February 27, 2011 – Conforming XDCAM can take a while but this tips speeds it up
This Reader Quicktip comes to us from James Stuckey Weber and it’s a tip to speed up the exporting process of the XDCAM format in Final Cut Pro. I don’t do a lot of XDCAM export from FCP so I can’t confirm the rather dramatic speed-up this tip claims but I can’t deny it either. When the XDCAM export does present itself next time I’ll be trying it out.
Here is James’ tip:
When you export to XDCAM from Final Cut, there are two export stages- the first where Final Cut is “Writing Audio and Video”, and the second where the Sony XDCAM Exporter is actually copying the file over to the deck or drive you are using. Here’s a quicktip to drastically reduce the time of the first step.
If you export a sequence to XDCAM while that sequence is open in the Timeline, Viewer, or Canvas, your “Writing Audio and Video” step will take significantly longer. On a 12 minute sequence, exporting with the sequence open in the timeline and canvas was estimated at about an hour:
Simply close the canvas and timeline, select the sequence in the Browser, and then export to XDCAM. That same 12 minute sequence? The first step took less than a minute:
That is quite a huge difference in James’ tip. Talk about a timesaver. Give it a try the next time you have to export XDCAM and let us know how much time this tip saved on the export.
You can follow James on Twitter @jamesnw.
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