HD XDCAM to FCP???

[Dan Riley]

Chris,

Congrats to you that you have a producer to go through and
pick the “good stuff”. What if, like me, I’m producer and editor?
What if I just shot a show 4 camera simultaneous timecode
over two days with 7 hours of tape per camera?
What if a scene had 10 takes and even though you have
circle takes you also had something good on camera 4
during the bad takes.
Yes, you go through and pick only the best takes.
But then you end up with 3 hours of tape times 4 cameras.
Can you see where I’m going here?

It takes days to capture.
It takes an afternoon to make all the multiclips.
This time must be reduced and can be reduced by
simply doing a data transfer from hard drive or disk.
Then as I pick scenes to use, they are already in the system.
I lay them down and I’m done. Your way I pick them
then I capture. This take double the time.
In the old days of not having drive space this made sense.

Different types of production require different kinds of thinking.
As a news editor for years I did what you did.
I sat there and pulled shots the producer liked
and got the piece edited in minutes not hours
and always made the feed. That’s not this.

Dan

[Dan Riley]

Andy,

I’m definitely going to try that situation when Sony/Apple
makes the software available. I would also like to see a cheap
DVD blue ray (XDCAM disk) drive though, that I could carry
around with my Macbook Pro or better yet, make a DVD drive
that actually goes IN the Macbook Pro. Why use the $15,000
deck if all you want to do is transfer data?

Dan

[Blub06]

That

[Dan Riley]

Chris,

We are in agreement 🙂
I also like the idea of instantly available proxies I can browse
on a Macbook Pro. I could pick big chunks of scenes pretty
quickly, much faster I think than scanning tape. But since
I haven’t seen what the proxies look like or how Sony/Apple
will make it all work, I’m only guessing.

I think for my next studio or indoor location shoot
I will try some kind of hard drive system. What I will need to
build is a G5 with a Blackmagic or AJA card for inputing the
SDI from the Digibeta camera and a SATA card and a few
drives in a box. This is fine if it’s just one
camera, but for a multicam shoot this will be expensive
pretty fast because I don’t know of anyone who rents
G5s with AJA cards and extra drives. Would be a sweet
setup though.

Dan