Due to an almost full system drive on my mac I took the decision to order a larger drive (a 1 TB Corsair black) and reinstall the mac OS along with all of my other applications. It has to be said that although straight forward, this is a very time consuming task and one which makes you realise how many things you’ve had to set up in the past.

This proved to be especially true when it came to making Final Cut play nicely with my EX1 footage. I installed Sony’s XDCam Transfer application, as well as the XDCAM File Browser and the SxS Driver and thought my machine was ready to go. It wasn’t until I tried to import some footage using Final Cut’s ‘Log & Transfer’ that I realised I still had a problem. When trying to browse by SxS library in Log & Transfer I was getting unsupported Media errors.

After a little bit of searching and trying to remember what I did to make it work previously I redescovered the missing component, a plug-in from Sony called ‘XDCAM EX Log and Transfer Plug-in’. It’s possible to import video without this plug-in by using Sony’s XDCAM Transfer application, but I prefer using the built in Transfer app in Final Cut and this little plug-in is needed to make that work.

So, for the next time I forget what to do here’s a quick run down….

1. Install Final Cut Studio
2. Update Final Cut to the latest version (6.0.5 at the time of writing this)
3. Download and Install the SxS Driver
4. Download and Install Clip Browser
5. Download and Install XDCAM Transfer (Includes the FAM driver)
6. Download and Install the Log & Transfer Plugin

The band video I’m shooting with Peter Naylor for ‘Kuda’ is progressing nicely, we’ve shot at three locations now with the last one coming up on Saturday. Having shot everything in low light so far I’m really looking forward to shooting in the daylight this weekend.

If you’re interested in finding out more about Kuda, they have a page on mySpace.

Here’s a few more footage grabs.

I worked as DP on a music video today which was a great experience as it was my first shoot with a Director, actors and a real storyline.

The music video is for a band called Kuda and the video has one scene which takes places in an underground gambling room, which was the part we shot today. I shot in 1080/25p on the EX1 with the brevis adapter and a combination of 50mm f.14, 20-35mm f2.8 and 135mm f2.8 Nikkor lenses.

The shoot was directed by Peter Naylor, a local film maker who’s also going to be editing the video. We’ll be shooting three more scenes in the coming weeks so I’ll post more news as it happens.

Here’s a few stills from todays shoot, they are straight out of the camera without any alteration other than reducing the size.