[Don Greening]

I’m not going to try and figure out what you’ve done wrong but instead I’ll tell you how it’s supposed to work and you can take what you’ve learned and apply it to your situation.

The EX SxS Pro memory cards have one media folder called the BPAV folder. You can drag these folders to a hard drive right from the card and the folder will copy over just fine. The BPAV name should never be altered in any way, otherwise the Sony Transfer Tool will not see it. You can use the Sony Transfer Tool as a stand-alone app to import the clips from all BPAV folders and turn them into MOV files, which is the format FCP can use. You can set a destination folder for your MOV clips in the Transfer Tool preferences menu. If you don’t set a destination with the Sony Transfer Tool it will default to importing them to your startup drive as you’ve just discovered. Once that’s done navigate to all your BPAV folders in Transfer Tool window and import them.

It’s important to remember that each BPAV folder should reside in its own unique folder with a naming convention such as: Card one – Offload one, Card Two – Offload one, etc. Whatever you’re comfortable with. This is so a BPAV folder doesn’t get overwritten with another one because the names are the same. And remember you can’t change the BPAV name. When you navigate to a BPAV folder within the Sony Transfer Tool you just have to get to the folder that you’ve named. The program will see the BPAV folder inside your folder and will display the clip icons within that BPAV folder ready for the import. I don’t know why you can’t reconnect some of your clips in FCP’s Browser but what you’re trying to connect to have to be files already in .mov format and probably can’t already be in the trash.

Hope this helps.

– Don

[Don Greening]

Do you have any other FW devices on the same BUS as your media drive?

– Don

[Don Greening]

[Brendan Kirwin] “In the XL-H1 AUDIO SETUP menu it doesn’t look like it has this option. “

You don’t need to change anything with the XL-H1, only with FCP. I capture 4 channel audio recorded by an XL2 all the time and I don’t even use the XL2 to do the capture, but a cheap Sony MiniDV palmcorder.

Go to Audio/Video settings in the Final Cut Pro Menu. Click the capture presets tab, highlight the one you usually use, duplicate it then click on “edit”. In the capture preset editor window rename the preset and make sure you have something like “32K” audio instead of “48K” so you can keep track of it. In the Quicktime Audio settings you can choose “first 2 channels” and “second 2 channels”. Leave it as first 2 channels for now. Change the Format to 32 Khz 16bit 2 channels. Click OK to close the Capture Preset Editor window and click on the A/V Devices tab. Click the Options tab to the right of the Audio drop down menu. Change the settings from 48Khz to 32 Khz, 16 bit to 12 bit and 2 channels to 4 channels.

Make your first video/audio capture to get the first 2 channels. Rewind the tape and open up the Capture Preset Editor window again. Change the audio to second 2 channels and do another pass, this time disabling the video capture in the log and capture window so you only capture the audio this time.

NOTE: if you’re monitoring your audio with firewire only you’ll still hear just the first 2 channels in your speakers even though you’re capturing the second 2 channels. Rest assured that when you’re done the 2nd pass you’ll have your audio from channels 3 and 4.

– Don

[Don Greening]

Try rendering the effect and having another look.

– Don

[Don Greening]

This is a related discussion on possible CMOS damage from shooting with the sun in the shot:

https://forums.creativecow.net/thread/142/860245#860271

– Don

[Don Greening]

[Paul Crowe] “these cameras don’t produce good run’n’gun styled footage.”

Actually they do quite well but require more set up to get the look you want. The EX series cameras are not “prosumer” in nature but a lot of prosumer users are stepping up to the EX cameras without first learning how to use them and therein lies the problem.

The short answer to shooting fast motion with an EX is to choose the right recording format:

– HQ 1080/60i or
– HQ 720/60p

These two modes are “as listed” in the Sony manual, although some folks will refer to them as “30i” and “60p”. These shooting modes offer the most temporal resolution of all the settings. So you have a choice of interlaced or progressive shooting, depending on what’s required.

Make sure your shutter is set to 1/60th sec. minimum to reduce motion blur. And check out the Sony website for footage from an air show where several EX1’s were put inside aerobatic planes and set to 720p 60. The stuff looks great.

– Don

[Don Greening]

[Lisa Koza] “Isn’t 720X480 the resolution when I shoot in the 16:9 option on my cam?”

Yes, but it’s also 720×480 when you shoot 4:3. This is because DV NTSC is always 720×480, regardless of widescreen or full screen. The difference is that the 16:9 image is anamorphic or “squeezed” into the 720×480 space. That’s why the image looks tall and skinny until you tell FCP that the image is anamorphic. Then FCP will pop the picture out to fill the widescreen frame which works out to about 853×480. Make sense?

If you’ve got a lot of graphics in your project try editing your dv footage in a DV NTSC Anamorphic timeline first, then create a DVCPRO 50 Anamorphic sequence, copy and paste everything from your DV NTSC sequence into it then do your graphics there. The DVCPRO 50 sequence won’t do anything to improve your DV footage but it’ll be better for graphics.

– Don

[Don Greening]

[Travis Brillowski] “My question is; What exactly does ‘Conforming HDV video’mean?”

HDV is recorded using a 15 frame long GOP (group of pictures) recording format. This means that only one frame out of every 15 frames has complete information. All the other frames only record the changes from frame to frame. When you add filters like colour correction to HDV clips or transitions between clips Final Cut Pro has to re-interpolate those 14 out of every 15 frames. This is what’s known as conforming.

[Travis Brillowski] ” And is it making a large file somewhere that I can delete or would be a space eater? “

Look in the render folder for the conformed files. When you first set up FCP for a new project you set your capture scratch folder, render folder, audio renders, etc. using the System Preferences command in FCP. The render folder within FCP should be where the conformed video files reside.

– Don

[Don Greening]

[Nate Hanson] “When I finish editing, can I export a reference .mov file and then use that in iDVD or DVD Studio Pro?”

I’m not sure about a reference movie in iDVD but for sure you can use it for DVDSP. I recommend you use Compressor to encode your reference movie to MPEG2 as you’ll have much more control over the encoding process. Also recommended is to encode the audio to the industry standard AC3 file format. Doing this will ensure maximum playability with consumer DVD players, plus the AC3 audio takes up a lot less room on the DVD itself, leaving more room for video. Once the encode is complete drag the audio and video elements into DVDSP and place them into a track.

Keep in mind that a reference movie uses the master clips to create everything, so if you delete them after the fact you’ll lose the ability to do any further editing in FCP.

Hope this helps.

– Don

[Don Greening]

If no programs were running then it sounds like it might have been something like a directory error on the drive where your media files are located, or your target drive, or both. This is just a guess, since I can’t look over your shoulder. If you don’t practice periodic maintenance you could start by using Apple’s disk Utility to make sure your hard drives are in proper operating order. Repair permissions on your startup drive and check that the directories on the rest of your drives are good. If Disk Utility find a directory problem but can’t repair it then you need the program DiskWarrior to rebuild the directory. This is all part of a preventive maintenance plan that should be done periodically even if there’s nothing wrong.

– Don