Editing XD Cam HD
 

I am very interested in this format and workflow but I am concerned about editing Mpeg 2, I know what it' like to edit HDV natively in FCP and we now edit DVC pro 100 and that works great much better than HDV.

I have been told that final cut 6 will change the XD cam work flow for the better but will not handle the highest quality 35mb natively right out of the gate.

if anybody has any info on this I would appreciate hearing about it

Thanks

Bob

Hi Bob, we'll try to get some info together about XDCAM HD editing solutions. It is an MXF based file format. Seems to me that Sony, Avid, Canopus and Apple should all have a way to handle it.

Avid (Express Pro HD and Adrenaline Media Composer HD) definitely supports XDCAM. Avid has been a big partner with Sony since the beginning. There are three modes for interfacing the Camera to Avid.

1. SDI capture: Of course this only works with the PDW-F350 for XDCAM HD. Basically you just play back the disc, outputing to HDSDI, and capture with the Adrenaline box. This does now work with Express Pro HD but works fine with Adrenaline Media Composer HD. This is the fallback mode when there is a new release from Sony that is not yet supported by Avid.

2. File access: You can either copy the files over to your laptop using the file access mode (freeing up the camera) or mount the XDCAM device as a drive. Avid can directly import the XDCAM MXF files. This is available for SD, but I have not yet been able to confirm when this will be available for XDCAM HD. The Avid folks at the Snader show a couple months ago said it will be available by NAB. I will be trying this shortly (PDW-F350 is supposed to ship to me this week) and will let you know when it is working. This is available for both Express Pro and Media Composer HD.

3. Streaming over firewire in DV mode: I have not tried this, and there are some issues with settings and such. The last post I saw on the Avid discussion boards indicated that this works from the deck but not the camera. This would require the recently announced PDBK-102 optional board for XDCAM (not sure if that is for the deck or the camera). Again, I have not tried this.

File access (#2 above) is the best general purpose solution. I will post results as soon as we have made that work with the PDW-F350. We will try it for both Express Pro HD and Media Composer HD.

Typo in previous post. Replace "now" with "not" in SDI capture discussion. SDI capture does NOT work with Express Pro HD since there is no hardware for HDSDI with Express Pro HD.

Okay, typing too fast. Let me clarify #3 above regarding streaming into Avid.

For Standard Def (DV) this will work like the existing SD cameras and decks and is supported out of the box by Sony. The limitations with Avid will be the same as with the existing XDCAM SD products. Details are available on the Avid boards.

For streaming HD, Sony is adding support for 25mbs HDV with the PDBK-102. So far as I know the 18Mbps and 35Mbps formats are not supported for streaming. Once that is available Sony it will work with standard HDV support in Avid.

SDI capture and Fille access are the only two modes we will be using. Streaming seems less realiable from what I have heard from others.

Wow, that was quick... thanks for the feedback, Michael!

AVID XDCAM-HD support will come in Q3 of this year. It will have the same functionality as whatever the SD-based XDCAM workflow is at the time of release.

Thanks Jason. Where did you get the Q3 date? Depending on when in Q3 Avid provides XDCAM HD support I may be using the HDSDI capture method for several months. For XDCAM SD I believe file access (importing Sony MXF) was available before full proxy support, hopefully that will be true for HD, since importing files is much more important than proxy support.

The Q3 timeframe came directly from Sony/AVID.

Any way to edit XD HD in Premiere Pro 1.5 (or even the new 2.0) ? I have heard that its possible, although anything is "possible" in the digital world... I would just like to not take 10,000 steps to get there... Is there any plug-ins/codecs that would work with XD 1080 24p data in premiere, that would make things nice and smooth and just a drag and drop edit flow? This would be great stuff to know for me! thanks :-)

Michael: did you receive your new camera yet? How does the low light response compare to the Canon XLH1?

Yes Kevin. See the "F350 Arrived " thread.

Editing XDCAM HD
 

Question---Lets say you shoot in the DV mode, can you go from the camera to you computer and save the files in the usual .avi wrapper then pop them into your NLE and edit away? (I know that Sony Vegas and Canopus and probably someothers support XDCAM but not sure about XDCAM HD. Also, lets say you are want to capture HD files----are any NLE's set up to do that.

I haven't been able to find much on post production work flow and would love to know.

Hi David, we're getting XDCAM HD next month. The DV files out of the XDCAM HD will be in MXF wrappers so you need an NLE that can handle Sony flavored MXF, unless you want to use a file converter. XDCAM HD high def MPEG2 is not supported yet far as I know (cause it's different from HDV perhaps?) Canopus tech support said they definitely will be supporting it. If you need something right away, The XDCAM HD deck has an optional card that will make it compatible with HDV non-linear editors. Canopus seemed pretty nimble at new development before Grass Valley bought them. Hopefully nothing changes. As an aside, version 4 of Edius Pro is supposed to come out in a couple of months, but they couldn't say if that would make a difference or not.


Edit: Sorry forgot to mention, You need the Edius Broadcast upgrade to handle the Sony .MXF wrapper.

Thanks Henry----Sonic Foundry (Vegas) use to be pretty nimble at development before Sony bought them! Anyhow hope you like your knew camera---I'm so tempted! By the way, I live close to you guys---what are you main uses for the XDCAM HD?