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Working with c300 footage in FCP7
I’m working with footage from the Canon c300 in FCP7. When I log/transfer, the footage comes in as XDCAM EX codec. I changed import preferences to ProRes and on my next attempt, transferred in as ProRes. Great! However, my question is: According to the c300 specs, the camera records in 8-bit MPEG-2 Long GOP (Canon XF codec). Shouldn’t the footage get imported in the native codec? Is FCP7 unable to recognize that codec and thus, encodes it into something it recognizes? Am I sacrificing quality when I’m not importing the footage in it’s original codec? Any clarification would be appreciated. Thank you.
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5 Replies
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Not a Final Cut user (in any flavor, we’re all Premiere here), but…
Are you using the Canon XF Utility to first manage (back up, log, rename, merge, etc.) your .MXF files before attempting to import them into FC?
T2
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Todd Terry
Creative Director
Fantastic Plastic Entertainment, Inc.
fantasticplastic.com
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Hi Boris,
The XDCAM EX codec is indeed correct. Although it says it’s cannon XF, it is based on Sony’s XDCAM codec, just with a different name so you are indeed using the native format. -
Well, that’s great to know! Whew! Thanks, Michael.
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no problem.
I had a similar scare but in the opposite form on a show I worked on. We primarily used EX3s and the few times we had the c300, it was imported into Avid and shows up as Canon XF and no matter how many times I told avid to transcode it to XDCAM HD 50Mbits, the wording never changed, so I looked it up and turns out Cannon XF & XDCAM is interchangeable. In FCP’s case it seems that FCP refers to the original codec name rather than Cannon’s variant of the name. -
However, if you bring it in as XDCAM and want to do compositing or major color correction or anything that will require multi generational transcoding, you would be better off promoting the footage up to ProRes 422 or ProRes HQ for that work…
You essentially promote each pixel into the new color space so that it can withstand multi generations.
If you are only going to bring in footage to edit with little to no rendering and want to save the edit in the native codec, that would be the usefulness of staying native.
Rarely does the native codec workflow provide the best results in our process of color correction and compositing.
Rich Rubasch
Tilt Media Inc.
Video Production, Post, Studio Sound Stage
Founder/President/Editor/Designer/Animator
https://www.tiltmedia.com
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