XD Users

[Lost in Alaska]

I have a couple of questions for people at shops that use XDcam or P2. What do you do for playback? Is it dumped to a server or is there some other way to air the piece? What do you do for archiving? Are the stories put onto a disk or archived to tape?

I ask because I want to start pricing out what it would cost to take my shop to something new. We are shooting on 100's (yes some still exist) and editing on dying machines.

Thanks for the help.

[ September 29, 2005, 01:08 AM: Message edited by: Lost in Alaska ]

[JumpCut]

We are using XD with Grass Valley Newsedit. We play to air off GV M-Series servers. The Newsedit gear can be configured to play to air directly if both our servers fail.

For archiving we just go back to XD. The discs are great in cameras but arent big enough for archiving in my opinion. However it's a hell of a lot quicker to pull file off a disc than waiting for a tape to spool.

I believe some of our bureaus still archive back to SX. Quality wise it's pointless archiving back to tape (other than SX or Digibeta) because of the quality loss.

[ September 29, 2005, 08:27 AM: Message edited by: JumpCut ]

[cp16]

Our station bought the XD with the DV25 cheaper version,also no input recording board and got them pretty cheap. they are very good looking cameras and take only a little but to get used to them. they make a little clamshell device that we feed back thru the live truck and I guess you could feed back to air with it but the Grass Valley setup as described above is the way we do it. You can record 85min at dv25 level and so archiving on disc would be a good option.They keep pretty warm which might be a benefit in cold country but they go thru batteries really quickly

[Bluedog]

To answer the original questions. At our shop playback is from server. Archive is to tape for now. Once we get the proper software/hardware to go back to disc that will be the way to go.

In reference to the battery problem I've heard discussed on here, I guess it's relevent to what you're used to. We were using NP-1's with our old 700's so you can imagine what it was like to go to a battery that would last more than 45 minutes-1 hour. I've not had any problems with 3 batteries for the day. As a matter of fact, I've not even needed the third yet, but it's nice to have. I think the side panel color viewfinder will suck juice a little quicker so you might want to turn that around when you don't need it.

[jajack71]

Grass Valley has News Edit and within the application is a program called Content Share. You can put in the title of a story and it will bring up the story with the name you put in the title. We have a huge server in the basement of our shop. We just shoot it and edit the vo's or pkg and dump them to the server. We were given 10 disk per photog and we just dump the footage that we don't need it's up to the photog to keep the footage or not on the disk. The disk holds about 50 minutes of video. The disk can take over 1000 passes and once you record on to the disk you wont have to worry about copying over the disk like with tape. Hope this has helped you

[JumpCut]

Be aware of the disc/camera limitations. The 510's are DVCAM compression only and will hold about 85mins of video. These are pretty much what news operations seem to be buying. Our's included.

The 530's offer DVCAM and degrees of IMX compression. Jajack must be using something like IMX 40 for the disc to only hold 50 minutes of vision. ie his gear is saving a lot more information to the disc, therefore a better picture.

CP16, in case you didnt know. It is possible to record a firewire input on those cameras. We carry a firewire cable so that we can dub amateur vision etc in the field. Most domestic cameras have firewire output these days.