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need XDCAM EX – MC 4 workflow advice
I’m working on a long-form documentary that will be shooting over the course of a year. Our primary camera is an EX1R, and others may be used as secondary cameras along the way (already have some HVX200 footage as well). I have an extensive tapeless workflow background with FCP, but this project is going to be cut on Avid MC4 and I have to get the post production ball rolling. I’ve been doing a lot of trial and error testing…and searching forums…and reading guides…and I still don’t feel very confident. ANY advice will be greatly appreciated. Here is what I’m looking for in an ideal world, which I know I can accomplish pretty closely in FCP but haven’t quite figured out in Avid:
1. log the footage from a macbook pro, either in Avid (ideally) or the Sony XDCAM EX browser (not so ideal- navigating through a lot of clips is very slow) using virtual volume dubs of the SxS cards downloaded in the field
2. offload that material to a base editing station at a quality the same size or smaller than native (xdcam 35) for the editor to work with and not take up too much space on the main edit drive that will continue to accumulate footage throughout the year. Raw XDCAM EX footage will be archived onto a separate drive
3. as the doc nears a rough-cut state, consolidate/transcode media used in the sequence to a high resolution so effects and color correction can be done and then sent out for online
4. be able to rebuild bins and sequences from archived source XDCAM EX should anything happen to the media on the edit drive
I keep running into dead ends trying to decide between AMA or exporting AAF’s or MXF’s from Sony EX Clip Browser, or wondering if there’s some other option I don’t know about. It would seem like AMA is the way to go, but I worry about system performance with the amount of footage we’ll have by the time we wrap up shooting, or losing clip information if raw footage is moved from a field drive to an archive drive and then needed later on to re-link. I don’t even know if I’m making sense anymore
thanks for any help that might be out there
chris -
2 Replies
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Did more trial and error testing, and this is where I’m still at:
The best I’ve determined is that AMA solves the issue of logging in the field without having to create new media wonderfully, but then getting to the next step of creating a safe Avid-native offline/online workflow is where I’m stuck. Would we be backed into working AMA the entire way up to consolidation/transcoding a rough cut? After transcoding from AMA to the Avid media drive, if that drive goes kaput, can you rebuild the project from the source material? It seems like with XDCAM that’s easy to do, but not with unwrapped XDCAM EX source material.
Any recommendations?
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As long as you keep the AMA-sourced sequence you can rebuild. When transcoding the rough cut check the “create new sequence” box. When done transcoding, move the sequence and its associated master clips into a separate bin then apply any effects and color correction you want. If this transcoded media is lost you can transcode the original AMA-sourced sequence again, still creating a new sequence. The offline clips from the first transcode can be relinked to the media files of the second transcode, so all that would need to be done is to re-render the effects if needed.
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