PDW-U1. Do I have the wrong idea?

[Steve Wargo]

I bought one last December and am still waiting for the write ability.

Steve Wargo
Tempe, Arizona
It’s a dry heat!

Sony HDCAM F-900 & HDW-2000/1 deck
5 Final Cut (not quite PRO) systems
Sony HVR-M25 HDV deck
2-Sony EX-1 HD .

[Ray Raley]

You may be disappointed. My experience is you can only put data in the General subdirectory of a fomatted disc. My testing hits the limit at 500 MB. Useful for scripts and other supporting files.

We have 5 U1s to support our PDW-355, two PDW-700s, two PDW-F75s, and a PDW-1500. We use a Windows laptop and the U1 write driver to rename disks in Windows Explorer prior to XDCAM transfer into Final Cut. Otherwise all your reel names are “XDCAM disc.” The Windows U1 utility will format a disc and create Sony’s standard XDCAM HD directories.

I cannot remember from NAB any promises by Sony regarding XDCAM discs as raw data discs. Elegant solution if it ever delivers. I hope this answers your concern.

Ray
Chief Engineer, Multimedia
Lockheed Martin Aeronautics

[Clint Fleckenstein]

Interesting. That’s not a deal breaker, though; if I can at least dump our raw footage to these discs for archiving, that’s great too. Sadly, it doesn’t look like that’s a possibility on the Mac just yet. So much for my brilliant workflow idea! That is, at least, until Mac support materializes.

Thanks,
Cf

[Clint Fleckenstein]

I finally found the article that I originally got my ideas from:

Well all this is about to change with the new firmware updates. The first firmware update will allow the U1 to become a writer i.e. you can export complete edited project timelines back to disc, export individual clips/groups of clips etc back to disc. But now for the good bit, well, AMAZING bit actually. That 500mb of allocated file space I was talking about, well it is about to become a lot larger than 500mb, the entire disc to be exact, that’s write (pun totally intended). When this second firmware becomes available later in 2008 you will be able to insert a blank XDCAM disc into the U1 and it will format it as a 23GB (or 50 GB depending on the size of the disc used) file storage device if you so desire. This will mean you can treat the entire disc space just like a regular Blu-Ray writable disc or hard drive. You can drag/drop any file directly onto the XDCAM disc, files such as: Sony’s new SxS MP4 video media folders, other video files, audio files, photos, text documents, well, anything you like.

The article can be found here. Hopefully he knows what he’s talking about; otherwise, I’m ready to box up the deck I just received and send it back!

Cf

[Mitch Jordan]

That sounds great. I’m also waiting for it. In the meantime, I understand the PDW-F75 deck should also work as an archive solution. It’s supposed to write data to the XDCam disks if you set it up in the File Access Mode. However, when I’ve tried to do that- I get an error messsage “Error 36- some data cannot be read or written”. It’s useless for that purpose right now. I hope that the ultimate U-1 solution works better.

[Clint Fleckenstein]

Just thought I’d pass along the reply I got from Sony:

Hi Clint-

It’s actually going to require a combination of U1 firmware and an updated driver for the Mac, both of which are still a few months away.

The driver will enable you to write MXFs back to the disc. The firmware will enable you to expand the ‘General’ area up to the remaining capacity of the disc (currently it’s locked at 500 MB). We’ll have an announcement on the website when the driver is available, or you can feel free to check in with us in a month or two.

So that’s where we sit for now. It’s good to hear that they’re at least working on it. I can’t wait for that software to come out, I have a $2600 paperweight on my desk right now!

Cf