[Paul Crowe]

Hmm, this is interesting to hear.

I considered using an Fujinon SD lens from an SD Dvcam camera we had about the place, but was told not to bother because it limits it at the widest end (ie gets vignetting and/or soft edges) and that in general the pictures would be soft – but none of this is your experience?

If not I might need to dig out the lens and take a closer look for myself.

Cheers
Paul.

[Paul Crowe]

Ah yeah, we’re on the same page here Michael. 1k of my money is about 500 .

Cheers
Paul

[Paul Crowe]

Ah, c’mon Sony. I know it’s a commercial long shot but throw us a bone! What about us loyal users?

I’ve had many Sony cameras over the years. I’ve encouraged companies I’ve worked for to go Sony every time. I was a buyer for a rental company and always went Sony.

And now when I go to rental co’s (if I’m not shooting high end HD) I always ask for a sony camera. I’ve been brown nosed by sales reps from many of your competitors and I’ve sent them packing. I have an EX3 myself and there are legions of long-term loyal shooters like myself, if it’s possible to do it with firmware – just do it!

And if ya feel you have to charge – I’d pay a grand or so for it!!

WHat would you dudes pay?

Cheers
Paul

[Paul Crowe]

dude,

I have to admit, I’m curious as to why you’d actually want to do this?

But I think for best results you may well have to use Compressor or Streamclip to transcode your footage to SD 4:3 (DV or whatever) and then import it into M100 to do your thing.

Cheers
Paul

[Paul Crowe]

Unless, I’m missing something – for this job, couldn’t you just download the M100suite trial software to your mac pro. Test it and then trial it on your job (you get 15 days trial).

I’m thinking you could probably continue to digitize through your USB device and import the files into a bin in M100 if you cant dig straight into M100 via your particular USB device.

If you’re only handling SD you should be good to go.

But if its the USB device that sucks you’ll need to get a decent I/O device. Why composite video, do you have access to a FW device? If you’re coming out of an older deck into your mac, Belkin do a little pass through box that you can use to control the deck via FW800.

Hope this is useful.

Cheers
Paul

[Paul Crowe]

Okay. Cool thanks Matt. That makes sense.

I don’t have squeeze. So I guess my question is whats the best way to do this using compressor?
For example do I digitise the SD into FCP (or M100) and then export to compressor (as what?) and then output it to 720p (at what settings?) bit rates etc etc. Sorry to get into the nitty gritty, but this is the kind of help I’m after. I’ve never had to do this before. And I just thought I might be able to benefit from others experience.

Cheers
Paul

[Paul Crowe]

Thanks for that Floh,

as per usual your advice is spot on. I re-encoded the footage as ProRess standard (didn’t have LT as and option in my version of M100 – how do I get that?) and everything runs smoothly. It’s even seems to have eliminated the error messages I was getting when importing using the Sony XDCAM transfer tool on my tower mac pro.

But I do have another Q for you if you don’t mind, though…

I’ve gone on to read much stuff on the web about PR and most folk seem to believe that unless your source is 10-bit there’s no point in using PRHQ anyway. Although a few other people reckoned it looked a little better and stood up to more generational rendering and/or transcoding. What are your thoughts about PRHQ v PRLT v PR Standard?

Cheers
Paul

[Paul Crowe]

OK cool thanks fort the help guys. I’ve set the video output to none and the problem persists.

So I’m looking at the AJA system test. I guess thats what you mean for speed testing right guys? Sorry to be a bit of a dumb-arse about this. I’m looking at this AJA system tester and there’s so many options for things to test it’s hard to know exactly how to set it up.

So anyway I did a read/write test to the main drive where the apps etc run from on the mac and one on the FW drive this particular program/media is. Is this the kind of info we need to progress?

Test 1 – Disk Read/write Volume: FW800 storage drive, Video frame size 720×486 8-bit, File size 128MB (disabled file system cache). Result Write: 68.8mbs, Read 72.3mbs.

Test 2 – Disk Read/write Volume: Mac HD , Video frame size 720×486 8-bit, File size 128MB (disabled file system cache). Result Write 60.9Mbs, Read 63.7Mbs

Cheers
Paul

[Paul Crowe]

okay cool. thanks for that Matt. that link was solid and I now have M100 suite 1.5 running seamless with XDCAM transfer 2.11 on the macbook pro using snow leopard – yehaa! thanks heaps.

Now just gotta work out whats causing the same problem with the XDCAM transfer tool with M100 V1.3 on the macpro tower running standard leopard.

Oh yeah, will a project opened and/or created in V1.5 work in 1.3 – doubt it, right?

Cheers
Paul

[Paul Crowe]

Mi again mike,

i just noticed the version i was trying to load from here…

https://pro.sony.com/bbsc/ssr/micro-xdcam/resource.downloads.bbsccms-assets-micro-xdcam-downloads-XDCAMSoftwareDownload.shtml

is version 2.10.0 and not 2.11.0 as you mentioned you had working okay. Do you think this could be the problem. 2.11.0 isn’t even available on this sony site. SO yeah, again, Id be really keen to find out where you got it from. Every link I’ve followed to it is dead!

Cheers
Paul