[David Meth]

Hi,

Unfortunately, I can’t offer much advice about field transfers. One of the main reasons we decided to use the F800 XDCAM HD camera was that it shoots to disk and we wanted to avoid having to do field transfers or not have a permanent copy of the footage. At most, we’ll reuse a disk once if for some reason we don’t want to keep the footage on disk – but that’s quite rare. Sorry I can’t offer any insight into how the disks hold up to multiple uses, or how long they would take to transfer to external HD.

I haven’t tracked ingest & transfer times that closely, but I would say ingesting shoot disks using a U1 drive onto a FCP system with XDCAM Transfer, the disks seem to ingest at anywhere from 1.5x to 3x real time, usually around 2x – 2.5x real time. I never thought to check, but I think the size of the files are comparable.

For the post side, I can offer more advice. We have completed a limited first season of six 47min shows, and we are underway on a second season of eight more. In the first season, we did our “offline” edit on XDCAM HD422 sequences, in the native size & frame rate (1080p23.98). I did find the editors seemed to experience a number of odd system issues like FCP hangups and crashes. Also, when the sequences started getting longer, we began experiencing an odd issue with audio sync when exporting Quicktimes using the regular export option (vs. using Quicktime conversion). It appeared that without an additional render step, sometimes the video frame rate gets “misinterpreted”, maybe as full 24fps, while the audio did not, causing the audio sync to drift.

This season we are transcoding all our XDCAM HD422 footage into ProRes Proxy for “offline”, and we’ll conform for “online” using ProRes HQ transcoded from the XDCAM. I have to say that while this workflow takes more time in the early stages, so far it seems to be smoother. The render times appear to be noticeably shorter, and the editors are experiencing fewer glitches, FCP hangups and oddities on their systems. FCP just seems to play much nicer with the ProRes family. My outlook now is that XDCAM HD422, or really any GOP/interframe codec, is better suited to acquisition than to post, and if I can I will transcode to an intra-frame codec for post-production. On this production we have the time to do that, so we do.

I would, however, suggest that you keep the frame rate to it’s native setting if you can. So, if you are shooting 1080p25, keep your edit sequence 1080p25. You can always introduce interlacing as the final step of creating your delivery master.

I hope that is helpful. Don’t hesitate to ask if you have any further questions.

Best,

DM

[David Meth]

Thanks all,

Looks like the consensus is to work with the XDCAM HD422 material.

Though our systems won’t be running 22GB of RAM!

Much appreciated,

David