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P2 Hell (from Final Cut to Avid)
Help! We’ve shot an entire show with two HVX200’s / and firestores. Then transfered all the footage via Final Cut to our storage drives. Now we’ve got a whole bunch of quicktime files that I can access from my mac laptop without any trouble. The problem is we’re editing the whole show on an Avid Xpress Pro HD (PC) and the .Mov’s won’t read correctly, I get the audio but video is a blank screen. am I missing a codec? We shot in DVCPro50 and I would guess that quicktime would cover a DVCPro50 PC Codec, right? I’ve tried re-compressing (exporting) a few of the files from final cut to another format and re-importing those files back into Avid, but everytime I get a white screen (in dvcpro50). If I knock it down to DV, it works, but it would take a lot of time and energy (wich we no longer have) for a lower res. result… Any ideas? Does anyone else have this problem? I need a solution.
Thanks for your attention, regards.
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6 Replies
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The DVCPRO codecs aren’t available on Avid. You really should be cutting this footage with a version of Avid that supports MXF files and the P2 format. Using FCP to import footage for use on an Avid is iffy, at best. I recently consulted for a company that has one FCP station and 10 Avid bays, and they needed to shoot with the HVX as the HDV cameras weren’t accepted by Discovery as B-cams. What did they have to end up doing? Importing all the P2 footage into FCP, outputting that footage to tape, capturing that tape into the Avids.
Of course they were all running meridian systems still on OS9.
You either need to output to tape, or convert all the footage into a format that the Avid recognizes. Bearing in mind that you want to keep source TC information.
Shane
Littlefrog Post
http://www.lfhd.net -
Thanks, but that would mean waaaay to many many tapes. Do you know if I can hook-up the output of my FCP station to the input of the Avid (via SDI) and transfer that way? (TC isn’t important as everything was pre-sorted into seperate bins.) Will I need anything, in tearms of syncing, converting, surging? Any tips?
Thanks for your time.
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[TVGuy666] “Do you know if I can hook-up the output of my FCP station to the input of the Avid (via SDI) and transfer that way?”
Never done it, but I suspect that you can’t do that.
The only thing that I can think of is transferring to tapes, or loading the Avid codec onto your Final Cut machine and converting all the footage into an Avid codec. But if you are running FCP 5.1.2 then the Avid codecs won’t work….they tend to cause FCP to crash. You would have to convert them all to an intermediate codec, like Animation, but then that produces HUGE files. This is why I suggested the company I consulted for output to tape. Well, that and the network requires that companies turn over all their footage at the end of the show, and they only accept footage on tape, not as data files.
Hopefully someone who has done this will chime in.
Shane
Littlefrog Post
http://www.lfhd.net -
Okay, first of all, why is this message titled “P2 Hell” when you didn’t use P2 at all? You used the FireStore, and secondly your problems were created by FCP, not by the HVX or FireStore or P2 or anything like that.
The first source of your problem is that Apple insists on converting the files from MXF into Quicktime. Had they just supported MXF off the timeline you would have no problem whatsoever; you’d be cutting on MXF files on the Apple and you could transfer that drive straight to Avid and cut there too. It’s Apple’s conversion to Quicktime that is introducing the incompatiblity.
Second, and worse, Apple refuses to release the DVCPRO-HD codec on the PC version of Quicktime. That’s the real killer here. They have given Quicktime capabilities on the Mac that they haven’t matched on the PC, so you’ve created quicktimes on your Mac that are not PC-compatible, simply because Apple won’t make Quicktime fully compatible.
Sounds like a pet peeve, pointing out all these things, but if we’re ever going to get a solution it’s going to come from identifying what the true source of the problem is. Apple has to do one of two things: either produce a compatible version of Quicktime for the PC, or (vastly preferably) support MXF editing. Until they do that, the platform incompatibility is going to continue. And only Apple can fix that.
So, is there a way around it? Perhaps. Avid has produced a DVCPRO-HD quicktime codec that may allow you to directly import DVCPRO-HD quicktimes into Avid. Try downloading and installing the Avid Codec pack from here:
https://www.avid.com/content/9993/PCAvidCodecsLE.zipI think that’s the package that has the DV100 (aka DVCPRO-HD) codec. Try it, it might work.
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Just a quick hint:
There is one possibility to edit MXF files in FCP using P2 Log and
QuickTime reference movies that are generated in background by
P2 Log. It’s not an official workflow but in fact it works … -
FCP SDI to Avid SDI worked, I transfered all my video files (in real time), everything seems to work fine. Thanks for all your help and attention. The reason I titled this thread “P2 Hell” even though I was using the firestore, is beacause you still have to organize you P2 clips before importing them into a system. I wish Quicktime could come out with a DVCPRO50/HD PC codec… But at least now we know.
Thanks all, regards.
TVG
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