HD XDCam transfer to Hard Drive via Mac
 

Client called me today and said it was taking over 3 hrs to transfer one HD XD Cam disk to hard drive. I found that hard to believe.

They are using Sony's U1 reader/writer. Footage was shot @ Sony's standard of 50m / 422.

Looking for an answer.

Thanks.

Dusty Powers

Re: HD XDCam transfer to Hard Drive via Mac
 

This shouldn't take more than real time, i.e. a full 23gb disc should take about 40 minutes or so. The only thing I can think of is the recipient hard drive might be defective, dying, or 5400 rpm drive. I have my PDW-U1 hooked up to my Mac Pro and it transfers reasonably fast.

Re: HD XDCam transfer to Hard Drive via Mac
 

My transfers from a PDW-U1 to an external hard drive, connected to a 4 year old Mac Pro, happen at almost 3x real time. A full 23GB disc only takes about 15 minutes or so.

1) They should make sure the firmware for the U1 is up to date.
2) They should be using XDCAM Browser 2.0 for the transfer.

You should ask them if they are "transferring" or "transcoding". Maybe they are transcoding to ProRes or something else instead of doing a simple transfer. That would account for the time delay.

Re: HD XDCam transfer to Hard Drive via Mac
 

I thank both of you for your input. I forwarded your responses to my client. They may be using an imac. I'll post back with an update.

Thanks.

Dusty

Re: HD XDCam transfer to Hard Drive via Mac
 

i have had very slow transfer speeds when dumping mxf files to clients sd cards. i put this down to the write speeds of the sd cards. i use my kit for eng and the injest time from a 300 camera to avid on a mac is quicker than real time. i injest to a usb2 external drive running at 5400 and have never had a problem.

Re: HD XDCam transfer to Hard Drive via Mac
 

Dusty, was the client perhaps using a slow 5400rpm usb drive? Maybe they were overloading the bus on the computer bogging everything down. Hope you are doing well!

Re: HD XDCam transfer to Hard Drive via Mac
 

Make a simple test:

use a single file out of the CLIP folder. Take a 1GB file (or 500mb) , thats easier to calculate the speed.

Now, simply copy & paste it somewhere using the finder.

What you find is the transfer speed of the U1 to THIS harddrive.

Usually you end up with something ~2x or 3x faster than RT .
23GB (EVERYTHING incl. Proxy, Audio, Meta) is roughly 45min. HD422, now you can calculate.

So when you experience slow transfers, it could be the target drive being busy or slow, or transcoding processes in the background (AVID suffered from that in the past years).

ULi