Editing SxS (EX3) Footage in Final Cut Pro

[MitchLewis]

I've spent so much time over the last few months researching 35mm adaptors, tripods, lenses, etc....and I admit that I took a leap of faith that we won't have any trouble editing Sony EX3 footage in Final Cut Pro. Here's how I "think" it works:

1) Using the disc supplied by Sony (comes with the camera) we install software on our computer that puts the XDCAM codec into Quicktime. This also enables the XDCAM Import feature in Final Cut Pro (similar to Panasonic P2).

2) We put our SxS card into the Sony USB SxS Card Reader, go into FCP and using the Import Footage command, import our clips. We can choose which clip to import by looking at thumbnails of our footage.

3) The footage is imported at greater than real-time speeds (hopefully MUCH greater) and ends up in the designated Logging Bin in the Browser window. From here, we can just drag the footage into a timeline that matches the same specs as our footage (1080 30p, 720 60p, etc...)

4) We can then perform "frame accurate" edits in the timeline, just like we've done for years with our standard def DV footage captured from tape.

We never have to convert to ProRez, or make any other time intensive conversions to our footage......right?

I've read that when shooting in 24p (we'll probably mostly record at 30p or 30i) Sony only recods 2 actual frames per second and the other 22 are estimates. If this is true.....how can we make frame accurate edits in FCP? This is my biggest concern.

Anyone?

[MitchLewis]

Hmmmm......maybe I should post this under another catagory?

[carl@brazos]

1) Exactly

2) Yes, or you can preview the actual videos

3) Yes, I import via expresscard and it is quite fast

4) Yes, see my comment below

"We never have to convert to ProRez, or make any other time intensive conversions to our footage......right?"

You can convert to ProRez if you want to. However, I (and most people I assume) just edit natively in XCDAM in FCP. I do have the effects and graphics set in FCP to render in ProRez since it is a little better with graphics and effects. The real benefit of ProRez is for editing uncompressed footage. You are not going to gain much by editing XDCAM in ProRez.

XDCAM EX is frame accurate. The "2 frames per second" you are referring to has to do with the Mpeg-2 compression, not the frame rate (HDV is the same BTW). XDCAM EX will record 24fps (or what ever frame rate you specify), treating each frame as a seperate 1/24th of a second. Unlike the Pana compression that records each whole frame to memory (at large file sizes BTW), XDCAM EX compresses the footage using Mpeg-2.

That is one of the reasons that XDCAM and HDV (and h.264) require so much computer horsepower - they have to decompress the footage from small file sizes (high compression) in real-time in FCP.

So to answer you question, yes, you can edit XDCAM down to the frame. Honestly, Sony would never make a prosumer format that wasn't frame accurate, because no one would buy it...

Yes, the XDCAM format is compressed, but that s a trade off for the price and performance. In digital photography a TIFF file has more info and larger file sizes than a JPEG file, but with good compression, the JPEG can be almost indistinguishable from the TIFF, s a much smaller file size...

my two cents - I am sure others can offer more specifics.

[MitchLewis]

Thanks Carl. Those are exactly the answers I was looking for. (Mitch breathes a sigh of relief) Interesting about setting up FCP to render in ProRez, I didn't know you could do that. I guess I need to read through the manual again.

Thanks again! (i'm going to remove this thread from the FCP forum)

[ColorBalance]

The Sony SxS USB reader is very expensive. You can simply connect the camera through a USB cable and download. Reasonably fast.

Read the thread on Fast SDHC - the most popular thread - and you can do the data storing part much much cheaper and faster. Basically, you buy a Kensington 7 in 1 ExpressCard adapter for $37 and a 16 GB Sandisk Ultra II SDHC card for $65. This will give you a 1-hr of storage at the highest posiible setting. Then, copy the BPAV folder into your computer via a USB adapter (comes with the card). The download speed is about 1 GB / minute. So, in 15 minutes, you got 1 hr of footage into your computer. Then use XDCAM software (download the newer version) to import into FCS.

[MitchLewis]

Yeah, I thought about that. But we're a professional shop and the Sony readers aren't that expensive in the whole scheme of things. We're going to stick with SxS and Sony for now. It's VERY important that our work flow doesn't have any reliability issues. I'm willing to pay a little extra for that confidence.

Also, you can't overcrank with the SD card solution. That's something we are planning to use quite a bit. We can always go with the KxS solution down the road.

Thanks for the info though! Much appreciated! :)

[MitchLewis]

I think I understand this now......

Compared to a simple codec like the DV codec, XDCAM is more processor intensive, so in Final Cut Pro you can't layer as many tracks of video without rendering. With DV footage you might be able to show 6 or 8 live streams of video without editing, but with XDCAM you may only get 2 or 3 streams.

One last question....

What about in After Effects CS3? I assume the same thing holds true. Projects that contain a lot of XDCAM footage will take longer to render than with the same amount of DV footage. Right?

We're still crossing our fingers that you can edit XDCAM footage in After Effects CS3. We're spending so much money right now upgrading to HD, we don't really have much left over to upgrade 3 work stations from CS3 to CS4. But worst case, we'll find the money! hehehe

[MitchLewis]

Bump....anyone? (see the last post....it's new)

[jvfante]

Mitch, The render times indeed are longer in XDCam vs DV. I'm guessing, but I'd say about 3 or 4 times as long. I don't know if CS3 or 4 have the ability to "Log and transfer" the Sony files directly into AE. When you import to FCS, the Sony files are rewrapped and become QT files. These would import into AE. Transcoding to ProRez creates huge files, so you may decide to stay in XDCam as many do throughout the edit. Transfer using a MBP and the Express 34 slot goes at abt 5x real time. Hope that's helpful.

[MitchLewis]

Thanks for the reply! Much appreciated. Sounds like this should be our work flow:

1) Use FCP to import the files using the Sony USB card reader (I have a MacBookPro, but we edit on a MacPro tower so it would be silly to transfer to the MBP and then have to transfer to the MacPro.....right?) I wish someone made a faster SxS card reader, we'd buy that instead of the Sony.

2) Once they are in the Capture folder created by FCP, I can import those QT files into AE CS3 for compositing. Sweet! What file format (codec) should we output to from AE to then import back into FCP? ProRes HQ? XDCAM?

[jvfante]

Hi Mitch,

Your imports will be MUCH faster if you use the MBP's Express 34 slot (vs USB 2) and an external drive to do your Log and Transfer. It's very important to make at least one, better two, back ups to your SxS cards as they come out of the camera and before you erase them. The MBP is perfect for this task, even though you're going to edit on another machine.

As for what file format to export to from AE, I'd try a test of both the XDCam and ProRes workflows taking them out to the final delivery format of your project. On a good monitor, you should be able to determine which one to use. If you stay in XDCam, you'll have much smaller files to render.

Let us know what you come up with. The AE workflow isn't one I see discussed here much.

John

[MitchLewis]

Thanks John. You've really cleared up some major questions we've had.

One last question.... I'm still not understanding why we should use my MBP to Log and Transfer to an external disk. Here's our current setup and backup procedures.

1) Everything gets captured onto a Ciprico 5 drive fiber channel RAID (2TB). It's setup so that if one of the RAID drives fails you can keep working while you replace the drive. Kind of a built-in backup.
2) We use Apple OS 10.5 (Leopard) with Time Machine constantly backing up the Ciprico RAID to a Western Digital My Book firewire drive (2TB).
3) Then once the Ciprico drive gets full, (about once per year) we use Dantz Retrospect Backup to "archive" our data to removable 500GB firewire external drives (Western Digital My Books) that we store on a shelf until needed. We do spin them all up once every couple of months just to help keep the drive mechanisms lubricated. (that's the big negative with using external firewire drives for archiving)

In your opinion, should we add additional external drives to the mix to keep a backup of the raw data from the EX3?

Thanks again for all you great advice. :)

[adamr316]

Mitch,

Your workflow/hard drive specs seem fine for XDCam EX. I personally have a small setup going on and have two TB MyBook drives, use one drive as the "work drive" and manually mirror the other one. So when I dump footage off the SxS cards I am always doing it twice and then when I am editing a project I'll back stuff up to the drives at the end of the day. As long as you have two copies of your footage/edits then you should be good.

Now, one precaution I may make is having an additional hard drive stored off-site in case my place catches fire or something. But that goes for all data.

Someone forgot to mention besides XDCam EX being MPEG-2 and therefore more processor intensive it also takes longer to render versus DV because...it's 2.5x larger!

Since we have some FCP users posting to this thread and I may make the Mac switch early next year or so would capturing/transcoding to ProRes not give rendering speed increases as well as better compatibility with Color/work better with color correction? I thought I read this somewhere about HDV being better to color correct when captured with ProRes but I may be wrong...

[MitchLewis]

I'd know to know about the ProRes workflow as well Adam.

Also, we're thinking of adding one addition hard drive to our XDCAM work flow. This would be a basic 500GB firewire drive. What we would do is this:
1) Download the raw files from the SxS card to the 500GB drive
2) FCP Import (Log and Transfer). The files will be "unwrapped" and copied to our RAID drive for editing.
3) Once the 500GB drive fills up, decide what footage to just throw away and what to archive to Blu-Ray or ?

Is this a doable workflow? We don't have our EX3 camera yet, so we're not sure if this is a workable work flow or not. Can you transfer the files from the SxS card to a firewire drive without changing them in anyway. Then use FCP to import them from the 500GB instead of directly from the SxS card. Will this work?

[adamr316]

I'd use XDCam Transfer to log/capture the files within FCP. That seems like the way to go.

Yes you can transfer the files from within Finder. But because you may have files that are split between cards (when one card runs out of space and you are recording the camera switches to the next card automatically) it is highly recommended to use either XDCam Transfer or Clip Browser when moving/copying/renaming files with the EX1/EX3. Otherwise for those instances or a few others the files may not copy correctly.

Clip Browser also has a CRC checksum feature built-in as well so that's good for peace of mind. And you can make new XDCam EX clips from within Clip Browser to save on hard drive space. It's simple in/outs only but if you are rolling at length for any reason (say a news conference or man on the street interview) and only need a sound bite here and there this feature is great/can save you a ton of hard drive space.

[jvfante]

You want to do Log and Transfer directly from the SxS cards to your drive first. Then you'll back up the QT files that are created to a separate drive. This is not a destructive step, so don't be worried about losing quality.

As for ProRes, this is an additional compression of the files, so you want to avoid this if at all possible. It is my understanding that ProRes is best suited for capturing uncompressed HD into a managable (and playable) file size. So uprezzing XDCam may not be what you want to do. XDCam will look its best if left "native" in FCP and then exported. You mentioned AE work, and that is where ProRes might help, but only if the XDCam files don't look up to snuff when you do comps out of AE. As I mentioned, I don't know enough about AE to answer this, but a simple test on sample XDCam and ProRes footage should answer your question about workflow through AE.

[jvfante]

You want to do Log and Transfer directly from the SxS cards to your drive first. Then you'll back up the QT files that are created to a separate drive. This is not a destructive step, so don't be worried about losing quality.

As for ProRes, this is an additional compression of the files, so you want to avoid this if at all possible. It is my understanding that ProRes is best suited for capturing uncompressed HD into a managable (and playable) file size. So uprezzing XDCam may not be what you want to do. XDCam will look its best if left "native" in FCP and then exported. You mentioned AE work, and that is where ProRes might help, but only if the XDCam files don't look up to snuff when you do comps out of AE. As I mentioned, I don't know enough about AE to answer this, but a simple test on sample XDCam and ProRes footage should answer your question about workflow through AE.

[rawsuperhuman]

Hi. I just got the pmw ex3 but can't seem to connect it with final cut pro. I've installed the file for mac so when I connect the camera it shows hard drives on my desktop. When I open final cut and try to import, I don't know what to do from here. I've tried every selection that was on the import menu, but no luck. If anyone can help me understand what I'm doing wrong, that would send me on my way to editing.

[MitchLewis]

Are you using FCP version 6.0.2 or later?

[rawsuperhuman]

Here is a link to my screen recording to show you the problem I'm having. I've installed the sxs mac driver from sony and also updated my final cut pro.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9H297h0cF54

[MitchLewis]

Updated Final Cut Pro to what version?

[rawsuperhuman]

6.0.5

[MitchLewis]

Sounds like some stuff didn't get installed. Could be that you need to uninstall then reinstall FCP or maybe just try that with the Sony drivers.

It may be unrelated, but I installed FCP 6 (as part of the Final Cut Suite 2) over a year ago and last week when I went to try the Smoothcam effect for the first time it wasn't there. I called Apple and they didn't know how to help me, so I started searching and on the Creative Cow forums I found a guy who solved it and even posted the missing files! Maybe this could be a related issue...dunno. Do you have access to the Smoothcam effect? (Effects>Video>Smoothcam)

[rawsuperhuman]

Yup I do. I can use smoothcam. I'm going to uninstall and reinstall again. Thanks Mitch. Hope to get some more advice from someone as well experienced as you again.

[MitchLewis]

I hope it works! :)

[rawsuperhuman]

I found out the problem. You have to do it with log and transfer.


http://www.suitetake.com/2008/10/16/xdcam-import-plug-in-for-final-cut-pro/

http://pro.sony.com/bbsc/ssr/micro-xdcamexsite/resource.downloads.bbsccms-assets-micro-xdcamex-downloads-LogTransferUtilityAppleFCP.shtml