Sony XDCAM Viewer

Question

Is there a version of Sony XDCAM viewer that will work with a an iMac G5?

Answer 1

Hey Wil, got this figured out quite painlessly considering the train wreck that it was to begin with. The material consisted of 4 mxf discs all with sequentially numbered duplicate filenames from disc to disc… cameramen love to torture editors. Simply renaming the clips using the OS would not work so here’s what I did. Starting with Bridge I identified the HD material apart from the 8 audio files and 1 proxy file per clip by performing a file search using the letter (V), only the HD video material has a (V) in the filename. Next I copied only the video files to a work folder as to not alter the original disc structure, I did this for each mxf disc. Next critical step was to turn off all metadata logging in Bridge except the filename metadata, then I used the batch renaming function with 3 criteria: 1-seed each filename with the disc number, 2- retain original clip name, and 3-rename extension to mpg. I did this for each disc. Next step was to batch encode using AME. I processed each disc using the same codec as the original source material, MXF/OP1a, Sony XDCAM 50mb with smart rendering codec enabled. My system ripped through this process at amazing speed, it retained the original source clip time code and the quality appears to be unaltered from the original. The reason for turning off the metadata logging in Bridge was to strip off the mxf reference, AME would not process the files by simply renaming them using the OS. Total time to clean-up train wreck; 40 minutes.
BTW: I did not need the associated audio from these clips otherwise there would have been an extra step involved using premiere’s nesting feature as you had mentioned.
Happy Holidays.