XDCAM to HDV output to HVR25U

[Chuck Spaulding]

We have been producing content with the Sony Z1U, editing natively in FCP 6x, outputting to HDV tape with the Sony HVR25U that was sent to the DVD producer for SD DVD's. Maybe not the best workflow but worked moderately well.

Recently we replaced our Z1's with a couple EX3's and an EX1 and edited XDCAM natively in FCP. That worked great, unfortunately you can't export an XDCAM sequence to the M25U. So we exported an HDV Quicktime from the XDCAM sequence and then placed that Quicktine into an HDV sequence and tried to print to tape from there. The resulting Quicktime played fine in the timeline but it kept pausing/freezing in the M25U.

To get around this problem we copied the XDCAM timeline and pasted it into an HDV sequenced and then rendered AND THEN conformed for a print to video. It worked but this process took more than five hours for a fourty minute sequence.

Anyone else experience this? Any ideas why FCP would have any trouble printing to tape a Quicktime that it generated from and XDCAM sequence?

Thanks in advance for any help.

[Pete Cofrancesco]

Because you're not just rendering every frame your re encoding it. That takes a long time and even longer because its HD resolution. If you're doing it to backup then I'd suggest using an external hard drive with removable trays. It will be faster and you won't be degrading it by re encoding it to a highly compression lossy format such as HDV. If you can afford EX1's then you can afford hard drives.

[Chuck Spaulding]

Originally Posted by Pete Cofran

Because you're not just rendering every frame your re encoding it. That takes a long time and even longer because its HD resolution. If you're doing it to backup then I'd suggest using an external hard drive with removable trays. It will be faster and you won't be degrading it re encoding it to a highly compression lossy format such as HDV. If you can afford EX1's then you can afford hard drives.

Pete, I don't get it. We're outputting it to HDV tape to pass it along to the company producing the DVD, that's what they want/need.

We have a shared file system running at about 280MB/s with about 16TB's of storage. All that and we can't seem to output a simple HDV Quicktime...

[Pete Cofrancesco]

Originally Posted by Chuck Spaulding

Pete, I don't get it. We're outputting it to HDV tape to pass it along to the company producing the DVD, that's what they want/need.

We have a shared file system running at about 280MB/s with about 16TB's of storage. All that and we can't seem to output a simple HDV Quicktime...

A common misconception is HDV is simply High Def video recorded to a DV tape when its really a highly compressed video format. The video must be converted from XDcam to HDV format before in can be written out to tape. That's a highly processor intensive task.

If the production company wants it in HDV then unfortunately you need to convert it. Although if they're using fcp6 they could use your XDcam footage directly but might just be ignorant of the fact since XDcam is a uncommon format or they're just inflexible to make things simpler on their end. You could dedicate a computer for this or run the job at night so it won't tie up your editing machine.