Re: Sony S270U, Final Cut 5, DV editing

I'm trying to help someone who just bought 4 Sony S270Us with the HVR-MRC1 record units. They have several Final Cut 5 workstations and don't really want to go up to Final Cut 6. They also want to stay with DV workflow for now.

They have the cameras setup to record DV right onto the record unit. We can drag and drop DV files off the compact flash cards and import them into final cut. We run into a problem though. Final cut thinks it needs to render the audio. It sees the audio as being 32bit floating point audio (not 32khz but 32 bits of depth instead of 16). Quicktime/the finder also sees some oddities with these files. It will often say their data rate is quite high. I really suspect the HVR-MRC1 record unit has munged them but I can't prove it. It just don't feel it as polished with years of compatibility testing as say a firestore.

I think I can fix them with Visual Hub. Converting DV to DV with the "-vcodec copy" flag set makes them quite digestible for final cut, it isn't a generation loss and hopefully won't be a big complicated deal.

How do I prove to Sony that their recording unit is doing something strange with the formatting of their files? They don't seem to care about older versions of final cut their capture plugin only works for 6.02 to 6.04, what a wide range of compatibility. Anyone with FCP 6 having similar problems despite using their plug-in?

Anyone have any thoughts?

Hi Josh,

Don't have the answer to your question but I sure do wish you good luck dealing with Sony.

--ken

Hi Josh,

The HVR-MCR1 only records AVI or RawDV. This is specified in the MCR1 specs, so you can't blame Sony.

Of course Sony found it necessary to use its own little flavor of RawDV for this recorder, and this type is not recognized by FCP5 So if you want to use this footage in FCP5 without having to render all the time you have to convert it to QT DV (.mov extension)

Since FCP 6.0.2 Apple adapted FCP to accomodate for this Sony related problem (accepting the capture plugin from Sony). So in FCP6 you don't have this issue anymore. If you want to work with the latest video types ("latest" does not always mean "best") you need the latest software versions.

If you want to use these files in FCP5 you can just Batch export the files from the Browser as QT DV and import them again in your project.

Best wishes,

Ronny