Mastering to XDCam HD (Time Efficiency)
 

For quite some time now we have been mastering our half-hour shows back to XDCam HD disks via HD-SDI (Kona 3) in real time (simply playing back off the FCP 6 timeline and crash recording to XDCam HD in HQ mode). We got in the habit of doing this because the FAM mode took so long. Our machines are dual-3Gig PowerMac G5s. Is the FAM method significantly faster now with the Intel Macs? Can anyone give me a real world scenario (time-wise) of mastering a 30 minute show back to XDCam HD via FAM on an Intel quad core?

Ive been FAMing back IMX50 timelines on a Macpro recently, its rather slow..

Have been going back to a V1 deck, so no way of crash recording out of the machines LHe card... What i'd give for a 1500 with SDI on this project.

I really wish Sony would put FW800 in their decks, 400 is to slow for a professional deck. I haven't checked but does the new HD1500 deck have 800? or is it still 400..

I'd stick to doing assemble edits.

But firewire 800 won't make any difference to the transfer speed. The write speed of the drives is only around 80Mbps. I find transfer of XDCAM material to disk to be faster than real time so I have no complaints. A 30 minute XDCAM HD show excluding renders takes about 20 mins. Obviously if there are a lot of complex effects to render it takes longer. I would be very wary of the quality of playing back un rendered or non-native material from the timeline, especially if you are then re-encoding to 35Mb XDCAM HD in the deck. This really isn't a workflow I would use as it's adding un-necessary compression steps.

Also, look for the recently released PDW-U1 XDCAM USB stand alone drive. It reads at least 2X faster than existing XDCAM / XDCAM HD decks and cameras. Also, the new F335, F355 and F75 decks are outfitted with the same drive mecanism as the U1 and you should notice similar improvements in read speeds with those devices too.

Thierry.

Ah, correct, i'd completely forgotten about the so called 'drum' speed as i have heard it refered too.

As i understand the U1 will only have 1 'drum' where as like its little brother(1500) the HD1500 will have 2?

Haven't tested it in a long time so I did just now and Alister's times hold up with us here now as well. I guess the software upgrades have had an impact? We're now mastering back to XDcam faster than real time.