[Andy Mees]

Mike, it sounds like you simply lauched XDCAM Transfer and Imported your clips … this is fine and it works very happily by this method (no need for FCP to be installed)
What you should have done is to choose Import > Sony XDCAM… from FCP’s file menu.
That sends the necessary dtat to the XDCAM Transfer app so that it knows which project you want the clips imported to … how else can it know?

Borjis, the workflow is an absolute treat. Very simple, and very much faster than realtime. You have to remember that you are no longer working with tape … if you approach the format from a linear / tape-based viewpoint you will certainly lose many of those benefits. Multiple processes all happening simultaneously in the background whilst you continue to edit/work is the key. Its a new age.

[Andy Mees]

no Neil, I don’t beleive you can

[Andy Mees]

its beacuse you are working with a Long GOP format
a reference movie to a Long GOP format just doesn’t work Dave, don’t ask me why.
it seems basically that the first clip is referenced but all subsequent clips need to be rendered/conformed to a single Long GOP structure … theres no benefit to creating a reference movie with this format.

[Andy Mees]

a 23GB XDCAM disc will hold about 66 minutes of XDCAM HD footage at 35Mbps
my calcs say thats about 4500 minutes

[Andy Mees]

do yu have Final Cut installed on the Mac G5 that you are viewing on?
If not, then you probably don’t have the codec needed for the decompression of the HD video data

[Andy Mees]

or in list view, right click the column header row (but not in the name column) and choose Show Thumbnail from the dropdown menu

[Andy Mees]

1) go to this folder: /Library/Application Support/ProApps/

2) Find any file that has “_SystemID” in the name i.e. Final_Cut_Pro_SystemID, DVD_Studio_Pro_System_ID etc… these are left over from your previous versions.
DELETE THESE FILES – yes all of them. Empty the trash too

3) Restart Final Cut Pro and enter your Serial Number

Apple’s tech info article on this issue: https://docs.info.apple.com/article.html?artnum=303184

[Andy Mees]

this may be worth a look too
https://www.mxftk.com/pub/page.php?id=19

[Andy Mees]

have a look at https://www.freemxf.org/

[Andy Mees]

repair permissions
trash prefs
create a new OSX user account and test in that new clean account

kind of a scatter approach but see if any one of those steps helps