[Denis Devlin]

I had the same experience – direct menu stopped working after low battery and/or mem card full warnings.

This threw me into somewhat of a panic since I was getting ready to film a concert. I believe that I ended up in a state where the warning messages were gone but the direct menu was still un-responsive even after powering off and back on (with direct power, not the battery this time). I then did various things like erase some files on the SxS card and reset all camera settings to the default. This got me back to a working state – but I am not sure exactly which step did the trick (as I said, I was in somewhat of a panic with time running out).

The moral of the story for me: don’t let the battery get too low especially if your mem cards are full. I did not have a chance to investigate more precisely how to get into and out of this state. BTW, the firmware version for my EX1 is fairly old, 1.03 I believe.

[Denis Devlin]

Problem solved. Use XDCAM Transfer to join the two segments.

Evidently an export of each segment individually with EXDCAM Transfer does not transfer all of the audio data. With the incomplete audio data, a join in the FCP timeline, in SoundTrack Pro, or using Quicktime creates a dropout of some duration.

Here is the XDCAM Transfer doing the join:

and here is the timeline join of the same segments showing data missing and an offset:

Thanks for the help!

[Denis Devlin]

When a clip spans across two SX memory cards, the sony XDCAM Transfer program exports the initial and final clip segments as two distinct quicktime files (on a Mac). These can be pieced together either in the Final Cut timeline or using the QuickTime player. There is no frame interruption at the splice point, just as Sony claims in their documentation and sales literature.

BUT there are two audible clicks in the audio track at the splice! (as heard in the Final Cut sequence timeline – no rendering used because the timeline audio matches the source). The audio glitch is even worse when Quicktime itself has been used to join the segments: several frames after the splice have no audio at all in this case.

My question is: after the firmware upgrade, does a spliced clip still produce audio clicks (or dropouts) – or does the new firmware fix this problem? (Note: my tests are done on a camera with the original firmware).