We're trying to capture video from a Sony XDCAM XDS-PDW1000 deck via deck control. The deck is controlling fine, we're getting picture but if you try and Batch Capture a selection of clips you get an UNKNOWN COMMAND ERROR. The deck will digitise on the fly but not in Batch Capture. The Avid / XDCAM pdf suggests you set the deck settings on MC to a HDW1800 or HDWM2000 but this doesn't work. Because we get sports footage from an event on XDCAM and don't necessarily need to digitise all of it it would be really helpful for us to do this. AMA is a real pain and not very accurate when handling such large files. All our other Sony decks (digibeta, hdcam, beta sp) are happy being controlled this way.
If i remember right, only the PDW-1600 can be used for batch capturing, because sony hasn't implement all rs422 commands to the PDW-1000 deck.
Well that was £26K well spent then. Thanks Sony.
One of my clients has a PDW-F75 and at one time (pre-AMA) we would capture off of the discs, but we'd use one of the HDV deck presets. I think it was the HVR-1800 or so?
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when ever I have needed material of a PDW machine I have used FAM ( file transfer mode) by Firewire would it be better to ama this way?
Or do you need to batch capture previously edited material?
I use a U2 with XDCAM discs, ama and consolidate on Golf without too much problem.
Sony Browser, also helps pre sorting clips.
Steve
We get sports footage on XDCAM and often need to access small amounts of footage from certain discs. As the clips are 2 hours long it takes an age to flick through using the XDCAM browser to find a specific in/out point - it's not very accurate. It's so much quicker to spin through like a tape. The issue we have is recall when the media has been deleted and we want to redigitise it back into a sequence. We've got several U1's and a U2 so we've been doing it the USB import way for years now, unfortunately the PD1000 doesn't have any Firewire/USB connections.
Everything else works fine - you can digitise on the fly. Nowhere on the Sony or Avid site does it state that the Batch Capture function is not available which given that it is essentially a VTR is a dumb omission.
Finally got to the bottom of it - Sony are issuing a new Firmware upgrade very soon to rectify the problem.
The function was missing from the last two releases. Ooops.
Just ran into this problem as well. Any word on the Firmware upgrade availability?
Just got the firmware update today - it didn't work.
Back to square one - not happy.
Borrowed a Sony PDWF70 to see if it works - no problem at all, didn't even need to select a deck, it worked on 'Generic'.
So it's not a general XDCAM problem or a MC problem. It's a Sony problem !
Same here. Patch didn't work on the media stations meanwhile our PDW-F1600 has never had a problem with the batch capture operation.
I have spoken to a contact at Sony who are going to look into it next week. Will keep you posted.
After dealing with Sony directly i have just installed version 2.0 of their XDCAM firmware (after previously installing version 1.26 and 1.29) - it still doesn't work.
To reiterate, an older Sony XDCAM deck was happy to do this - is this an Avid thing or a Sony thing ?
Is there an up to date device compatibility chart ? The only one i can find is over a year old ?
I have now upgraded to MC 6.5.0.1, AMA V2.0 and have updated the XDS firmware to V2.01 and this still doesn't work despite assurances that from Sony that it would. The XDS firmware update allows it to be controlled from a conventional edit controller which one would assume would allow full control from an Avid ? Any help, as ever, hugely appreciated.
THi isn't an AMA plugin issue (and the AMA plugin is created by Sony anyway) it sounds like a limitation of the deck to respond correctly to RS422 issued deck commands.
Even if the deck seems to work correctly with an edit controller it doesn't mean it's responding correctly to the commands as issued by Avid during a batch capture.
This sounds squarely like a Sony generated issue and only Sony can fix it.
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