Randy Whitlock

[Randy Whitlock]

I have just gotten a Sony XDCAM HD camera. I have a VT5 system with SpeedEdit 1.5. I also have a Sony PDW-U1 pro disc drive unit which works with the XDCAM camera disc's. My question is, How do I get the clip files from the XDCAM disc into VT5 (Speededit) to work with them. I brought some HD files on to the computer with the the PDW-U1 drive using the Sony programs supplied with the camera, but the MXF files would not play. It did give me a sub clip in MPeg 4 (compressed and low resolution) which played but looked lousy.

I see that SpeedEdit 2.0 is suppose to work with XDCAM nativily (not sure what that means,) I guessing that that it means I should be able to pull the clip as a file right off of the disc and it should work with SpeedEdit.

So do I need to get SE 2.0 to work with the XDCAM files? If not how do I do it?

Thanks

[KiloWatkins]

So do I need to get SE 2.0 to work with the XDCAM files?

Yes. I'm not sure if SE2 would read it as a VOB, or whatever the disk capture format is in. You would think it would be Mpeg2. Tell us if you can and see if there is some other format for the PDW files in the Sony program you can resave the files as. You have tried FWire or Y/C capture as Type2 or 1 into VT? Of course if you used Y/C, then you could pick an HQ or uncompressed maybe, as a capture codec.

I know many don't want to use their camera's for playback and capture into a PC, because of wear and tear on the heads. But there has been a lot of work done in head/drum reliability, but not sure if your camera even uses heads, with the optics/electronics burning to disk.

IOW, with FWire or Y/C or RGB, you should just test the capture from the camera into SE1.x or VT. Match the cameras capture resolution with the project size during capture. If it is going to fail, you would then change the capture codec and try again. SE2.0 has the ability to understand the disk format for your camera, but that is a file thing, you should still find you can capture, I'd work in VT5.2D.