SONY is now recommending the Lacey Quadra.

thanks for your replies.....as far as an external hard drive what brand is compatible w/the Sony switcher?????

[quote="beto"]I have the animations recorded in a XDCAM disk. I want to be able to load the animations into the switcher and saved them in the menu's hard drive....I can feed any of the XDCAM Decks through the AUX's but from here I do not know where to go.... also do you know what is the size of the menu's hard drive??? I don't want to max it....[/quote] If your animations are on an XDCAM, then you can do the following: Feed the XDCAM as an input into the FM. Determine the length of your animation. In the CLIP menu (page 2523), set up RECORD by entering a name for the clip & a duration for the FM to record. I'd suggest making this duration a little longer than the XDCAM's animation so that you have some room for error when you start the clip recording & play back the XDCAM. When you're ready, press the CLIP button to arm the recording. Now, play back the XDCAM as you press the RECORD START button. If you can simultaneously play back both a fill & a key XDCAM (as a simul-roll from 2 decks), then you'd have selected the PAIR button & V/K button so that your animation has both a hole-cutter & a fill. In this case you'd pretty much be done, except for trimming the clip (see below). But I'll assume that you only have 1 playback deck. So now you have a clip of either the fill or the key. Next you need to do the same procedure for what you don't have (fill or key). Set up another record, giving this 2nd clip a different name. Repeat the procedure described above & you'll have a 2nd clip - now you should have both a fill clip & a key clip. Because of this method, now comes the part that's a pain. You probably have a couple of FM clips that's got some "spillover" of unnecessary frames. Go into the FILE/DELETE menu (2545) and get rid of any excess frames that you don't want. You'll need to do this for both clips - when you're done you should have 2 clips (1 key & 1 fill) that are essentially identical. If you built the clip as a V/K Pair using a simul-roll from the XDCAMs then you're done. If you have 2 separate clips, then you can either call up each one on a different FM output (fills on odd channels & keys oneven channels) & play them together. A more consistent way is to marry the two clips as a V/K Pair. You do this in page 2541 (File/Pair Recombination). Call up each of the 2 clips & press the COUPLE button. In this way, you'll only have to call up the 1 clip & it'll have the metadata that tells it that it's both a fill & a key...the advantage here is that by calling the clip into an odd channel, the key will always follow in the even channel - plus the fill & key will always play back in sync...assuming that they were identical when you combined them. As to the size of the hard drive, I am not sure - but I do know that to max it out you'll need about 10-12 show files that each have about 30 sec of High-Def animations (1080i)...that's how I maxed out my drive.

Check out this thread, is this what you are looking for? Pick up a external drive to help archive and load stuff. Storage depends on format, guess you are SD, not sure if 9K is different then 8K in regards to memory, you may have like 2200 frames of SD. In framestore menu will tell you remaining frames.

[quote="Bob Ennis"]XDCAMs record video - not the data that the switcher's hard drive uses. To my knowledge, you can't use an XDCAM in the same way as you'd use a hard drive or flah drive to store & retrieve switcher data. If you're going to use an XDCAM as your archival material, then you may find it easier to just put the XDCAM into RECORD & play back the animation. You would need to record both the fill & key channels. When you're ready to re-load the clips, you'd play back the XDCAM and perform a live record of the animations (you'll need to record the fill, then the key & then couple the 2 signals together in the Frame Mem's FILE menu). Even tough it takes longer, you'd probably be better off saving clips to either the menu's hard drive or to a USB Flash Drive - the clip material will remain coherent & will be easier to organize when it comes time to re-load the clips into another switcher.[/quote] I have the animations recorded in a XDCAM disk. I want to be able to load the animations into the switcher and saved them in the menu's hard drive....I can feed any of the XDCAM Decks through the AUX's but from here I do not know where to go.... also do you know what is the size of the menu's hard drive??? I don't want to max it....

XDCAMs record video - not the data that the switcher's hard drive uses. To my knowledge, you can't use an XDCAM in the same way as you'd use a hard drive or flah drive to store & retrieve switcher data. If you're going to use an XDCAM as your archival material, then you may find it easier to just put the XDCAM into RECORD & play back the animation. You would need to record both the fill & key channels. When you're ready to re-load the clips, you'd play back the XDCAM and perform a live record of the animations (you'll need to record the fill, then the key & then couple the 2 signals together in the Frame Mem's FILE menu). Even tough it takes longer, you'd probably be better off saving clips to either the menu's hard drive or to a USB Flash Drive - the clip material will remain coherent & will be easier to organize when it comes time to re-load the clips into another switcher.

[quote="Bob Ennis"]Step 1: Create a directory on the hard drive where you want to store the stills - Menu page 7171 (File/Configure/Directory). Step 2: Go to menu page 7151 (File/Frame Memory). Over the left window, select CLIP - you should see your desired clip(s). Step 3: Highlight the clip(s) that you want to save. Press the SAVE-> button. Step 4: Wait a LONG time - it takes forever to transfer clips! If you don't see anything when you press the CLIP button in Step 2, then your stills are an animation, not a clip. In this case: With STILL lit on page 7151, highlight all of the stills that appear to make up your animation. The stills will be named something like "AOO00001, AOO00002, etc. If in doubt, press the ALL button at the bottom of the window & it'll highlight everything. Then press SAVE->.[/quote] thank you for your reply. If I have the animations recorded on a XDCAM Disk do i need to have the matte key on disk as well???? Do I follow the same procedures??? or is there a different way to do it????

Step 1: Create a directory on the hard drive where you want to store the stills - Menu page 7171 (File/Configure/Directory). Step 2: Go to menu page 7151 (File/Frame Memory). Over the left window, select CLIP - you should see your desired clip(s). Step 3: Highlight the clip(s) that you want to save. Press the SAVE-> button. Step 4: Wait a LONG time - it takes forever to transfer clips! If you don't see anything when you press the CLIP button in Step 2, then your stills are an animation, not a clip. In this case: With STILL lit on page 7151, highlight all of the stills that appear to make up your animation. The stills will be named something like "AOO00001, AOO00002, etc. If in doubt, press the ALL button at the bottom of the window & it'll highlight everything. Then press SAVE->.