Transferring Clips Spanning Two Cards
 

This may be very common knowledge but I figure people might like to hear it again.
I got a call last night from a friend of mine who was trying to get all his clips from a shoot with the XDCAM EX into his computer. He was having trouble with a clip which had spanned the two cards he was using. The Sony software wouldn't recognize the two sides of the spanned clips. I told him I hadn't used the camera enough (don't own one yet) but it sounded like a software issue.
A few minutes later he called back very relieved with the solution. He had put both cards back in the camera and attached it to the computer and the software recognized the clip as spanning over the two cards and things went smoothly for him.
This could be a problem if you are swapping cards out live and trying to import footage before erasing and using the card again. Sounds like the software requires both cards to be mounted at the same time to bring the footage in which could slow down your production. HTH

Mac, Windows?
ClipBrowser or XDCAM transfer tool if it's a Mac?

I'm on a Mac and with PPC Mac and XDCAM Transfer Tool I believe I was able to do this using subclips.

Keep in mind sometimes you're spanned across more than 2 cards. I just shot a 90 speech which spanned 1 16GB and 2 8GB cards. I wasn't importing on location though. On Intel Mac I used ClipBrowser imported all the cards. The XDCAM Transfer tool had no problem recognizing the last clip on the last card and pulled in the clip across all 3 cards.

Craig,
I am not sure which computer he was (some Mac since he mention Final Cut etc) on but I know he was using the Sony software to deal with it and he had not experienced the problem before. I assume it is supposed to work the way you described. Maybe it is a bug in the software which happens rarely. The question is what should you do if it happening to you. You could have been in trouble if you needed to load all three cards on the computer at the same time to get the proper results. Lets see if it happens to anyone else who makes their way to the website.

I believe you can bring in each separate piece if you mark each as a subclip. In the lower right of the XDCAM Xfer software you'll see the option to check the segment as a subclip.

Craig,
I will pass that along to my friend although he seemed to describe an error message that neither parts of the clip could be recognized or was incomplete so he may have missed something.

I did have one case where I couldn't import clips. I used the "fetch meta data" command and that fixed it. I mention this since it's the only case where I couldn't import a split clip at first.

You'll see on the bottom right of the Transfer tool that the split clips are represented by a master clip (probably the .smi) and the subclip. Just check the subclip box next to the part of the clip available on the given card and you can import it.

Last week I bought the Sony SBAC-US10 card reader with the intention of importing without using the EX1. For one thing, I dislike the flimsy flap that covers the USB and other ports - and for another, the USB port seems to be located in a particularly difficult place, even if you rotate the hand grip of the camera.

Of course the SBAC-US10 only has one slot, so I was dismayed to find the Incomplete clip message (with no media apparently present).

To my relief, I discovered that you can, indeed, import the footage as a subclip. The apparently missing media was the part which is on the other card, of course.