I really need to get MY head wrapped around this workflow too. I had a boardroom meeting to shoot last week and it was 2:05 of continuous recording. I had 4 SxS 8 gig cards and rotated through all 4 of them. I was alternating between using the Finder (on a Mac) to simply drag the BPAV folders into my pre-made shoot folders numbered consecutively OR using ShotPut.

Since this was a shoot with a (mostly) locked-down camera, I had time between card swaps to "play" and was also using Shotput to ingest the same cards. I didn't realize that Shotput was automatically joining the "split" clips for me. At first, I thought that I had lost some of my footage until I found one folder with the entire two-hour session joined together. However, one thing that I still haven't been able to understand is how to prevent SP from renaming my cards when it wipes them clean. I have each card with a consecutive letter name (Card_A, Card_B, etc.) but I hate the fact that I have to manually enter the name again....or am I missing a checkbox somewhere? I'd like SP to get the card ready for the camera so that I don't have the dreaded "Restore Media" warning in case I'm cutting it a little too close to the card-swap time.

Do NOT use finder! Don't take a crap shoot with your camera masters.
Use ShotPut or ClipBrowser2.

I regularly do shoots running 2-4 hours.
Copy with Clip Browser.
Delete Clips with ClipBrowser (or reformat card in camera which you can do while other card is recording).
Safe repetitive so your brain follows a SAFE work pattern.

I just use clipbrowser to copy files and delete them aftewards on the sxs card - then the SxS card is ready to be put back into the camera without troubles - no formating and not too much touching the camera when rercording.
---- Bo

What exactly are you deleting? The entire BPAV folder or one of the folders/files inside it?

I'm just deleting the files in ClipBrowser. That way the folder structure isn't touched and you don't get the Restore Media.

I second Paul's method. I've done this many times when recording event that I offload to my Mac while shooting. The formatting thing is scary the first few times but it doesn't interrupt the recording on the card you aren't formatting. I've done this and had one continuous clip for a few hours using this method.

However, in the future, I'm going to use SDHC cards with the Kensington if I can. To me this method is much less error-prone and efficient than offloading to your computer. I now have the ability to shoot 4 hours without having to offload. When I get the Sandisk Ultra II 32GB (on backorder now) that will go up to 6 hours. Offloading to a computer in the field while shooting is a huge distraction, especially if you don't have an assistant.

I just don't know why you go to all this drama.

We do many dance concerts, mainly two camera shoots, between now and Xmas, and two weeks ago had the unfortunate experience, during a long concert with no interval, of having to plug the laptop and Sony card reader intoa a powerpoint in a large old theatre using a powerpoint across at the side of ther hall.

You guessed it, lock off wide camera, fight through 50 schoolkids sitting in the dress circle, start the transfer, go back ten minutes later to find "unknown error", panic, do it again, worked with 5 minutes recording to spare!

Yesterday I went out and bought two 32 gig cards, bringing total recording time to over 5 hours with each camera. Yes, it cost me AUD $3,200, a lot of money, but really, it's ONE job, and I can use these cards for the next 5 years or until I retire!!!

Really, it's less than using tape over the same time!

The joy of coming home, loading the cards, and seeing I have 320 minutes of SD recording time in my viewfinder was just mindblowing.

You can keep your cheap recording solutions, with the door staying open etc, I think they will probably end up being false economy in the long run.

My 2 cents ......(down 30% against the US$ in a week-LOL)!

Cheers Vaughan

Vaughan blinked.

From my testing, with the SDHC cards and my EX3, I would definitely just use a variety of 16 or 32 gb cards. And, on the EX3, the door closes! If not overcranking, it is identical to using SxS of the same size, minus all the expense, of course!

I have a question about this workflow - I have plenty of sxs cards, so, using them, but recording continously - when the camera switches from one card to the next, is there a problem with stitching the clips together? This will hapen multiple times, as the idea is a continous shot lasting about 3 hours. I'll end up going through 3 or 4 16gb cards and don't want to ever stop recording at all. Can you just copy the clips and stitch them in final cut?

Thanks,
John

Vaughan, in my opinion, you are correct. If I were in your situation with continual paying big gigs I'd simply get a bunch of SxS cards. No fuss, bother risk and the door closes. However the EX1, though a wonderful camera, capable of achieving results, perhaps better in some cases than $50K cameras, is in the 'prosumer' price range. There is a resistance to paying as much for the media as the camera. It raises the barrier to effective entry. So one person's drama is another person's 'I can get the same result for $5,000 less, and invest that in other peripherals.'

John, with the XDCam transfer software, if you add all the clips from various separate BPAV on different cards, the partial clips will show up with a .smi extension. Then when you 'import' the clips (in my case since I use a Mac) to .mov files, they get automatically joined into one large QT file. Those can them be added to the FCP browser, they are valid QT files. It works remarkably well but isn't obvious or intuitive when you're initially doing it.

....and ShotPut was joining them automatically without me even knowing it!

Keith,

Thanks for the reply. That's what I thought, but wanted confirmation.

John

Hi - I am just deleting the clips in the clipbrowser - click the window open with SxS clips. press ctrl A and then delete and thje card is ready again for a new recording..