EX1 and Letus thoughts

Other

Well am off again on the final part of the 5 part series. Dilemma. Do I take my F350 or my EX1? I am driving my car so space is not an issue.

I think I will take both. Have the Ex1 attached to the Letus permanently.

There are a number of things I am hoping get fixed soon.

Firstly I need to backup my ex1 cards onto professional disc using my F350 but so far I cannot find a way to do this using my mac.

Secondly, I need much better rod support for my ex1 and Letus, currently my setup is not good enough. It’s imprecise and unbalanced. Making any pans very hard due to it not being completely level. Letus have brought out their own rods. I have ordered them hoping that this will fix my problems.

The vignette issue I do come across, but only shooting clean without the adaptor. I need to get my camera in to Sony to do their ten minute fix or whatever it is.

I wish someone could explain to me what happens when a file is bridged between two cards . How do i get them off of the cards onto my mac as they seem to be .smi files. I can’t find any documentation on Sony’s website about it or on the forums. A little frustrating.

Anyone better sign off as I haven’t packed my overnight bag or car and I am supposed to pick up my producer in an hour!

I will update when I get to my hotel. Thanks to everyone for reading this and emailing me. I promise to reply to everyone.

4 comments

  2. Hi Philip

    Haven’t tried it yet (looking at some footage tomorrow) but perhaps it’s possible to mount an ProDisc in FAM and use Terminal to do a “mv -f” to transfer the contents of the SxS card in their entirety to a blank disc… worth a shot.

    Right now we’re using LTO-4 for backup – Quantum make an LTO-3 drive that’s MXF-aware (not sure how profound are the benefits, we bought HP) but it’s a good solution for SxS and P2 backup, and for re-using ProDiscs, for that matter!

  3. importing footage spanning two cards, is very strange indeed. I shot a two hour meeting last week (1 clip, 3 cards)

    Access XDCAM Transfer in Final Cut by going to File > Import > Sony XDCAM

    In the XDCAM Transfer soft, you’ll need to go to the last clip, there you will see a compilation of all clips. Select your clip, mark In and Out then select import. Software will then go thru and create your .mov file

    That was how I went about it and it worked fine.

  4. There is info about the .smi files in the Sony book but it’s not very informative. I got the shock of my life when I filmed a kids nativity recently to discover these .smi files. These files seem to appear if you film continuously or if you span 2 cards, then to my horror I discover the .smi files get greyed out from IMPORTING on my Mac. After a lot of blood, sweat and tears I discovered you have to tick the boxes in the logging section to get them to import. I got a Sony LMD9050 with SDI HD inputs and the picture looks amazing, i’m still working out what batteries to get for it.

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