SxS Drivers Update in September for Snow Leopard.

[Allen Cavedo]

I searched in this forum and did not find a reference to the new driver that makes SxS work with Snow Leopard 10.6.1 so I thought this post would be useful.

https://www.sony.ca/promedia/drivers.htm

Text from Sony site:
Download (Mac)
•Filename: SxS_Device_Driver_v1045050.dmg
•File Size 265KB
Recommended Macintosh OS environment
Mac OS X v10.4 (v10.4.9)
Mac OS X v10.5 (v10.5.0 or later)
Mac OS X v10.6 (v10.6.0 or later)

I downloaded, installed and BAM my previously crashing Macbook Pro now works with the SxS cards. XDCAM EX Clip Browser works however the XDCAM Transfer has an error as previously documented.

[Allen Cavedo]

I was surprised to find no posts in response to mine about the Snow Leopard SxS driver that works without crashing the Mac OS, especially after the many requests for info. Makes me wonder if what I found is as useful as I thought it was. Seemed to me like it was a breakthrough.

Well, here’s another one that seems like a breakthrough. I was faced with either reinstalling Leopard and removing Snow Leopard and reinstalling FCP and everything else back on the Mac or waiting for Sony to kick out an XDCAM Transfer that works with Snow Leopard.

I found another way to get my EX1 clips into FCP7 and it works on Snow Leopard. I found, downloaded and installed the Sony Log and Transfer plug-in (PDZK-LT1).

Download from here:
https://pro.sony.com/bbsc/ssr/micro-xdcamexsite/resource.downloads.bbsccms-assets-micro-xdcamex-downloads-LogTransferUtilityAppleFCP.shtml

I plugged the EX1 into the Mac via USB cable (will try inserting an SxS card into the MacBook Pro later), got in FCP7, clicked on Log and Transfer and it automatically found the SxS card clips. I transferred them into a new FCP project and all is wonderful.

I also found a great Sony EX1/FCP workflow doc here:
https://pro.sony.com/bbsccms/assets/files/micro/xdcamex/downloads/25634_XDCAM_AppleFinalCutPro_R1.pdf

[Craig Seeman]

SxS driver was a find although I know many people are apparently having issues with the update.

The other links have been available for a long time, long before FCP 7 arrived for example.

Thanks for the links though.

[Tom Laughlin]

In my battles to pull video off of a Transcend 32GB card using the Hoodman adaptor, latest Mac, FCP 7, and Snow Leopard, we found that it did not work using the Clip Browser, the log & Transfer Sony Software, or the FCP plug-in. The BPAV Folder seemed to be corrupted, as we’d get one out of the three clips to play out. One clip was a minute or so, and the other two clips were about 25 minutes each – giving us no time-code or info, and we could see that a thumbnail was not generated either. I went into the camera’s in camera play feature, and played the video, and it would play fine in camera, so we captured the video out using SDI-out, and into our BlackMagic Card installed on our Mac. Once 15 minutes into capturing, we’d get a blue error screen and the message “Media Error: Media Halted During Playback.”

So, to try and salvage that last 6 minutes or so, that would not allow me to replay, I went into the menu, and clicked on the clip, then in the clip menu, I went into “Expand Clip”, this allowed me to go throw each clip to finally arrive and play where it appeared there was corrupted video, and I selected the subclip after the corrupted 2-3 minutes, and captured the next and last 6 minutes, so there seemed to be a section in the BPAV folder that did not get written correctly. It was 2 minutes in the middle of this 25 minute clip that was causing the error. This may also be why the softwares were NOT importing or working with the footage, so it may not be a Snow Leopard issue, it may be card corruption or a small strand of corrupted video inside and housed in good video clips. We also tried this on multiple cards using the same BPAV Folder, os it wasn’t the fact that we went with a Transcend card versus the expensive Sony cards, it was hitting at the same spot. If you watch all of you video all the way through, it’s hard to catch it if you’re not watching, but there could be a small 30 seconds of corrupted video of sorts. The also affects how the clips are sequenced and if things are sequenced correctly, you can’t always go in the hit “Restore Media” because this card with this BPAV Folder did not indicate that any media needed to be restored, so after 2 weeks of battling, we were able to recover 98% by simply recapturing the card’s footage, capturing in real-time using FCP. Now we’re editing again.

In the last 5 months, we’ve shot over about thousand hours of video, if not more, using the Transcend cards, and with our loggers logging video, we are now finally getting word back months later, that we have out of those thousand hours, about 15% of the video is either not available, or the video cannot import, so we are looking at how to overcome this. I’ve heard that it’s not a card brand issue, it’s a camera or cameras issue. We’ve got about 35 of the Transcend 32GB cards, and so now we are trying to figure out at what point will this footage loss problem end, or footage import problems end?? We may have to go back and recapture them as well, but first I’ll try the Clip Browsers, Log/Transfer, then the FCP plug-in, and if we still cannot get the video to transfer into the softwares to convert them, we’ll need to recapture to .mov.

Thanks,

Tom Laughlin
FCP Editor/Producer
Salt Lake City, UT.

[Jan Lichtmast]

I have installed this ‘latest’ driver v1.0.45050 on OS X.6.2. I can read the ExpressCards, but still my system crashes on ShutDown (MacBookPro unibody). Afterde-ninstalling the driver no crashes on ShutDown.

I’m currently installing the driver when I need it and de-install before I ShutDown the system, but would really appreciate some help on how to solve this issue -> some people claim this driver works properly with Snow Leopard so I wonder if something sticks on the system when de-installing the driver…???