[Don Greening]

Can you view EX clips using Quicktime Player? If so then Sony’s Transfer Tool may not be finding the EX codecs that reside with Final Cut Pro. Use Apple’s Disk Utility to repair Permissions on your startup volume. See if that solves it. Since no one can look over your shoulder as you install updated software all suggestions are just educated guesses.

– Don

[Don Greening]

[Perry Lam] “By the way, when you say turn down the edge detail, do you mean just the level selection under detail sub menu?”

That’s correct. Choose your picture profile and edit the detail settings, both the level and the frequency parameters. The detail setting in the picture profile affects edge detail. There’s always so much dialed in from the factory to the point that it’s quite excessive. Do some tests and compare the differences and you’ll see what I mean.

For more info on settings and shooting tips go here:

https://www.sony.ca/xdcamex/tips.htm

– Don

[Don Greening]

Hi Perry,

Welcome to Creative COW.

You may want to read the posts at the provided link below. There is a lot of good information concerning the current trends in HD to SD conversion.

https://forums.creativecow.net/thread/142/863059

Some of the more important considerations to be gleaned from recent workflows when SD is the final output:

• Turn the camera’s edge detail way down before shooting.
• Don’t use the DV codec for your down conversion. Use Pro Res instead or similar high end codec.
• Within FCP use the motion blur filter with a sample setting of 1 as well as a bit of the flicker filter.

Since you already have an AJA capture card this is probably the best advice:

“Re: Aliasing/twittering EX1
by Will Griffith on Feb 28, 2009 at 9:16:48 pm

For me FCP has always been a horrible converter.

The only way we could fix HDV conversions for BetaSP
was to use a Kona and its hardware downconvert.

Right now I don’t even bother with FCP or Compressor’s
conversions and just use the IOHD with the EX3.
It also saves on rendering.”

– Don

[Don Greening]

From an article by Jeff Warmouth at the Ken Stone site:

Preprocessing Tab
There is only one crucial setting on this third tab: Compression Preset. You MUST override the default value and choose None. The default value of Film Standard Compression is used only when the AC3 file will accompany a theatrical film print; setting this for a DVD audio file will cause the audio level to be automatically adjusted throughout the AC3 file. The effect is much like an AGC circuit on a sound recorder. In other words: YOU DON”T WANT IT! This single setting will make or break the quality of your AC3 file, so make sure to set Compression Preset to None.

https://www.kenstone.net/fcp_homepage/a_pack_warmouth.html

– Don

[Don Greening]

Hi Darren,

No XDCAM EX user likes to hear about a fellow user having trouble with missing or unretrievable files on an SxS Pro memory card. Personally, I’ve never had a video clip go missing or ever had even a corrupt frame of video. I guess I’ve just been very lucky so far.

Having said that there are some things you can try to retrieve your missing clips, some of which can be found in this past thread:

https://forums.creativecow.net/thread/142/861851#861854

– Don

[Don Greening]

[Peter Fuhrman] “I cannot export to Flash, but I can any other format. “

I ran across this great tidbit of information the other day: if you create a QT H.264 .mov file and change the .mov suffix to .f4v your movie will play in a flash player without any other changes. Here’s the article:

https://provideocoalition.com/index.php/aadams/story/the_quicktime_conundrum_solved_by_our_readers/

Good luck.

– Don

[Don Greening]

Okay, it would seem I’ve been getting it wrong all these years. I thought it was:

• walk under the tree
• squat on the rock
• time to break wind

My mistake.

– Don

[Don Greening]

Or FCP is looking for a scratch disc/external hard drive for exporting that is no longer connected to your system.

– Don

[Don Greening]

The smoothcam bug I’ve seen is that the analyzed clips become un-rendered after the initial render. I’ve not heard of a smoothcam clip becoming un-analyzed before. The work around would still be the same though: render your smoothcam clips and export them as self-contained .mov files then import those back into your project.

– Don

[Don Greening]

[wing poon] “Yes, they’ve confirmed that a new EX1 comes with the latest firmware.”

Yeah but make sure your vendor doesn’t try to sell you a N.O.S. camera. That stands for “new old stock.” If they do chances are that it won’t have the latest firmware update.

– Don