Re: Massive Amounts of XD Cam files

Tom,

Don't despair! There are still possibilities and work flow that may be right for you.

Example. We're shooting the current season of MTV's "The Real World" using Sony's XD-CAM.
A typical season of this show will generate approximately 6,500 HOURS of media.

Because of this massive amount of media, we employ the classic "Off-line to on-line" workflow. Here's how it goes: Disc is brought in house. BOTH hi and low res media is copied onto our server using the Sony PDW-D1. As Wayne has mentioned, this is basically just a blu Ray player and it's economically priced. We use five at once.

The low res proxies are split off into a separate folder and immediately made available to our loggers. They access the X-SAN via AFP using "PilotWare" for logging. The high res media is then recompressed using "Compressor" to "Off-line RT". Using a the Q-master cluster approach, this step is done much faster than real time. We now have three files on our server: Full res media, Sony proxy, and Apple "Off-line RT". The loggers can start immediately, the story department will request "selects" and we will then "recompress" selected media.

Because we can't keep all of the full res media on line forever, we purge it after approx two weeks. When picture is locked, we have to media manage the sequence and redigitize the ful res media.

This may seem like a lot of steps, but trust me, this is much easier than our old taped based workflow.

Anyone who says that XD-Cam doesn't work for you, hasn't really tried hard enough. We've been using the format for years now (Back when it was taped based IMX), and I can tell you that it works.

I can also say that I wished FCP would play nicer with the Sony proxies, but fundamentally, there's the problem of "off-line quality" audio. We take the steps that we do specifically to preserve the original audio quality.

As for DRW's comment about why anyone would still use "off-line", all I can say is 6,500 hours x 5 shows and you'll be thinking about low rez too!

mark