Problem importing sample footage into FCP.

[Racker99]

Hello,

I was invited to go see a roadshow unveiling of the new XDCam EX yesterday. After being walked through what all the menus were with some level of explenation, we were allowed to finally touch and play with the camera some.

I found that there is one 'mid' spot for the hand grip that really felt nice and balanced for the camera if you want to do a lot of hand held work. Beyond that we also saw there there was a reasonable amount of depth of field when doing some focus tests.

After we had played around with the camera both in the room and in an outdoor lit mall area, I connected the camera via USB to a laptop, and transfered the media of the SxS card to an external HDD I had brought along. Returning home I was excited to see how the footage would actually look in FCP. After making certain that I had all current updates from Apple (running 6.0.2) and installing the XDCam HD clip importer software on my mac, I still have not been able to import any of the clips that I returned home with.

When I point the clip importer at the directory where the footage is contained, it says that it can't find any clips.

Thinking I might need to do some form of conversion from the MP4 files to XMF files, I installed the 'Clip Browser' software on my PC and finally got that to convert a few of the MP4 files into XMF's. Still unable to import the footage.

I've recently been helping out on a shoot as an AD which has been using an HVX200, so I was also trying to import footage from that which had been directly copied off the P2 cards. That also didn't seem to work.

I read through the FCP Guide about working with HD footage, but most of it seemed to pertain to downloading from the camera (though sometimes it did talk about using a directory you'd just copied off.) Anyways, at the moment I feel like I'm missing an important step that is preventing me from getting this footage into FCP so I can work with it.

My Mac is a Dual Power PC G5 1.8 Ghz with 5 Gigs of Ram and tons of HD space. My only concern is that for some reason Sony has only released support for Intel only Macs (as is the case for their clip browser software) but I haven't seen that stated yet.

Any help from anyone who's done this before would be much appreciated. Once I can edit them I have multiple clips recorded at various resolutions and frame rates that I'll be happy to post and share.

Thanks,

~Jonathan Tanner - Do It Now! Films

[gaffney film]

Launch Xdcam Transfer 2.1
Click Add button lower left hand corner
Browse to the desktop (it will not allow you to select the BAV folder. That is fine)
Add desktop
The Transfer program should scan for and add the clip.

I do recall some intel only talk somewhere, but try it anyway.

HTH

Vince

[Racker99]

When I launched the XDCam Transfer 2.1, I browsed to the HDD where I had stored the data. On that Disk I had a folder PNW-EX1 and under that it had two XML files and two directories. (At the moment I don't recall exactly what they were called but they were both four letters long.)
Under one of those two directories was another series of directories which appeared to be for each individual clip. Under each of these directories was an MP4 file, and around four other files.

No matter what directory I pointed the Transfer utility to it didn't seem to find any clips. Which made me concerned that I needed to perform some processing on them before they could be imported.

Will adding the Desktop work around some folder limitation?

Thanks,
~Jonathan

[gaffney film]

i had sample clips that i downloaded to my desktop and unzipped. the only way they would import into final cut was the method described. my problem was the clips were grayed out until we discovered this approach on another forum. i do not believe you need to do any processing.

vince

[rubyred]

Hi,
make sure you have the read-write privileges in each section of the ownership & permissions for that folder. I had the same problem and this fixed it. I work on a 15in. Powerbook 1.67, 2gigs of ram.
Good luck.

[rubyred]

Would anyone have a link to sample xdcam ex footage for me to work with on an avid station at my workplace ?

[Racker99]

Hi Ruby - I finally have gotten this working as of a few days ago. As for sample footage, I'm not sure exactly how I'd have to provide you the clips so you could import it (given all the issues I had getting it to go into FCP.)

For any others of you who might be curious around the final fix for this issue - When I had copied the contents from a SxS card onto my hard drive I had placed the contents under a folder called PMW-EX1. Under that folder I had some files and other folders that included names like TAKR and CLIP.

Whenever I ran the Sony XDCam Clip Transfer software I would try to point it at the location of my PMW-EX1 folder and nothing would happen.

Then at NAB I was given the golden key to unlocking this footage by someone in the Sony booth. I had to rename my folder called PMW-EX1 to "BPAV". Once I had renamed the folder and then launched the Clip Transfer software again, it easily found all of the clips on my system and seamlessly imported them all into my FCP Project where I was able to edit and play them back easily.

Edit Comment:
(Having to name the top level directory BPAV for Sony SxS card isn't much worse than having to name the top level folder 'Card' for importing from an HVX200 P2 Card. Neither of these software designs were well thought out as they both seem to assume that you're taking the footage directly off the card in the camera as opposed to importing from a copy on a HDD, which could be located under any arbitrary directory name you choose.)

For note, my Mac is a G5 Dual proc 1.8Ghz system, so I have verified that you DO NOT NEED an intel based Mac to edit EX1 footage.

When I tried to slow down the play speed of some sample 60P footage and perform a cross fade, it did seem to take a while to render, so that might be a point towards upgrading the system, but if you don't need to do TONS of SFX rendering I think you can probably get by on a Dual Proc G5 system of sorts for a while to come.