None of the current NLE software would read the camera's MXF files if I copied them directly to my hard drive, despite claims to the opposite. Transferring the footage from the U2 drive wasn't quite as straightforward as I expected.

More of which you'll get to enjoy in another article.įor now let me focus on what kind of results you can expect. I discovered a number of different projects on the discs, some of which I'd rather forget! But I found everything from footage from my documentary on Matt Coulter, the motorcycle stunt daredevil known as The Kangaroo Kid, martial arts seminars, and a comical fight sequence from a failed indy feature I worked on. Extremely clean images and PsF progressive scan capabilities mean that the cameras were lauded for their image quality. Granted, my PDW-510 wasn't producing the 50Mbps 4:2:2 results of the pricier PDW-530, but even still these were generally seen as the pinnacle of standard definition technology outside of Digibeta. I'd been looking forward to doing this for a while to see what Topaz Video Enhance AI could do with footage that, at the time, was regarded as being very high quality standard definition. I recently dug up some of my XDCAM discs from circa 2005, and with the extremely kind help from the people at Sony Professional Systems Europe they managed to dig up a PDW-U2 XDCAM optical disc drive for me to use to transfer some of my old footage to my current editing machine. I've long since ditched my DV decks and most footage available in SD resolution online is highly compressed due to the inferior settings YouTube uses with 360p and 480p. Impressive though that was I had yet to be able to try it on some high quality master footage. How well can old video footage be restored? Here's what happens when you apply Topaz Video Enhance AI to high quality SD XDCAM footage.Ī short while back I reviewed Topaz Video Enhance AI and I was thoroughly impressed at how it could restore highly compressed and really quite mangled footage.

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