This IS the Avid L2: [Avid-L2] Audio issue with XDCam HD and Sony PDW-U2

Good morning everyone,

I'm freelancing at a facility that uses the Sony PDW-U2 as a delivery mechanism for several national networks. We ran into a situation that I've been unable to find much info on, and thought I would run it by the list.

Our first issue was in using the U2 on a Windows machine - the 3.0 driver caused the Avid to not be able to create media. The fix for that was to unload the driver when not in use.

The bigger issue we're having is that some of the networks are reporting that audio will not play on the discs we export from a Mac Avid (tested under MC 5.5 and 6.0) until about 1 minute into the show. They can shuttle the disc and hear audio, but simply hitting PLAY on the deck results in silence.

This link:
http://community.avid.com/forums/p/103652/598958.aspx

gave me a hint as to what might be happening. There may be some sort of Sony or Avid issue where the Avid export to XDCam includes a huge amount of "Essence" marks at the beginning of the file. The Essence Marks are part of the XDCam spec and are supposed to be MetaData. Under normal circumstance, these marks can be set automatically or manually by a camera and might indicate: a spanned clip, a new recording, audio spike, video luminance spike or drop, etc. When importing XDCam files into the Avid, each Essence Mark shows up as a locator.

I can use the Sony Browser software to see that we are indeed getting an Essence Mark on each and every frame starting at the beginning of the clip and running to about 1 minute and 5 seconds into the program start.

The poster on the Avid community forum suggested that perhaps the sheer volume of essence marks (over 4000 in my case) might overflow a buffer in certain XDCamHD playback decks.

The crazy thing is that I took both discs to a local facility with a PDW-1500 and there was NO ISSUE with playback here... but the network is claiming an issue. Am I alone in this, or does anyone have a suggestion?

Your help is appreciated. For now, we just emailed the audio of the first segment to the network and they were kind enough to make an edit on the disc... the show will air, but it is a situation which will give me pause anytime I'm asked to deliver on XDCam in the future until I can figure out what's happening.