Edius Broadcast and XDCAM HD

[Mithras]

This is my first posting, so please excuse my lack of knowledge.

Has anyone had experience of Edius Broadcast and XDCAM HD?
Without an HD-SDI set up is it possible to import XDCAM HD material (via MXF, I guess) and edit in edius.
I don't need to output back to disc / tape. The material will eventually be streamed on the internet.
Any thoughts?

[ISDV]

I'm also looking to buy a new system based on the EDIUS NX Express bundle and a PDW-F330 XDCAM HD camera.

My dealer told me that you can very quickly download the proxy files from the camera and start editing, when the system in the background is capturing the high resolution MXF files. This all can be done through the Firewire connection.

Hope this helps!

[Roy Colquitt]

I have a week's worth of exposure to it at NAB this year. To expand a little bit on what ISDV has said, when you connect to the XDCAM deck through firewire or the (about to be released?) XDCAM feeder drive though USB2, the media shows up on your computer as any other drive; it's assigned a letter and has viewable directory structure.

In Edius, you use XDCAM Select to manage selection and transfer of the files. XDCAM Select presents you with thumbnail views of each clip and offers options for transfer. You can do a full transfer, and as ISDV mentioned, your bin is quickly populated with the proxy files (versions of the files that I believe are 1 or 2mbps), and you can start editing with those right away. Clips in the bin and on the timeline are replaced with the full res versions one by one, as they come online.

In another space saving and processor maximizing workflow, you can use XDCAM Select to download just the proxy files and edit with those. If you are working without external monitoring, these files provide a completely useable image and the performance you get is great. You then conform your edit to full res, with the process only downloading the full res files that you need.

[xeberdee]

Xdcam

You can use Edius 4.24 for XDCAM. The earlier versions were very buggy with the proxy IMX files and crashed a lot. This is fixed in 4.24 and proxy to high res works well.

Preview & select proxy files and either download them manually, or you can select the whole disk to download automatically via connect (cam) or FTP feature for players (when you set your player up for ftp). When the files are on your media drive and you have edited, you have to do a 'Proxy Handling' to get the high res data moved over by the XDCAM select function that runs in the taskbar.
When working with the XDCAM select applet, you have to give it time to find & move the hi res files over, as this applet is an auto feature that works in the background at it's own speed. When it has moved the hi-res over from one disk, it will ask for another.
This is where the unique name for each sony disk comes into play, as far as I know there is no way to rename your disk metadata to something meaningful for your project like 'Tape 1' - unless you did it in the camera in production?. The sony disk does have a unique name from sony production like 007845362788192876538290 or something, so you have to physically fill in your disk labels with good old fashioned ink - 'Tape 1,2 etc', or edit the metadata in the camera (I'm not even sure if this is possible, or will help Edius) and keep good track of them so you can keep an eye on which clips come from which media. I strongly recommend making 1 folder for each XDCAM disk in Edius that corresponds to your tape name ie. Tape 1,2 etc. XDCAM select will ask for disk 007845362788192876538290, so if you don't know which disk that is !!!!
We went into the details for the bin and edited it to show the unique media name for all the clips in the bin - in this way we could search through the bins to spot the unique media name and associate it to our own name - Tape 1,2 etc from the bin name in Edius.
I imagine if you dump 30 disks into 1 folder in Edius and have 4-500 clips, then this would be HELL - so make sure to seperate and label your media.

If anybody else has a better way of doing this, I would like to hear about it.

Like always save your project a lot.

Otherwise Edius works with XDCAM.

[Mithras]

Thanks

Many thanks for your knowledge.

[xeberdee]

HD v SD

Hey Mithras,

I neglected to mention that this was an SD XDCAM workflow with IMX 50Mbit DV and D10 proxy. I've not had any experience with the XDCAM HD codec but the workflow will probably be the same.


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[ceyhunkarabag]

Upload the MXF files to XD Cam

Well, How can we upload the MXF files to XD Cam? We couldn't do that. We use Edius Broadcast 4.x . We could download easyly with I-link. We could edit but we couldn't upload MXF files to XDCam. We used Sony PDW-1500 XDCAM Recorder

JJ
[email protected]com

[GrassValley_BH]

Print to File, XDCAM Exporter

[AndyW69]

cache files

Hi I have been using xdcam hd for a while with edius, occassionally I get an mxf file that causes edius to crash repeatedly. It seemed random and usually if I re-transferred the filre via the edius applet it would be ok. I recorded some scenes recently using the cache record function on my 350, thes files make edius very unstable! They have no default poster frame and if you trim them or appy filters they seem to crash edius, I will obviously stop using cache in the short term but wonder if this can be looked into, the files ar large and my bandwidth small so I won't be able to email them.

Andy

[GrassValley_BH]

Please submit a post in the User-reported Issues section, and attach a small sample file if you can.