Your right Craig, I really just wanted to report my discoveries as I progressed with the camera, it might help others to look out for the same things, although I'm sure there's plenty of more experienced users who will not have so many issues.

The wb settings was indeed user error - I have edited the original post accordingly.

The peaking does work, it just doesn't do what I'm used to with the Canon. On the sony, peaking highlights any contrasty hard edged elements in focus, it does not seem help when focusing on faces or other non hard edges items. With the canon, peaking applies a sharpness to the entire image which helps with focusing, that's what I was looking for and why I thought it wasn't working.

I can see that the sony method would be a lot more accurate with the correct subject, although it doesn't seem quite as useful on softer subjects. I did set it to high and had the colour set to red too which seems to show up a lot more.

regards

Paul

Paul, I know the differences in peaking implementations by Canon and Sony very well from my own experience and can tell you this: you MUST set the right intensity (depending on the subject, brightness etc) for the Sony's peaking to work best; if you do it's far superior to Canon's!

I agree, it seems a lot more intelligent and I can see that Its going to prove a lot more useful. It's really good when there's a shallow DOF and as you adjust focus you can see the peaking jumping from one object to the next.

I'm about to try capturing some footage to the mac, I'll use this post to update my progress.

> Connectors. The USB connector is located in a panel beneath a plastic cover near the underside of the grip. This is the first thing I've seen on the camera which doesn't seem to be up to the rest of the cameras quality. You can't insert a connecting lead without first rotating the grip out of the way, and the plastic cover seems very cheap and nasty. It's not a great fit and is held on by only two small strips of hard plastic. I wouldn't be surprised if this is the first thing to break if no card reader is used.

With the cable inserted, the camera does not sit flat on your desk due the rotated grip sticking down, this may result in wear on the grip if you move the camera around while connected. I found that fitting my tripod mount helped in this respect, but it's worth noting anyway.

> USB Cable. The supplied USB cable seems quite low in quality, it's a thin cable and is only 1m in length. I think it's a standard cable though so if like me you're computer is located on the floor a small distance from your desk a longer cable may be something you'll want to invest in.

> Capturing. The capture process seemed very easy indeed. I created an XDCAM EX 720/25p project in FCP6, selected import>SONY XDCAM... and immediately the XDCAM import utility appeared showing all the clips on the camera. Import speed seemed good. A 2m 30s clip took 20 seconds to import.

Editing seems fast, not a bad word to say about the import process :)

> Copying cards. I also tried copying the contents of the SxS cards on to my desktop. Connecting the camera mounted the cards on my desktop as 2 separate volumes, each containing a folder called BPAV. I copied one 2.6Gb BPAV folder to my desktop which took around 3 minutes.

Running final cut again, I pointed the SONY XDCAM import utility at my desktop folder and it picked up the clips instantly allowing me to use them in exactly the same way as when coming directly from the camera. SO this proves it's possible to just copy the contents of the cards to a laptop on location without having to use any specialist software at that stage. Importing from the hard drive took around the same time as doing so from the camera, the app said x5.2, I assume thats 5.2x real time.

Paul.

20 seconds for 2:30 source seems about 7.5x real time. Even 5x is pretty good. Sony said 10x or faster for 34 connections. USB would be slower. This is still very fast.

The files that were linked to on this site aren't importing for me though. I open them in ClipBrowser and it creates the BPAV folder and it plays the clips.

I open FCP 6.0.2, the 2.1 Xfer tool and I try to point to the BPAV folder and it's grayed out for me. I tried import on both Intel and PPC Mac. ClipBrowser itself only works on Intel Mac.

What could I be doing wrong?

Yeah, that confused me initially too, but you have to add the folder containing the BPAV folder (in my case 'Desktop'), not the BPAV folder itself. I guess it assumes your importing from a SxS card and so you would normally point to the card not it's contents.

If you were on a shoot and copying cards to a laptop it would probably be best to copy the BPAV folders to a set of descriptive folders anyway.

regards

Paul.

Point to . . . what . . . to add the folder?

Nothing I try works so I'm obviously not pointing to whatever I need to point to.

Place the BPAV folder inside a folder called (card1), and then in the import utility choose 'Add' and then select your card1 folder.

If it doesn't work then maybe those sample files are incomplete.

Paul.

Didn't work. The files are .mp4 pointed to here
http://www.bolanski.com/ex/home/ex1-test-shots/
Clip Browser creates the BPAV and can play the files but nothing I do allows the Xfer plugin to access them to import into FCP 6.0.2. Any folder I add containing the BPAV shows as 0 clips.

I'd like to figure this out also. It's been bugging me since those clips were posted last week

So it's not only me?

Has anybody gotten a way to import the clips into FCP? Again I've got no problem playing the clips on Intel Mac (and creating the BPAV folder) for the clips posted last week as well as the ones that went up today.

I have not been able to get these into FCP. They play in the XDCam EX Viewer but I can't export them for some reason. Also VLC seems to be able to play these.

I think we're running into an important issue here.

I'd like to know if I can deliver such .mp4 files to clients so they can import and edit. I hope someone can help us get this sorted out.

Wow...
Sorry to hear this?
What the...
I'm using Vegas so I'm of no help.

The native mp4's can also be edited in NewTek's SpeedEdit 1.5 editor.
No conversion needed.