Clint Fleckenstein
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COW Coin
Forum Replies Created
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I couldn’t get the Sandisk utility that came with my CF cards to work with SxS. It’s an older version though; maybe newer versions will work. It didn’t see the SxS card as a valid drive (using the Sony USB card reader).
I once read that simply deleting files from a memory card, rather than formatting, introduces a risk of speed loss due to fragmentation. Formatting marks the entire card as available. I tried to do a quick search to corroborate this but didn’t find anything definitive.
Cf
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The fact that the EX-3 has a removable lens doesn’t mean that the Sony WA adapter doesn’t work. We have an EX-1 and EX-3 and ordered the same wide angle adapter for each. They both have the menu setting to accomodate this adapter, which obviously works the same on the front mount of both the fixed and removable lens.
Cf
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For sure, I don’t expect a card to last forever. But when Panasonic announces that their cameras are going to work like a Brita pitcher, telling you that you only have so much time left on your card, that starts to sound fishy.
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Speaking of logging… I was dismayed yesterday when I opened some clip folders in XDCAM Transfer to find that the clips didn’t have any titles or comments. A project manager had entered subclip and other information, but that was gone.
That leads me to now believe that such information is stored in the XDCAM Transfer program’s cache, and not with the clip? I guess I had the wrong impression. Bummer. And when the folder is removed from the list on the left side of the screen, and its files are removed from the cache, apparently that information is lost. Am I mistaken?
That leads me to Shotput. If it can make and retain clip information, that might make it a very handy investment. Anyone who’s got more to share in that regard, I’d really appreciate it. And I’m going to go look for a demo to download.
Cf
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That line is blurring, to be sure, based on the image quality delivered. One thing I will say, however, is that “prosumer” cameras can still be defined by price range based on one important factor: construction.
Coming from broadcast to a production company, I was distressed by the flimsy little connectors on prosumer gear. Lenses that aren’t sealed as well as the pro gear, plastic parts that should be metal, and that sort of thing. That silly little A/V cable that plugs into the Sony EX’s in perhaps the worst possible location? Ridiculous. But there’s only so much real estate on a camera this size.
Day-to-day abuse such as can be expected with ENG duty, for example, will destroy an EX camera in a day or two. It ain’t right, but it’s the way a lot of people treat gear that isn’t theirs. At least that’s how my experience in broadcasting has been. I’m neurotic in the way I baby equipment that I use, but sadly there are a lot of people who are just plain careless.
The paradigm shift has come in that the “guts” of the cameras can be made smaller and more economically, producing fantastic results (as our EX cameras demonstrate), closing the price point between the two. So for me the term “prosumer” has always indicated more about the external qualities of a camera than the internal.
Cf
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“A string walks into a bar…”
Cf
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Perhaps it’s “High-strength thermoplastic made from space-age polymers and resinsâ„¢” or something.
and two screws.
Cf
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Yeah, my goal is to tie the titled Quicktime to the numbered MP4 clip. I have since gone back and figured out a solution using the XML export:
Our HD archive RAID is not shared; we have started out using XDCAM transfer on a dedicated iMac to log and export to a shared “Dropbox” folder on the RAID. Editors then collect their Quicktimes from there. The problem with this is that the source file path value (“pathurl”) in the XML file would then be different, and FCP freaked at that.
Instead of sharing the Dropbox folder on the RAID, we’ll be sharing the RAID itself (read-only) for the editors. Logging will still be performed on the iMac, but the final XDCAM Transfer work to Quicktime will be done on each edit station. The resulting XML files bring in additional information, so we can put the clip number in the “Comment” field in XDCAM Transfer and have it show up in the “Log Note” column of the FCP project.
This may or may not suit others’ workflow needs. That’s one trick of this business: determining the way the office works, the nature of the work performed, and coming up with a routine that ties it all together. For us, this will be a relatively easy way to be able to refer to source clips if we need to resurrect all or part of a project and don’t have the re-wrapped Quicktimes to work with.
Cf
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Aha. That makes sense. I can see how the weight of a matte box and/or teleprompter could start to put some tweakage on the mount with the curve at the front of the camera. I went out to look at our EX-3 this morning and thought perhaps that would be the weak spot.
“I would suspect those that have had issues have been when they have picked up the camera by the camera handle while the tripod was still attached and these receivers just can’t handle that load.”
I caught one of our shooters doing that a couple of weeks ago, well AFTER I had spent the time a) explaining that EX-3 users were having issues, and b) fabricating an emergency repair plate for the bottom of our XL-2 after the threads were mysteriously stripped out of the camera! Oddly enough, nobody knew how or when that happened. Good thing my last name is so close to Frankenstein. The repair plate I made was so strong, I never sent the camera in for repair. Plus, I got to spend a couple hours of my workday at home, playing with tools and metal in my workshop!
Cf
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“The right way to get your clips from XDCAM Transfer to FCP, is to go to FCP and choose File > Import > Sony XDCAM. That way, the imported clips drop silently into the FCP Browser, and don’t open a new Viewer window for each one. Doing it this way, you also get the Comment/Log Note, which you won’t if you just open the movie in FCP later.”
This hasn’t worked for me. I just tried it again to hopefully minimize the possibility of looking like a fool 🙂 I did, however, get the “Comment” field from XDCAM transfer to import to the “Log Note” column of the FCP bin by generating and importing an XML file from XDCAM transfer.
Looking at the Quicktime, I can see that the information from the “Comment” field of XDCAM transfer makes it to the “Description” field of the Quicktime movie file. That information never makes it into FCP, at least on my system. I even tried renaming a bin column “Description” to match, but no luck.
Cf