[Don Greening]

Kimberly,

Read the series of posts at the link below. The advice and pointers to various pieces of software to get your clips back may help you. The fact that you partially recorded over the previous clips on that card does not sound very encouraging, though.

hhttps://forums.creativecow.net/thread/142/859250

Good luck.

– Don

[Don Greening]

[Bob Jackson] “I will have to try 1080i-60 today.”

Don’t forget to try 720P 60 as well, if you want to keep things in progressive format.

– Don

[Don Greening]

For a direct machine to machine transfer you would want to rent the EX 30 deck but I don’t think it’s come to market yet. Not sure about that, though. I’ve also never used the PDW 1500 so you’ll have to wait from others to address that workflow.

To get the the raw data off an SxS Pro card I simply insert it into the Express 34 slot in my Macbook Pro and drag the BPAV folder to an external hard drive. It takes about 5 1/2 min. to transfer a full 16 Gig card. Once all the BPAV folders from all the cards are transferred and deposited into their unique folders I connect my external hard drive to my editing suite, start Sony’s Transfer Tool app. and navigate to all the BPAV folders one at a time. Once the folders are visible in the Transfer Tool window I do a “Select All” and import everything to my destination hard drive array. This command will import the clips and convert the files into the MOV format for editing in Final Cut Pro. If you were using a Windows machine the process would convert to AVI instead using Sony’s Clip Browser ( I think).

Since you haven’t indicated what computer platform you’re using I can only address the Mac workflow, since that is what I use. You can do the same thing with the EX3 hooked to your machine via USB but the transfer is much slower due to the reduced connection speed.

Hope this helps.

– Don

[Don Greening]

[Paul Zwicker] “s it faster to use ShotPut Express or preset the file folders?”

I’ve never used ShotPut so you’ll be better equipped to address that decision. All I do is, once the card in slot A is full, yank it out, put it into the Laptop and drag the BPAV folder into the folder on the hard drive named “Card 1 Offload 1”. I used a felt tipped pen to mark the actual SxS Pro card with the number 1. It takes about 5 1/2 min. to offload a full 16 Gig card. Then I use the Clip Browser to verify that all the clips are there (on the hard drive) and once satisfied I’ll drag the BPAV folder from the actual card into the trash and then empty the trash. Eject the card from the desktop and now the card is ready to be put back into slot A of the EX.

Once card 2 is full the EX will jump back to Card 1, allowing you to pull card 2 out and put the BPAV folder into the hard drive folder “Card 2 Offload 1”. And so on and so on.

So rent a couple of 16 Gig cards instead of that BHU-60. Depending on how much you have to man the camera during shooting will determine if you need to bring a card wrangler.

Some folks who post here use Sony’s Clip Browser app. to handle the card transfer to hard drive because it’s got error checking during the process. I haven’t used that, either. Haven’t lost a clip so far.

It’s also really important that you don’t alter the BPAV folder name in any way, nor anything inside. That’s why each time you transfer a card over you have to have a unique folder name and only one BPAV folder in each unique folder, otherwise the first BPAV folder will be overwritten. You don’t want that. I also do a Cmd-I (get info) on each BPAV folder on the hard drive and put a check mark in the lock button/tab so I can’t erase or overwrite the folder by mistake.

– Don

[Don Greening]

[Paul Zwicker] “I guess I could buy or rent the PHU-60k hard drive and record @25Mbps or @35Mbps-though I don’t think it needs to be in HD. “

Don’t rent it. Users are reporting a ton of issues with the drive crashing or working for awhile then prompting you to “restore” the media on the drive. Sometimes nothing happens to your footage and other times……….well, don’t ask. Read some of the recent horror stories below.

Best workflow for you is to get a laptop with an Express 34 slot and an external USB or firewire powered hard drive. You can hot-swap the cards and offload the video files to the laptop’s external hard drive by simply dragging the BPAV folders from each card into its own unique folder which you have previously set up before the shoot. You can shoot video this way until the cows come home and never miss beat. Or until you run out of hard drive space.

– Don

[Don Greening]

[Randy Lee] “I haven’t heard about RED, also a CMOS sensor, having problems, or the EX-3, or any other cameras.”

Well then you haven’t been to the reduser.net forum, because there’s all kinds of posts (and extensive test results) concerning the RED’s CMOS “picture skew” issues. Look for a test where someone set up a bunch of white vertical lines on a black background and panned the RED ONE rapidly back and forth. There’s video of that test at RED User.

The EX3 is exactly the same internally as the EX1 so the rolling shutter and picture skew issues are common to both. To minimize picture skew with the EX series cameras you need as much temporal resolution per second as possible. This means shooting HQ 720p 60. That’s why Sony used this setting when the company put bunch of EX1’s in several aerobatic airplanes and posted the results on their website. Footage looks awsome.

– Don

[Don Greening]

Some who have upgraded to the latest firmware reported that the half-frame flashes are gone, but others have reported no change. Among those who’ve reported no change is Phil Bloom from the UK.

Don’t get your hopes up.

– Don

[Don Greening]

First of all I need to know what computer platform you’re going to be using for the transfer. If it’s a Windows machine then you can’t use Sony’s transfer Tool app because that’s for Mac. Windows machines have the Clip Browser Software only. If you have an Intel Mac then you can use Sony’s Clip Browser software to transfer the files from the EX3/card setup. If you have a PPC Mac like a G5 or earlier you can’t use the Clip Browser but you’ll need to use the Sony Transfer Tool app. instead.

Need more info before I can recommend a workflow. Regardless, you won’t look like dolt when the friends show up.

– Don

[Don Greening]

If your tapes were recorded on cameras that have properly adjusted tape transports and the tape deck is also properly adjusted you should be able to play any DV tape on any kind of DV deck. I have both Canon and Sony MiniDV cameras and I use a cheap Sony palmcorder to transfer tapes to computer without issue.

Problems arise when you don’t get your acquisition cameras checked out every so often and they fall out of adjustment. Playing back those tapes with something else that is adjusted properly is when you start having trouble.

– Don

[Don Greening]

Michael,

There must be something strange going on with the EX lens, don’t you think? This makes two companies I’ve heard about now that are having trouble making adapters for this camera/lens combo, the other of course being the .75 WA adapter from Century Optics. Either Sony isn’t very forthcoming with their lens spec. to 3rd party companies and places like Red Rock are just “winging it” or they’re just missing something really obvious. Letus seems to have got it right, mind you. Curious.

– Don