XDCam capture questions

[J. Tad newberry]

doh! one more:

5) does it matter if all the thumbnails have loaded and updated themselves onto the capture screen after first invoking XDCam Transfer, or can i just go ahead and say “select all” and “import”? it SEEMS to not matter, but just making sure if anyone has seen a problem with this…

Thanks again!

J. Tad Newberry
Big Ya Productions
Power Mac G5
Dual 2 GHz
http://www.bigya.tv

[Andy Mees]

1) is there a way to only capture 2 audio channels instead of all 4?

In the XDCAM Transfer app preferences window, under the Import tab, there is a checkbox for “Only import monitored audio channels” .. you can change the monitoring on a clip by clip basis under the Information tab of the main application window (lower righthand pane) … you can set the default monitoring setting in the XDCAM Transfer app preferences window under the General tab.

2) i can’t seem to find a way to rename the discs…and yes, i’ve slid the thingy from “Safe” mode. Is there a way to do this?

Again In the XDCAM Transfer app’s main application window under the Information tab look in the Source section … there is a Name field where you can name the disc.

3) is it now concievable to edit with the proxies (to maybe speed up editing), then replace with the real stuff before rendering? honestly, the full XDCam files load and play fine on my timeline, so i guess this doesn’t really matter much.

Sony/Apple have not exposed a smooth means of doing this with XDCAM/FCP. There are ways and means but none of them are worth the trouble.

4) i will be adding HDV footage to this project as well. would i do well to convert everything to ProRes or something before starting the actual edit? i was planning on capturing the HDV footage as DVCProHD

Converting all your footage to a single intermediate codec makes a lot of sense, but no, not worth converting the HDV only to DVCPROHD in order to incorporate it into an XDCAM HD timeline, that just adds unnecessary compression cycles. HDV and XDCAM HD mix extremely easily in the same timeline with FCP6 (absolute nightmare in FCP5).

5) does it matter if all the thumbnails have loaded and updated themselves onto the capture screen after first invoking XDCam Transfer, or can i just go ahead and say “select all” and “import”? it SEEMS to not matter, but just making sure if anyone has seen a problem with this…

In earlier versions of XDCAM Transfer you had to wait for a clip’s proxy to download to the local drive before you could start to transfer the high res for the same clip … that is no longer a restriction. You’ll be just fine importing without waiting. BTW Cmd-Opt-I is the shortcut for Import All Clips

Best
Andy

[J. Tad newberry]

Andy,

Thanks so much for the detailed response! The audio channel selection was a great tip, but I still wasn’t able to change the name of the disk. No big deal though, i’m just dragging all the content from each disc into a folder with the name that was written on the disc, even though none of the discs were digitally named. I tried renaming within the XDCam transfer window, but couldn’t. My typing didn’t even show up in the window. In Finder, I right-click on the drive/disc and see that I can “read only”, even with the save lock slid over. Oh well. No big deal.

Thanks again!

J. Tad Newberry
Big Ya Productions
Power Mac G5
Dual 2 GHz
http://www.bigya.tv