Naming Issues and Organizing XDCam Transfer to FCP

Sony Cameras

Naming Issues and Organizing XDCam Transfer to FCP

Posted by Jim Bruce on October 6, 2009 at 10:27 pm

Hi All,

I started a thread earlier today then realized what I’ve discovered is perhaps worthy of a new thread.

I’ve shot 20 days worth of footage on EX-1 for a documentary that will shoot probably 20 more days.

I now realize I should have been looking at the camera’s default names it was giving to the clips but I did not think to consider this…

So I have tons of duplicate names for clips.

This doesn’t matter yet because I used Clip Browser and have a separate (time stamped) folder for each time we offloaded media from an SxS card. These BPAV are then grouped into folders more or less by day.

I now have to get these files re-wrapped to .mov’s for use in FCP.

I am nervous about putting similarly named files in the same destination folder, so I feel like I should rename the files, but at what point and in what program is it best to do this?

I don’t need to do any subclipping.

I do hope to organize in such a way that a (highly unlikely) worst case scenario reconnect to the XDCam original files is not too confusing.

Any advice on the best way to do this would be greatly appreciated.

Jim

Brian Beker replied 15 years, 3 months ago 3 Members · 2 Replies
2 Replies

Marvin Holdman
October 7, 2009 at 9:38 pm

We run 3 EX-1’s and had to come up with a method of creating unique file names between all camera’s over time. Here is what we came up with;

The first four fields of the clip name are user controlled alpha-numerics. We took the first two fields and assigned the year to them. The next field was a letter of the alphabet that corresponded to the month. For example…

A = January
B = February
C= March

and so forth.

The fourth field we assigned a letter that corresponded to the camera. For example;

A = EX1 camera number 1
B = EX1 camera number 2
C = EX1 camera number 3

Here is an example of a file name that is generated by camera number 1 in October;

09JA0001.MP4

We have yet to exceed 9,999 clips in a single month. Though the likelihood of this is small, we still keep check on it and have a contingency of changing the month letter from upper case to lower case, should we exceed the monthly quota.

One thing to be aware of…

Although VERY rare, this camera has (on two occasions) duplicated clip names between down loads. We’ve talked with Sony about it, and no one seems to know why it does this. I mention this in case it should come up in post for you. You will go batty trying to figure out how you ended up with two identical clip names of two totally different subjects.

Hope this helps.

Marvin Holdman
Production Manager
Tourist Network
8317 Front Beach Rd, Suite 23
Panama City Beach, Fl
phone 850-234-2773 ext. 128
cell 850-585-9667
skype username – vidmarv
Brian Beker
February 8, 2011 at 2:33 am

Hi, Marvin:

I’ve been having this duplicate clip naming trouble for some time now with my EX3. It seemed at first that the counter would just regress about 10 increments on a subsequent card for a while. A firmware update seemed to make it better, but today both SxS cards in the camera have all the same clip names – the only ones that are different are the ones on the card that has more clips on it. Both cards start with the same number, and the next 55 clips are all identically named. Oy.

Sony’s tech rep said he has no idea but will research and get back to me.

Did you ever find out anything more about this?

Thanks,
Brian

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