UPDATE:
Snow Leopard users should now be using XDCAM Transfer version 2.11, which cures the bug with previews, and therefore brings us full compatibility with Snow Leopard.

Oyvind Stokkan has posted the following link on the DVinfo.net board for new drivers for Snow Leopard users.

http://www.sony.ca/promedia/drivers.htm

http://support.sonybiz.ca/esupport/eSupportHome.asp

Thanks to Oyvind for passing this on! I’ve installed it (the download provides an unistaller for the old one, which common sense dictates one should use before installing the new one). And no more Panics! SxS is safe to use.

Now, in an ideal world, when we register a camera like the EX1 with Sony, and they ask us what platform we edit on and which software we use, plus an email address, Sony would have checked through its database of FCP using Mac owners and emailed them to let us know this update was available. Just in passing. Hey, it would have been nice for them to email us about the problem too, but perhaps that might have been a little dangerous.

But I’d prefer to give Sony a big thumbs up for fixing this issue quickly. Snow Leopard has been in Beta for some time, and by the laws of averages, somebody probably knew about this and rang the alarm bell under the cover of a Non Disclosure Agreement, but that is just a matter of conjecture and of little importance. SxS cards now work in Snow Leopard.

All we need now is a fix for the Cache bug in XDCAM Transfer. The tool spits up an error for every clip, complaining that “The clip thumbnail could not be saved to the cache as it was an unrecognised format” – though clicking Okay builds an uncached thumbnail that needs rebuilding each time you click it. Just keep clicking and things happen, but it’s annoying enough to warrant a moan – nay, a toddler style whine – to Sony for a fix.

PS: You could use FCP’s log and whatever, but my workflow is based around easy batch naming and embedding metadata into each clip.