Woo hoo! I bought a new MacBook Pro last fall in anticipation of a 5 camera XDCAM shoot at the Supreme Court in Washington, DC. The EX series of XDCAM cameras are tapeless, storing their images on what is essentially an ExpressCard. All of that HD video data results in some pretty big files and that can mean long transfer times.
Sony’s USB readers just don’t cut it compared to using the ExpressCard slot on a MacBook Pro. The problem is that Sony’s cards (they call them SxS cards) aren’t natively recognized by Mac OS X. I was crushed to find out that while the driver would install on my new MacBook Pro, it rendered the maching nearly unusable. With 5 cameras shooting for several hours, that can be a real problem. I had to suck it up and use the USB readers that we had.
Well, now Sony has released version 1.0 of the SxS driver and I’m thrilled to report that it works perfectly with my MacBook Pro! I have had it installed for nearly a week with no issues of any kind.
Happy ending. Happy editing.
