Sony U1 XDCAM Transfer error

[Paul Cronin]

I was able to transfer some clips last week to test my archive system using Nano clips wrapped in .MXF shot at 50Mbps. It worked fine. Even today it worked fine one time for 5 clips.

Now I have tried for the last two hours with no success at all. I have XDCAM transfer 2.10.0
U1 Driver version 2.2.1
U1 Firmware version 2.420

I go through the transfer as discribed on the Able Blog by Andy.

Open XDCAM transfer and the optical disk that I formatted with the U1 software is there. Add my folder on my RAID where the clips are stored. Select a few clips for a test and then go to “Clip” and select “Export Clips to Folder”. Then I select the disk and the “Clip” folder. Every time I receive “Error There was an error while writing the clip”.

So I check the U1 software under “Device Information” then “Driver Alarm Log” and the following is there for each time I have the error.
Red Explantion mark under “Kind”
Time of error
Source is UseAngent
Content is: Internal SDK error. (0x8200000F) err=-1 (VFAMAPl_Writefile)
Then under that the same with this ending (VFAMAPl_Closehandle)

Anyone have an idea what is up?

[Paul Cronin]

I now have it working again but it seems to be about a 10 clip limit.

Over the next few weeks I will be doing a few TB with clips and data. As I learn I will post any tricks or problems I find along the way.

[Paul Cronin]

Talking with Andy today he had only tested 5 clips. Andy also said Dennis is just using Finder with cut and paste. So I gave that a try with .MXF and it works fine.

[Daniel Wright]

As I recall, it says something in the readme for XDCAM Transfer about not using the app while exporting clips to a disc.

I'm guessing that XDCAM Transfer was trying to read the disc while you were writing clips to it. If it was hogging a file that the PDW-U1 needed to update, then this could cause your error.

You could avoid this by switching off 'Automatically Add Media' in your preferences, and then adding your disc to XDCAM Transfer manually after you had copied over all your clips.

Copying with Finder should work just as well, although perhaps not quite as convenient. You still need to make sure that XDCAM Transfer (or any other software) does not try to read the disc while you are writing to it. XDCAM's 'Copy Clip to File' is only essential when you a copying from a disc mounted in the PDW-U1 without the XDCAM Drive software installed since the MXF file is split into chunks which need stitching together.

[Paul Cronin]

Thanks Daniel,

Since the problem I have now been using finder and all is well.

[Dave Chalmers]

Hi all,

I too was getting this error, but ONLY with a specific clip.
After some investigation it seems that the VFAM driver doesn't like writing clips shorter than 2 seconds.

We had a 1 sec 'false start' clip in the middle of a bunch of clips and it stalled the transfer.

Otherwise we've been hammering NanoFlash clips onto XDCAM discs nonstop for a couple of days now with no issues.


Regards

Dave

[Paul Cronin]

Thanks Dave that is good to know. I think the problem at our end was the driver was out of date. Once I updated the driver all seems fine.

Glad you are having success as well with this excellent system.