Any news from NAB on the U1 firmware?
The lack of write ability continues to be a huge daily frustration here :(
Anyone got any word of mouth from NAB on the real release date for the U1 firmware? Cheers, Paul. |
No word, and my last credible information was that it would be weeks, at the soonest, which I interpreted as at least a month, probably two or three.
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At the NABSHOW, the Sony person I asked told me June/July of this year.
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So that will be 6 months after I bought the U1 - very disapointing :(
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I guess it will be released around IBC 2008 in Amsterdam.
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June is what I heard, too.
Given the fact that there is a whole big piece of software to be written I´d not complain about the time it takes the U1 to be write-enabled... It´s great to have a single IT-drive instead of buying a recorder/player. My 2c. ULI |
The windows version will be the first released, with the Mac ver much further out.
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-gb- |
So glad we bought into this device in November when they told use the drivers would be ready in Feb. Now if I have to wait even longer for OS X support... I'm a little perturbed to say the least.
I love the device cause it's small, convenient and fast, but I guess I'll have to go back to using my camera for all my ingest. BTW, the company I work for bought 6 of these doorstops, um, I mean drives. |
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Keep in mind, the initial purpose for this drive was to be an inexpensive device for ingest so that places like broadcast and post houses could have some way to accept an XDCAM disc directly. -gb- |
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Now I can hook up the camera change the disc name than throw the disc into the drive and do the speedier ingest. Frankly that just adds more steps. Either way I end up wasting time. At the company I work for, Intermedia Outdoors, we do episodic outdoor television. Last year I had 60 discs of footage for my 13 half hour episodes that I work on. As we didn't have the drives last year I found the work flow to be pretty easy. Hook up the camera, name the disc in the transfer utility by shoot location, shooter and # of #. Load the proxies and really easy to find selects on shots using the transfer software. Now using the drive I pop in a disc get Untitled disc and I'm not able to change it. I now have Untitled disc 1-12 in my transfer utility. So the drive was supposed to speed up the process which it does during the ingest, but now I still have to hook the camera up to change names. I don't need it to do masters to or archive to, (I have HDCAM for that) just simple things like naming discs. It would also be great to send project files back to the disc with the footage instead of burning them on DVD's at the end of the season. In short I can do everything that I want to do, just not the way we were sold on it. It will be nice when it finally works the way it is suppose to. I had a workflow developed that worked for me. Now I throw the drive into the mix and I have to change my workflow. I thought it was suppose to speed up my workflow not make me develop a new one. |
Jeremy,
Would it be too much of a hassle to use your camera to rename the disks, and then use the U1 to ingest? Once you rename your disks, the U1 should be able to read that name-change. On to other subjects.....I'll be very happy with the Windows-only version coming out. In our workflow, we want our producers to be able to log disks, and set in-points and out-points on shots before they go into the edit room. I don't want producers to use an editing system for this sort of mundane decision making. The PDZ-1 software is great for this, but if we can't write those decisions back to the disk, then we are back to writing notes on paper to take into the editing room. There is some value to that, but it still falls far short of the potential of the entire workflow. I actually saw an early version of an Apple logging application. I'll also be happy when that finally comes out, but I won't be holding my breath waiting for it to happen. By the way, my Sony rep told me June for write capabilities on the U1. |
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I understand this takes time, I just wish they were better at estimating time. Are there workarounds that work? Yes. Does it work right now? Yes. Is it the workflow we were sold on? No. Is it too much of a hassle? Depends on your situation I guess. |
Thanks for expanding and clarifying your workflow, Jeremy. I agree that naming the discs is most important for managing a library of discs. I have been very religious about that from the beginning.
That's why I wish we could create the volume name for the disc using the camera itself. I see no reason why not since we can now enable disc file naming by using the clip title. That would have helped alleviate your dilemma at the moment. -gb- |
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I'm pretty diligent about setting up clip titles, so I can usually figure out what disc it is pretty quickly, but not as quickly as being able to name the disc. All in all my complaints are pretty small for all the benefits that we have gained. It really is a versatile system. You can treat it 100% like tape formats of the past or 100% like the computer files they are. So many options and really depends on a person's needs or wants. And the picture isn't far from our HDCAM 730's. |
No matter what the reasons for the update taking so long, the fact of the matter is that we were told the firmware update would be released shortly after the units shipped. In my case I had one of the first available in the UK and these were also available before they were in the US. It's not the technical guys I'm disapointed with, but more the marketing team.
I've been without half of the functionality 5-6 months now which is quite a proportion of the life of a product like this which we'd write off over 4 years accounting wise. Greg - with utmost respect! - it makes no difference what the initial reason for releasing the drive is - it's sold as a read/write device. Anyway - I'm not ranting at anyone here, just hoping that Sony may look at this thread and be spured on to get this update finished :) Paul. |
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Believe me, I understand. I got the F350 before there was any FCP support for the XDCAM codecs or an XDCAM Transfer Tool. 2006 was a year of hurry up and wait, but it wasn't all Sony's fault. -gb- |
Ah OK, I believe it must be a case of my dealer over-promissing then as they told me it was imminent :(
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Thanks for that. Both interesting and disappointing in equal measure ... I'd admit I assumed the device to be no dumber than the D1, but it would make sense as a pure IT unit (no AV/C) that it lacks the same built-in capacity for writing. Ah well, still a great read unit till the code is cooked Cheers Andy |
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