[Victor Perez]

[Andy Mees] “Regarding the XDCAM HD timeline with ProRes rendering thing, you might want to talk with your tech guy again about that. ProRes rendering offers a significant speed increase over rendering to XDCAM HD, and potentially a significant quality increase too, especially with heavy effects and graphics work. “

Thanks Andy, I’ll forward that to our tech.

And to Tom,
We also Master HD Versions back to XDCam (Split, Global, Archive) for future use. Our initial conform back to XDCam Disc is under 5 minutes when everything is rendered including Full. If thats not done, conform time jumps to about half an hour and then the transfer to Disc occurs which takes an additional 20 – 30 minutes. But you should still be able to work in Final Cut during the second phase of that process.

We’re running that process on our 3.0 8 core machines. I’m pretty sure times would be much longer on our offline suite which has a 2.7 Quad.

Victor

[Victor Perez]

We also had issues with XDCam Disc files that were recorded at 25Mbs. Conforming to Master back then sometimes took about an hour for each 30 minute episode with our old machines. Since we updated FCP to 6.0.3 and had the cameras switched to record 35Mbs our conform times are minimal. We use Sony’s XDCam Transfer to ingest the Disc Footage ( we’re looking at what the difference would be if we used FCP’s Log & Transfer instead. If you know anything about that let me know) and use the Kona 3 to digitize Archival DigiBeta, DVCam & DVCPro. Our easy setup is for an XDCam Timeline capturing DVCPro HD thru the Kona which keeps rendering at a minimum (except when you pile on the effects). As for rendering in ProRes? Our tech guy said the difference was minimal so we’ve left that alone so far.

good luck

Victor