XDCAM causing FCP to crash?

I'm cutting a feature film shot on 2 cameras. Everything's XDCAM, and was ingested as XDCAM. About 90% of the movie is synched in to multclips with the separate 24bit audio synched up as well. FCP freezes and quits about once every 30 minutes with this project. I've tried reducing the project size, trashing prefs, copying and pasting material in to new sequences, using different computer systems, running disk utility and disk warrior, etc., and nothing has made this problem go away. I'm starting to guess that the codec itself is misbehaving and am considering transcoding everything to ProRes. Does anyone know if this is a known issue - do large XDCAM projects in FCP run in to glitches?

My main system is an 8-core nehalem mac pro with 16gb RAM, newest FCP, stock NVIDIA GeForce GT 120 graphics card.

Yes. Convert to ProRes. I find FCP less stable with XDCAM EX.



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Large GOP projects cause a LOT of headaches.

Instead of converting ALL of the footage, first try just using a ProRes sequence. That cuts down crashing by 500%! more.


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XDCAM HD 422 being MPEG-2 compressed and yet a hefty 50 Mb/s calls for ProRes 422HQ transcode.

Dennis Couzin
Berlin, Germany

i worked on a 3-camera multicam XDCAM project at the beginning of the year.

yes it was glitchy, and could crash but not every 30 minutes.
one i got used to it, it didn't crash that much
(mainly when we combined a few multiclip takes and they got up to 9 angles)

my project was fairly fast turn-around.
for a feature i'd definitely consider re-compressing to ProRes.

treat you edit as off-line and use ProRes LT or Proxy.
as you've done a fair bit of work already, i'd definitely use the Media Manager for this,
and i'd definitely TEST the process.

if you DO stay XDCAM and work in ProRes sequences, you'll probably want to turn off auto-render.
when a multiclip is rendered, FCP's "open" mode doesn't work:
it wont show you your multicam angels in the viewer.
i suspect it's "opening" the render file... pretty lame if you ask me.



nick

Quote

XDCAM HD 422 being MPEG-2 compressed and yet a hefty 50 Mb/s calls for ProRes 422HQ transcode.

Nah. ProRes 422 (LT) would probably be sufficient.

All the varieties of ProRes 422 north of the Proxy flavor are perceptually lossless. So the virtue of the higher data rates is to preserve latitude for color correction, visual effects or other post operations. But XDCAM is crap (technically speaking) with virtually no latitude anyway, so encoding at a higher data rate would be a waste of bits.

>All the varieties of ProRes 422 north of the Proxy flavor are perceptually lossless.

I would rather say that prores lt is a compromise between a perceptually lossless codec and the need to save on storage especially on certain types of editorial workflows, while preserving sufficient quality to be used as an intermediate codec. While Prores proxy is designed to be used strictly as an offline codec.



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