Sony XDCam EX workflow with FCP ?

[Ken Hon]

Aloha Bob,

We’ve had one for about a month now and have had no problems.

We are using it with a Mac G5 Quad and a SxS card reader attached via USB. You need to have FCP 2.02 installed (2.0 doesn’t work) and have installed the SxS card reader driver from Sony along with the XDCAM transfer software.

Use the Easy Setup for the type of XDCAM footage you want
Go to file import SONY XDCAM
Brings up the XDCAM software showing thumbnails of your clips (you can click on clips and view them).
Select the clips you want to import (using shift for multiple clips)
Hit Import and it brings them into FCP by giving them a Quicktime Wrapper.

What I’ve been doing for archive is the following:

Copy the entire card contents to our eSATA RAID (you must copy the BPAV folder on the card)
I then import clips I want from the RAID.
Rest of Clips are left on RAID
Use Retrospect to do a incremental duplicate to another RAID every day.
Do incremental Backup to Firewire drives once a week.

When you are ready to wipe the cards, it seems to be best to do this in the camera to get them formatted correctly. I haven’t tried formatting them on the Mac.

I shot some surfers just for fun at a variety of frame rates and I’m totally impressed with the XDCAM codec, it really holds up nicely even in scenes panning across breaking waves following a surfer. The nice thing about FCP is you can drop older HDV files onto the XDCAM timeline and it conforms them in the background.

Hope this is helpful.

Aloha,

Ken

[Bob Zelin]

thanks ken –
Cow ROCKS !

Bob Zelin

[Ken Hon]

Aloha Bob,

One other thing that you might come across. There are two pieces of software for the EX1

XDCAM transfer (works within FCP on both G5 and Intel Macs)

XDCAM clipbrowser–this works only on Intel Macs and I think is a stand alone clip viewer. Since I don’t have an Intel Mac I haven’t looked into this at all.

Aloha,

Ken

[Ken Hon]

My brain is like swiss cheese. A couple of other things I didn’t mention.

I’m using Quicktime 7.3 and it works fine.

However, I’ve read a couple of reports that there may be some problems with 7.4. Don’t know for sure if this is true.

Also we have a Kona 3 with version 4 of the drivers loaded under OSX 4.11

Ken

[Forrest Burger]

Ken,

What kind of transfer speed are you getting thru the card reader and USB?

Thanks,

Forrest

[Ken Hon]

Aloha Forrest,

Well at first it sucked because I had it attached to the USB on the Cinema Display that was hooked up to the computer with a 15′ USB repeater that evidently made this USB 1. Then I hooked it up to a hub hooked directly to the computer. I haven’t directly measured the speed, but it appears to be moving stuff near max USB 2 speeds. Some other folks have posted numbers in the CineAlta forum I think. But the net result is that it’s not a problem. It’s a whole lot faster than capture from tape and easier too as you get to see clip images and preview them if you want while another clip is downloading.

Aloha,

Ken

[David Brier]

Is anyone having issues with XDCAM EX being a GOP codec (a la HDV)? In the early test I did, using the native clips, dissolves required rendering, I am assuming, to rebuild the GOP frames lost in the edit. I am working on a Mac Pro 2.66 GHz quad core system, Kona 3, 12 GBs of RAM, with internal SATA storage. Throughput looked to be comparable to DV NTSC, so I was a little annoyed at the render.

David Brier
http://www.postopmedia.com