I had my first experience importing footage from the Sony XDCAM format over the weekend. I have to say that it was pretty smooth. It records the footage on to a 16gb SD card which then fit in perfectly to my Macbook Pro. Once I downloaded the drivers onto my computer, the transfer of files was relatively smooth.
Once it was on my computer, I had to download a program called XDCAM Transfer from Sony. From this I could go through all of the clips, watch them, and pick the ones that I wanted to import into an FCP friendly format. After selecting the clips I want, I drag and drop them to the folder and let it convert them to Quicktime movie files.
Then its as simple as creating a new Final Cut Pro project file and importing the clips just as I would any other file. The footage looks great and its ready to go.
One thing that is a blesssing and a curse is the doubling up of footage from the SD card. I load it all onto my hard drive once, then I go through and re-convert it to a format that FCP can handle. It’s a blessing because it forces me to create a backup, but a curse because I have no choice in the matter and it takes up extra space on my hard drive.
Overall, I had a good experience using the camera and the cut is looking good so far. If I run into any other issues using the format, I’ll post it on the site. Let me know what your experience was like using XDCAM in the comments!
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