[Andy Mees]

the answer probably lies in who you define as your primary market
even for worldwide distribution you will probably have some idea of where your product will be most watched

… lots of “probably” in there so probably useless advice!

[Andy Mees]

FWIW Sony certainly is predicting faster file transfer down the road, but that said, I don;t think its the data transfer that is the issue per se, its more likely the unwrapping of the MXF wrapped source and then the rewrapping as .MOV that takes the time. without native MXF support in quicktime thats not something that can be avoided (but certainly can be alleviated by ever faster processors)

as for the the low-res proxies being watchable, yes, they are certainly fine for a rough cut … but before we can do that we’ll also ned a native low-res codec 🙂

[Andy Mees]

XDCAM HD SP mode (aka 25Mbs aka HDV)
we can expect LP (18 Mbps) and HQ (35 Mbps) codecs from Apple later this year

[Andy Mees]

hi Wayne

not sure if this is useful info to you but afaik the flip4mac component always imports the full clip whereas the sony plugin allows you to import all or just specifically marked/logged sections of the media … also the sony plugin allows you choose how much of the audio to import ( in channel pairs ) as opposed to all 8 channels regardless.

other than that the maiin difference technically is that flip4mac requires and uses ethernet transfer whereas sony’s plugin uses firewire

… oh yeah, flip4mac is import only and sony’s plugin is both import and export

cheerts
Andy

[Andy Mees]

unfortunately, I think you’ll find those images are only showing typical DV chroma compression artefacts … not something you can easily avoid when working with DV! You can see too much detail on the fancy 30″ monitor of yours …

you will find a wealth of technical info on all things DV at Adam Wilt’s website:
https://www.adamwilt.com/DV.html

also highly recommended is Graeme Nattress’ Chroma Sampling article at the LAFCPUG website:
https://www.lafcpug.org/Tutorials/basic_chroma_sample.html

[Andy Mees]

sure, that would give everyone a chance to look and see if its an identifiable problem

[Andy Mees]

the issue here is whether you need to follow the “offline” workflow at all

the way AVID do it is to allow you to edit with the low res and then conform to the high res only what is needed (the typical upres solution)
what Apple proposes is that you edit natively with the full res media – which obviously looks great

… but this is an issue of which workflow you want to adopt. personally I want the opportunity of doing either.

editing XDCAM HD on the new 17″ MacBook Pro’s will give us about 5 or 6 streams of full res in real time – pretty healthy – but that comes at the price of time lost in data transfer … if I want to pull in 30 minutes of rushes at full HD resolution (to cut, lets say, a 4 minute package), then thats going to take me around 15 minutes to import (2x realtime), but if I work with the low res proxies it will take me zero additional time to pull in the 30 minutes of rushes at low-res (actually it will take 3 or 4 minutes to transfer but this happens automatically when you use the XDCAM Transfer tool). then, when I’ve cut the package, it will only take 2 minutes to import the full res HD for upres’ing

as to your original question, the proxy files are MPEG-4 video with 8ch A-Law 2:1 8kHz audio … if you send me your email details i’d be glad to send you a sample (my email address is in my profile)

[Andy Mees]

[Khashyar Darvich] “Are visible vertical lines in DV video in the FCP viewer window normal?”

no, this doesn’t sound normal

[Khashyar Darvich] “I can’t see the verticle lines from the same footage in my Sony PVM-14L5 monitor that I have connected through an AJA LHe card.”

then its ok… what you are monitoring on the PVM through the AJA card is the ‘true’ image … the one on the computer display is only a ‘preview’

[Khashyar Darvich] “Are the visible vertical lines in video on the computer monitor a result of a progressive scan of the video frames as opposed to the interlaced scanning of the video?”

interlacing artefacts tend to show up more as horizontal lines, not vertical … can you post a screen shot so we could see the specific problem

[Andy Mees]

At the present time Apple have not released full support for all the Sony XDCAM HD codecs
currently supported is the SP codec, thats the 25 Mbps codec, essentially HDV which can be edited natively on an HDV timeline
the LP codec (18 Mbps) and the HQ codec (35 Mbps) are not yet available, but Apple announced their (near) future support at NAB
the low-res proxy files are also not supported for native timeline editing, although I’m hopeful that this will also be coming (eventually)

Sony’s XDCAM Transfer tool is still in beta but is already very good at what it does … you can browse all the low-res proxy clips, mark ins and outs within those clips and then import only those marked sections – its quick and easy to use, with a very clean mac-like interface. It also delivers FAM (File Access Mode) support so that your disc mounts and is browsable on the desktop.

hope it helps

[Andy Mees]

best FCP prefs handling app is FCP Rescue

failing that, before going down the whole clean install road, try creating a new user account in your OS X System Preferences … log into the new user account and try FCP again.