Avid Xpress Pro 5.7 and XDCAM HD - first impressions
 

Hello,

I´ve just started editing a project and wanted to share my first impressions of Avid Xpress Pro 5.7.
The workflow seems to be absolutely fantastic. Avid now supports all flavours of XDCAM HD but apparently still has troubles with over- and undercranked shots when batch-importing. Haven´t tried that out yet.
Proxy editing is fully supported, as Thierry mentioned earlier, and the writeback to XDCAM works absolutely brilliantly. The only downside is that you can just export 2 channels of audio onto XDCAM (as far as I have experienced). Otherwise there are several improvements which I spotted immediately. Scrolling timeline which I always missed in previous versions is one improvement. Cheap programmes have always scrolled the timeline, Avid didn´t do this. Now it does it and the workflow really is fantastic. I have never worked on FCP properly but for me it seemed as FCP had this sort of workflow already. With Avid though things looked different and I thought that I would have to switch to FCP or upgrade to an extra Media Composer just to get my edits done. I guess that FCP would have been an alternative, now I´m happy that Avid is on track again.

Glad you like 5.7. There are a few things that are a bit slow on this version, mainly write back and batch import but this is being optimized and they will probably be an update available soon. FCPro works quite differently than AVID and does not support utilize proxy clips worlflows yet. A fondamental difference in the way XDCAM is handled by both systems is that the media management is much tighter and integrated in AVID. For example, a sequence without media can easily be batch imported in either low or high resolution on AVID. In FCPro, the transfer tool works outside the main application. XDCAM clips are captured outside FCPro media database and this makes it impossible to recapture a XDCAM project quickly and efficiently as you can do on AVID. In FCPro transfer manager, users need to archive the batch XDCAM imported disc/clips for each project as there is no way to rebulit those from a FCPro sequence containing XDCAM clips.

There are still a lot of areas that need to be explored for XDCAM functionallity on AVID (and others ...) and I beleive the company, more than ever, is seriously committed to tackle those.

Best,

Thierry.

Playout Problem
 

Thierry,

when playing the sequence out onto an XDCAM there seems to be a problem though. When I try playing the sequence on my camcorder it doesn´t show in real time. It´s like if there was some sort of unrendered effect or so (like when a computer slows down). Have you ever experienced that sort of thing? When playing out SD (imx) everything´s fine (i can play back normally) and in HD also the proxies - when using the PDZ1-direct mode - look absolutely fine to my eye. Is it that the camera can´t handle the playback of a finished sequence? I think that there´s some sort of problem on "my" workflow route. I haven´t yet tried importing the finished (written down onto XDCAM) clip from the XDCAM. Maybe then, when importing the media everything´s fine again.

Thanks,
Emanuel

i notice this playback problem reg exported-back from editing software..listed as a fixed bug in firmware 1.60.

Just upgrade your firmware to 1.6 and check if the problem is still there.

Are you saying there's a camera firmware upgrade to 1.6? I still haven't installed 1.58 yet. Where did you see or hear about a version 1.6 of the firmware (assuming you're talking about camera and not the deck.)

-gb-

I got the firmware from sony's ftp.

yep, it's 1.60 for the F350.

As said, I did have some issues with writeback onto XDCAM and Avid. Now, with version 1.6 of Sony´s firmware everything´s fine again.

And sure enough, you were right! Good find, Hornady. I updated my camera a few days ago.

-gb-