XDCAM EX playback issues

cortex bug
1

So we have a production that went Old School and shot some footage with a Sony EX3. This camera records XDCAM EX (the 35 megabit flavor). Cortex imported the footage, but playback is giving some weird issues.

  1. When playing, there’s an occasional frame where it’s all dark green, like it had problems decoding the frame.

  2. Occasionally there’s some frames out of order, causing a bunch of frame jumpiness.

  3. If audio was recorded in-camera, the audio plays in-sync with the video. But once I start scrubbing around, the audio gets out of sync from the video.

  4. Audio sometimes gets stuttery, like the audio is playing back at 1fps.

The good news: if I do a quick conversion to ProRes, the video is fine. There’s no green frames and audio is in sync. So the issue is just with the playback portion of Cortex; Cohog Render seems to be ok.

Also, as I hinted, this is only with XDCAM EX (35Mbps, 16-bit audio). XDCAM HD material (50Mbps, 24-bit audio) plays back without issue.

Let me know if you need a sample. We don’t have fast internet connection, but we should be able to get you a file somehow.

2

We have some old XDCAM EX footage here I believe. We’ll see if the issue is reproducible with that first. Good to know you found a workaround. I know others have transcoded odd formats to ProRes first as well, so that’s a good option to keep in mind always.