XDCam capture-problems

ReasonMan wrote on 4/1/2005, 12:54 AM
I am working with a XDCam PDW-530P camera and I have tried to capture through firewire to Vegas and I find that easy. But I don't understand why Vegas have problems with "cue to in" (in advanced capture) when connected to the camera. Instead of going to the timecode I set directly, the camera starts to rewind or fast forward to the designated timecode. Has anyone here experienced the same problem.
I don't know if same problem occure with the 1500-deck. But I do have tried the Avid XpressDV connected to the camera and there it works perfectly.

Comments

farss wrote on 4/1/2005, 2:15 AM
Sorry if I've missed something here.
Why do you think something is wrong if the camera starts to rewind/FF to the designated TC on the tape. I think that's normal behaviour.
How else do you expect it to get directly to the timecode you set?
Marco. wrote on 4/1/2005, 2:23 AM
XDCam ist disc-baded. No tape. There should be no need to rewind fastforward to find a tc. Direct adressing should be possible.

Yes, sounds strange. But I have no experience with using XDCam with Vegas.

Marco
ReasonMan wrote on 4/1/2005, 3:52 AM
Yes it is disc-based. I forgot to tell you. But as Marco said it should work without rewinding or fastforward the disc. Hmm, strange...
farss wrote on 4/1/2005, 4:59 AM
When I first read the post I thought it a bit odd too.
But this could be a Vegas bug. The way it controls decks might not be the industry standard. I've had an issue going through the SD Connect to a DVW 250 using the Capture Tape command. Convergent put their analyser on the 1394 port and found that Vegas issues a Rewind, Pause, Play sequence but the deck will not go into play because it's in Pause. It needs a stop command before it'll go into Play. Convergent offered a setup option to translate Rewind, Pause command sequence into a Rewind, Stop command sequence but as it wasn't causing me that much grief and it seemed like a backwards way to fix the problem that could cause someone unnecesaary confusion and after all why shouldn't Vegas be made to work right, not everyone is as understanding as Convergent.

So it could well be that in this case Vegas is issuing a Rewind / FF command instead of something like a GoTo xxx command. I'm not that up on 1394 control protocol to know this for certain but they should get it right even though it's probably only a minor inconveniece. After all it is a Sony camera and we were being told here how great the XDCAM gear is, maybe it is, just don't expect it to work right with Sony's DAW, oops sorry it's a NLE this week.
Bob.
SimonW wrote on 4/1/2005, 1:06 PM
I don't think Vegas is setup to work with XDCAM. I use a PDW510, but I cue it manually and then capture with Vegas at the moment. I'm hoping that Vegas 6 will have full XDCAM compatibility, as well as hopefully being able to handle the MXF files directly onto the timeline as per Pinnacle and the new Avid versions.

Alternatively I do a cuts only edit with breathing space using PDZ1, save the cliplist back to the camera and then just capture the roughly edited sequence and tidy it up.
ReasonMan wrote on 4/2/2005, 6:37 AM
You can do some editing in the camera directly and save the playlist there and when you want to capture you just play the edited sequence. That is easy if you have short takes, but if you have made longer takes like 5-10 mins and you want only short parts of them, then you would need to fastforward or rewind a lot which takes time. It is possible but not a perfect soluttion. I hope as you said that we will have full XDCam compability in Vegas6.
SimonW wrote on 4/3/2005, 4:39 AM
It was hinted a long while ago that the new version of Vegas may have MXF support. They would be mad not to really considering most other softwares newer versions do.

Though regarding the in camera edit, I have tried that, but prefer to use PDZ1. Is the camera yours? To use PDZ1 effectively you need to contact Sony to send you the latest version (its free). Then you can use the FAM mode and use the XDCAM camera like an extra hard drive. You can perform exact frame accurate cuts only editing with PDZ1 and export the clip list back to the camera. I've found this very useful when I've been away from base and need to see how an edit will go together. You don't need a high powered laptop either as it uses the MPEG4 proxies to edit with.