all this via ethernet

hope that helps to explain
Andy

[Ed Stevens]

Thanks very much for your time
ED

[Blub06]

I did several one hour shows with XDCAM and simply diged as usual. Are you guys mixing things up as if they are the same thing? To dig is to dig, to transfer seems like you are talking about finder level stuff where you try to access the XDCAM HD disk as if its an external drive and drag files from it to a hard drive, is this what you are talking about? Is this why you are talking about extra software to see these files through QT? Shouldn

[Dan Riley]

Chris,

For me at least, the whole point of that camera is it’s not tape.
It records data files to disk which can be transfered to FPC
faster than real time, well at least in theory, via ethernet.
Of course you can hook up the SDI out of the camera and capture
(assuming you have a capture card). Or you can rent/buy the deck and do it
that way. But for me, I want to speed up the process
of getting pictures into FCP by using data files transfer.
Yes, I know you can buy little hard drives that tether
to the camera, but they are very expensive if you doing
4 camera multicam. And they only hold a 3 or 4 hours at
HD. That means constantly transferring. And what about
backup? That’s why I like the XDCAM HD disk idea.

If you are going to use XDCAM the same way
you use a DigiBeta or Varicam camera, what’s the point?

Just my two cents.
Dan

[Andy Mees]

Hi Chris

Yes, we are talking about IT centric workflows. Faster than realtime data transfer.
Of course, you can connect to a capture card via baseband, as Wayne suggested in the second post of the thread, but what we’re exploring here are the alternative options that are becomming available.

Hope that helps
Andy

[Blub06]

I think what we have here is failure to be hip…

One of these days I will get hip and see the practicality of transferring a whole wade of footage to my editing software. Sense the advent of minDV and the lower and lower price of hard drive space there has been a trend to just dig/transfer everything. This is an editors dream if you have lots of time to edit each project, its an editors nightmare if you have to turn the project around quickly. Wading through 4 hours of tape rather then a producer selecting (and focusing the project) let say 90 minutes worth of stuff get you on your way faster with good results. I have long been an advocate of producers doing their job so editors can do their job better. The vision of editor as artist really hurts when you have an ocean of footage and just a few hours to shape it.

This new transfer vs. dig methodology seems to me invites one to a drowning session each time. I too like super fast ingest but it is not such a critical thing if you just dig the relevant stuff. I know you want more material when you cut but, gees 40 minutes per disk is a lot of extraneous stuff to wade thought for the sweet stuff. I know this is uncool, but I don

[Andy Mees]

you’re not wrong, Chris … I’ve been arguing the exact same point with our camera/edits

but this is where the new Sony plugin is going to walk all over the current incarnation on the Flip4Mac component

the XDCAM Transfer utility enables the user to plug in their camera/deck and immediately browse through the low-res proxies of the hi-res media.
they can then identify, and mark in’s and out’s and within the proxies, building up a batch list of only the specific parts of media they want to transfer (ie same as your traditional tape logging)

when you hit Import then only the hi-res media relating to the logged clip areas are transfered, with handles if you want, at faster than realtime

the best of both worlds

… plus the Sony plugin lets you export your conformed sequence back to the disc as a new clip