Snow Leopard and SxS cards

[Matt Davis]

Just installed Snow Leopard into the backup MacBook Pro.

Fired up XDCAM Transfer - all fine.

Inserted an MxR SDHC combo - all fine.

Inserted a 16GB SxS Card - BANG! Kernel panic.

Shut down, restart. Tried 8GB SxS card - BANG!

Rinse, repeat.

Try leaving the SxS card in the PCIe slot whilst restarting.

Apple logo, spinning belly button, then BANG! Kernel panic.

Shut down, pull out SxS card, replace with MxR adaptor.

Mac starts fine, finder loads, MxR adaptor mounts on desktop.

So... Is SxS really broken in Snow Leopard?

At least Time Machine works.

[Malcolm Dyer]

Did you install/re-install the SxS driver.

[Matt Davis]

Originally Posted by Malcolm Dyer

Did you install/re-install the SxS driver.

That was the first thing on the list. This was the latest (IIRC 09-07-2009) 2.10.xxx build.

[Brooks Graham]

Yeah, Sony's device drivers (kext) apparently aren't written all that well. We'll need to wait for Sony to issue an updated driver before anyone can use the Expresscard slot on their MacBooks with real SxS cards.

One thing though, did you force Snow Leopard to boot with a 64-bit kernel? If you did that, Sony's kexts are sure to not work. (it's nice that the 64-bit kernel is there, but totally unnecessary to be fully 64-bit)

C'mon Sony!! We're waaaaaaiting!

[Joachim Hoge]

Thanks for posting. I have the SL disk here ready to go, but I´m also ready to go to Paris tomorrow for a shoot. Guess I have to wait then, damn. I was looking foreward to have something to play with on the plane

[Daniel Goyette]

In my conversation with Sony support they advised me that unfortunately
Snow Leopard is not currently supported by the current versions of XDCAM
related software's from Sony.

Since this is a very recent release from Apple that involves significant
change to the Mac OS it may take several months, perhaps winter or
spring for full Snow Leopard support from Sony. The exact schedule is
still TBD.

It is therefore recommended to continue using the most recent release of
Leopard to maintain smooth operation of the XDCAM software within the
Mac environment.

For your reference the latest Sony software release versions are as
below:

As of August 26th 2009


PDW-U1 v 2.420

PDW-U1 Utility for PC or Mac v 2.21

FAM Driver 2.20 comes with the PDZ-1 software or XDT for Mac

PDZ-1 v 2.60

XDCAM Viewer 2.30 PC only separate from PDZ-1

XDCAM TRANSFER for FCP v 2.10.0

EX Browser 2.5.1


Thanks for your continued support of XDCAM!

[Joachim Hoge]

No no no. So I have to just put away my snow leopard disk indefinitly?
This being Sony I have a feeling it will be a loooong time before we can upgrade

[Brooks Graham]

Well, that's it then.

My production environments stay on 10.5 for the foreseeable future.

Here's a tip for Sony if they're lurking: join Apple's Developer Program. It's a fraction of the cost of one of your EX1 cameras and get this, you can have your software ready *before* 10.6 ships.

Just sayin'.

[to be fair, Sony isn't the only ones guilty of this. Anyone who uses ProTools knows that story very well.]

[Matt Davis]

For what it's worth...

MxR in XDCAM Transfer 2.10.xxx seems to be working okay on Snow Leopard. The following video is a little cruddy illustration for a blog post, but it proves XDCAM Transfer is up and working (how well it works I will find out later) using the various SDHC adaptors:

YouTube - Snow Leopard + SxS = Epic Fail

[Leonard Levy]

I am kind of shocked by this report. I was going to upgrade my system and had heard nothing. Its a big pain to try to go backwards once you've installed a new system.

It's astounding to me that Sony was asleep on this , or that both companies don't work together to make sure stuff like this doesn't happen.

At the very least Sony should have warned us on this forum and gotten the word out. Did they plan to wait until people were out on the job and couldn't download their cards?

Am I overreacting here? I mean aren't they in the business of convincing us that file based systems are reliable?

Lenny Levy

[Brooks Graham]

Thought I'd throw this out there in case someone might benefit:

If there's one thing I've learned over the years is that the systems that I rely upon for generating billable work must be rock-solid reliable. Having worked in various large-scale shops in the past, I got used to having systems get optimized for a particular application and "locked down" that way. These systems were dedicated for their particular purpose and no other applications or uses were allowed. No internet surfing, no automatic OS updates or app updates, no non-approved applications could be installed (If you tried, they would disappear automagically within hours) - you weren't allowed to change the config in any way.

At first I was annoyed, but gradually came to see the value of this and now that I'm running my own shop, I do the same thing. At times it's difficult to justify having dedicated hardware, so I do a combination of dedicated, locked-down systems and dual-boot systems. For example, a MacPro quad 3GHz is pretty much dedicated to FCS2 with all the big monitors and I/O attached. It might be tempting to run the latest first-person-shooter game on it, but I resist. It's my workhorse and I don't like surprises at deadline time.

My MacBookPro, on the other hand, serves both as my "daily driver" (email, surfing, billing, fun, games, etc.) and my field ingest and editing station. When it's doing the field work, I boot of an external OWC Mercury Elite Pro 1TB drive with 10.5, FCS2, the XDCAM software, etc. - and that environment is pretty much locked down too.

I'll probably throw Snow Leopard on my MBP internal drive (the daily driver boot environment) and leave my production environments alone until Sony and all the other vendors I rely on get their act together and I can spend a few days of downtime testing.

There it is, for what it's worth.

Oh, and don't forget to do a disk image backup of your boot drives before you upgrade. It's the fastest way to get back to normal if you need to.

[Doug Jensen]

Originally Posted by Matt Daviss

So... Is SxS really broken in Snow Leopard?
.

Matt,

I have not upgraded to Snow Leopard (and have no intention of doing so anytime soon) so I can't say for sure if this will work, but have you tried importing NOT using the built-in SxS reader?

In theory, you should be able to import with the EX1, EX3, SBAC-US10 reader, or PMW-EX30 deck because they do not require a driver. Granted, that is not as convenient as using the built-in slot, but it might work until Sony can get their act together. Apple and Sony ought to be working closer together on these things.

I'd be interested to hear if it works.

[Ben McElroy]

great find.. i was about an hour away from installing snow leopard on all of my systems.. Did anyone try it with the sony reader? or via usb from the camera?

[Keith Moreau]

I was planning to partition my Macbook Pro drive into one just for those 10.5 apps or drivers that will not work on 10.6. and boot into 10.5 when needed (such as, apparently, the Sony Software). I'm pretty excited about taking advantage of the optimizations and features in Snow Leopard.

On the Macbook Pro, when you want to switch, restart, then hold down the option key, and you can select which drive you want to boot from. You can add a new partition dynamically in 10.5 and 10.6 using disk utility. Or you can do the same from an external drive.

But it is really bad that big companies like Sony can't get something like this working. Snow Leopard alphas and betas has been available for developers has been out for a really long time (like over a year).

[Boyd Ostroff]

Personally I feel that upgrading new a new version of the operating system the day after it's released is just asking for trouble, unless you aren't putting it on a critical machine. I am happy to wait a few months myself...